Connecticut

One of eight accused in killing pleads guilty

One of eight friends accused in the 1997 kidnapping, raping and drowning of a 13-year-old girl pleaded guilty Thursday to her murder in Litchfield.

Under a plea agreement, Alan Walter Jr., 25, will be spared the death penalty and attorneys on both sides will recommend a life sentence.

Besides the felony murder count, Walter pleaded guilty to five other charges including kidnapping and conspiracy to commit sexual assault.

Authorities have said Maryann Measles was killed because she had accused Walter and another member of the group of statutory rape.

Walter’s case is the first of the eight to be resolved.

SALT LAKE CITY

Utah Senate passes bill to eliminate firing squad

Utah moved toward eliminating firing squads Thursday and executing condemned prisoners only by injection, as the Senate approved a bill banning the controversial punishment.

The bill passed 16-9 and returns to the House for approval of minor Senate amendments.

Democratic Sen. Ron Allen said allowing murderers to choose firing squads so they could “go out in a blaze of glory” perversely made heroes of criminals and caused victims’ families more pain.

California

Prison guard arrested in plot with inmate

A prison guard was arrested on suspicion of plotting with an inmate to use drugs to pay someone outside the prison to kill her husband.

Authorities said Linda Brock, 43, had a sexual relationship with the Corcoran State Prison inmate in recent months and the pair eventually developed the unsuccessful murder-for-hire scheme.

Corrections investigators and county authorities arrested Brock on Saturday at the prison, and later found more than a pound of marijuana and 7 ounces of heroin at her home.

Brock faces charges including solicitation of murder, sex with an inmate, conspiracy to commit a crime, and offering to distribute a controlled substance, said Kings County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick Hart.

LOS ANGELES

Astronomers spy object half the size of Pluto

Astronomers said Thursday they had found a frozen object 4.4 billion miles from Earth that appears to be more than half the size of Pluto and larger than the planet’s moon.

If confirmed, the so-called planetoid would become the largest object found in our solar system since the ninth planet was first spied in 1930.

Preliminary tests suggest the body is 10 percent larger than Quaoar, an 800-mile-diameter object found in 2002.

“Right now it looks like it could be bigger than Quaoar, which would put it bigger than anything since Pluto,” said Mike Brown, a California Institute of Technology astronomer.