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Brett W. Smith, 34, was strangled and decapitated inside his mobile home near North Canton, Ohio, in October 2008, and a neighbor later received life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Smith had missed a family visit and stopped answering his phone, so his mother went to his home to check on him. When she could not get inside, she and a neighbor forced the door and found Smith dead in the bathroom.

She called 911, reaching a Stark County dispatcher and then a North Canton dispatcher, and reported that her son appeared to have been killed and that his head was missing.

An autopsy found that Smith died of asphyxiation. Investigators said he had been strangled and that the decapitation happened after his death. Officers found his head inside the kitchen oven, partly burned. His fingers and thumbs had been cut off, and the body had been wrapped in plastic and covered with paint, according to court filings and later news coverage.

Authorities charged William Douglas Perry, then 41, a neighbor who lived in the same mobile home park. Perry, a former Marine with a prior criminal record, was accused by prosecutors of strangling Smith during a confrontation, then spending hours trying to dismember and conceal the body.

A Stark County grand jury indicted Perry on two counts of aggravated murder with death-penalty specifications, along with aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, gross abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence.

In October 2009, Perry pleaded guilty under an agreement that took the death penalty off the table. Common Pleas Judge Lee Sinclair sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. "I'm sorry," Perry said in court, according to news accounts. "I ask for your forgiveness." Perry remains incarcerated in the Ohio prison system, according to state corrections records.