[chris]

A 20-year-old Clemson University student was found sexually assaulted and strangled in her off-campus apartment in May 2006, and a registered sex offender who had been out of prison for about nine months was later sentenced to death for the killing.

Tiffany Marie Souers, a civil engineering student from Ladue, Missouri, was discovered dead on the afternoon of May 26, 2006, in her apartment at The Reserve complex in Central, South Carolina, about three miles from the Clemson campus. According to police, a former roommate who had gone to the apartment found her body and called 911. An autopsy determined she had been raped and died of asphyxiation from ligature strangulation with a bathing suit top.

Investigators said there was no sign of forced entry and that Souers had fought her attacker. They estimated she was killed around 1:30 a.m., hours after friends dropped her off the night before.

Authorities identified a suspect through DNA recovered at the scene, which matched Jerry Buck Inman, a registered sex offender whose genetic profile was already on file. Inman, 37, was arrested in early June 2006 at his mother's home in Dandridge, Tennessee. He had served 18 years in prison for rapes committed as a teenager in North Carolina and Florida and had been released roughly nine months before Souers was killed.

Inman pleaded guilty in August 2008 to murder, first-degree criminal sexual conduct, first-degree burglary and kidnapping. Because South Carolina law requires a judge rather than a jury to sentence defendants who plead guilty, Circuit Judge Edward Miller heard the penalty case, which began in September 2008.

Inman asked the judge to sentence him to death, telling the court he could not be rehabilitated. "There's really only one sentence appropriate for someone like me, and I ask you to impose that sentence," he said, according to news accounts. Miller sentenced him to death for the murder and added two consecutive 30-year terms for the burglary and sexual assault convictions.