Convicted killer gets second murder sentence, this one for a Wichita woman’s death
A convicted murderer accused of killing his girlfriend two days before Christmas in 2019 must serve 50 years to life in prison, a judge decided Friday.
Ahmad Khaasanouva Bey has been convicted of murder twice — in a 1999 Pittsburg, Kansas, killing and in the 2019 shooting death of 41-year-old girlfriend Melinda K. Sprague of Wichita — though he says he’s innocent in the latter.
Bey had been out of prison for about six months after serving a 20-year sentence for the Pittsburg murder before Sprague was fatally shot in the neck from above as she sat in a chair at her Wichita home.
Her body was later found stuffed in the trunk of her car after another woman Bey had romantic ties to, Vanessa Waner, abandoned it behind a business in the 1500 block of East Harry, Wichita police have said.
A jury in February found Bey guilty of first-degree premeditated murder and criminal possession of a weapon by a convicted felon after a multi-day trial where prosecutors presented largely circumstantial evidence of his involvement in the shooting. In closing arguments last month, Sedgwick County Assistant District Attorney Justin Edwards called the case a puzzle with pieces that “all come together to point to” Bey as the killer.
Bey, Edwards told the jury, had means and motive: His relationship with Sprague had been violent, with recent discord and strife centered on Bey using Sprague’s car and him seeing another woman. He was at Sprague’s house the night she died, although Bey claims she was alive when he left.
Sprague even “forecast her own death,” telling coworkers and acquaintances she believed she would wind up dead and her body would be dumped in a river, Edwards told jurors last month.
A coworker reported Sprague missing when she didn’t show up for work on Christmas Eve. Prosecutors think she was probably shot sometime before midnight on Dec. 23, 2019, but that she probably didn’t die immediately.
They said at trial last month that someone took time to clean up the crime scene and that Bey had “counted on” someone stealing Sprague’s car when Waner abandoned it with the keys and her body inside.
Prosecutors initially charged Waner with concealing, destroying or altering evidence in the killing but later dismissed the case. She told police she abandoned the car because there wasn’t enough gas to run an errand and that she didn’t know Sprague’s body was in the trunk, court records say.
Bey’s lawyers in their closing arguments cast blame for the murder on Waner, saying she was upset by the love triangle and Sprague when her own relationship with Bey fell apart.
Law enforcement never found the murder weapon and there were no eyewitnesses, defense attorney Randall Price told jurors. Prosecutors had an overall “lack of evidence” tying Bey to the crime, he said last month.
On Friday before his sentence was pronounced, Bey’s team of lawyers asked Sedgwick County District Judge Jeffrey Goering to grant a new trial, arguing that prosecutors’ inferences and assumptions about how the killing happened shouldn’t outweigh an absence of direct evidence.
“He (Bey) pled not guilty. He hasn’t done anything but maintain that to this day,” defense lawyer Ian Clark said.
Bey echoed that when he addressed the court, saying: “I didn’t do nothing wrong. I didn’t kill Melinda. I didn’t stuff her in no trunk.”
Edwards responded that the defense was simply complaining about circumstantial evidence and that prosecutors were “very careful not to stack inferences” when they presented the case to the jury.
When the judge refused to redo the trial, Clark asked him to give Bey a more lenient sentence of 25 years to life so that Bey might be paroled sooner when he’s an elderly man. Bey is 43 now.
Edwards replied that a two-time killer didn’t deserve that chance.
Goering acknowledged that Bey had maintained innocence throughout the case but said he found no “substantial or compelling” reasons to depart from state sentencing guidelines that say defendants convicted of first-degree premeditated murder should serve at least 50 years in prison.
He ordered a life sentence with parole eligibility after 50 years for Sprague’s murder and 11 months in prison for the weapons charge. The sentences will be served concurrently, or at the same time.
Goering also ordered Bey to pay $3,772.40 in restitution.
Several members of Sprague’s family were in the courtroom Friday for Bey’s sentencing, but none gave victim impact statements.
Bey will receive credit toward his prison sentence for the time he’s already spent in jail waiting for the case to resolve. He’ll be around 89 years old when he’s eligible for parole for the first time.
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