CINCINNATI -- An Ohio registered sex offender, whose attorneys told jurors he confessed to killing two teenage girls, was found guilty Friday of the slayings.
Anthony Kirkland, 41, who had pleaded guilty to killing two women before the trial began, was convicted of aggravated murder in the slayings of Esme Kenney, 13, and Casonya Crawford, 14, both of Cincinnati. The jury also found Kirkland guilty of attempted rape, aggravated robbery and gross abuse of a corpse in each girl's death.
Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty. The sentencing phase of the trial begins Tuesday.
Prosecutor Joe Deters said Friday he would have no comment on the verdict until after sentencing.
Kirkland was to be tried for all four deaths, but pleaded guilty before the trial started to charges of murder and gross abuse of a corpse in the deaths of two Cincinnati women - Mary Jo Newton, 45, and Kimya Rolison, 25. He could receive 32 years in prison to two life sentences in those killings.
Prosecutors said Kirkland strangled Newton and the two teenagers, stabbed Rolison, and burned all four bodies.
Defense lawyers told jurors Kirkland admitted to killing the teenagers, and presented no evidence in the trial.
"We expected this verdict, and we told jurors that," defense attorney Norm Aubin said after court Friday.
Aubin said the defense would focus on the sentencing phase, and try to prevent Kirkland from getting the death penalty.
In closing arguments earlier Friday, defense attorney Will Welsh reminded jurors that some of the four cases would have remained unsolved if Kirkland had not confessed to police.
Kirkland also gave the victims' families "the knowledge they needed to know," Welsh said.
Prosecutors said the evidence and the defendant's own words in recorded police interviews proved his guilt. Jurors heard hours of those statements this week.
Deters told jurors Kirkland was "devoid of human decency" and should die.
The prosecutor said, "There are people unfortunately like Kirkland out there. ... Sometimes pure evil just exists."
Kirkland's statements to police that he burned the bodies of the two girls and two women as some sort of "purification" ritual was nonsense, Deters said. What he was doing was as old as crime itself, the prosecutor said.
"He was trying to destroy evidence," said Deters.
Kirkland was arrested in March 2009 and charged in Kenney's death.
Kenney had left her home to go jogging at a reservoir. Police said they found Kirkland near Kenney's partially burned body in woods near her home. A halfway house had released Kirkland weeks earlier.
Kirkland was later charged in the other slayings that all occurred in 2006.
Assistant Prosecutor Mark Piepmeier told jurors that Kirkland had a sexual motivation in all the crimes and that he views women as sex objects.
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