'Rot in Hell,' Mom of Murder Victim Tells Convicted Killer at Sentencing

The mother of the Grosse Pointe Park woman Myron T. Williams strangled last May wrote in a letter read in open court Wednesday that she hopes he “will rot in hell when the time comes.”

Williams, 43, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in Wayne County Circuit Court Wednesday in the May 23 death of Sabrina Gianino, who was beaten and strangled during a robbery in her Grosse Pointe Park duplex, the Detroit Free Press reports.

In her letter, which Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Molly Kettler read, Verona Gianino also said she wishes “there was a death penalty here in Michigan,” though she acknowledged that would ease the pain of losing her daughter.

The sentence handed down by Wayne county Circuit Court Judge Ulyses Boykin was the maximum allowed under the law. Williams, who was originally charged with first-degree, premeditated murder, was found guilty in March of second-degree murder, felony murder and unarmed robbery.

According to the Free Press, Boykin had to correct the record, which showed that he had been convicted of the first-degree murder. He vacated the second-degree charge in favor of felony murder, which allowed him to impose the life sentence without parole.

Williams  said that he had been “set up” by Grosse Pointe police and his own lawyer, “but they didn’t shut me up.”

“I didn’t get no justice. I was railroaded from the day I was arrested. Grosse Pointe (Park) is a prejudiced police station,”  Williams said, declaring that he would appeal the verdict. He claimed police had a video of his children saying that he was at the time Gianino was murdered, and that the state’s case against him was “just like Swiss cheese with a lot of holes on it.”

Grosse Pointe Park Police Chief David Hiller dismissed the rant and said Williams "got what he deserved."

“The day a convicted murderer casts aspersions on my department will be a cold day in hell,” Hiller told the Free-Press.

Merri McGregor, a friend of Sabrina Gianino’s, read letters from other friends revealing that at one point, Williams had planned to rape her. McGregor asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence for what she described as a “horrific murder” that terrified her friend in her final moments of life.