[Faline]

Sedrick Cobb preyed on young Julia Ashe outside of Waterbury department store. After deflating her tire as she shopped, Cobb offered to fix the flat then asked for a ride, which ended in horror for UConn student.



While Christmas shopping on Dec. 16, 1989, Julia Ashe lugged an armload of bags out of Bradlees in Waterbury, Conn., and discovered she had a flat tire.
Miraculously, a man appeared and offered to help.
But he was no good Samaritan. He was shopping too, in a sense.
For two days, he had been lurking in his own car in that lot, waiting for lone women shoppers to arrive.
Twice, he used a valve stem remover to deflate a tire on the car of likely victims, then offered to change the flats when they returned from shopping.
The first two potential targets declined his help.
His third target, Ashe, a 22-year-old University of Connecticut student, did not. Who could blame her? It was 18 degrees.
As he slapped on Ashe’s spare tire, the man said his own car had broken down and asked for a lift to a gas station. She agreed.
But once in the car, the man directed Ashe to drive to a wooded pull-off barely a mile from the store, beside a dam on City Mills Pond. Though well-concealed, the spot is a stone’s throw from busy I-84.
As traffic whizzed by, he ordered Ashe into the back seat. He rifled her pocketbook, taking $300, and then raped her.
But the horror was just beginning.



He gagged Ashe and bound her mouth, hands and feet with fiberglass-reinforced tape. He carried her to the dam, then shoved her off the wall. She fell 23 feet and landed on a concrete apron covered with eight inches of water.
Julia Ashe, petite but feisty, would not die easily.
Thrashing in the icy water, she maneuvered her body to a metal shard on the dam and cut her wrists and ankles free, gouging her skin in the frantic process of trying to stay alive. Still gagged and missing a shoe, she moved toward shore.
Her tormentor was waiting there.
He had watched from above as she freed herself, then scrambled down the bank to finish the job.
He seized her by the hair and held her face-down in the water until she stopped kicking.
He returned to Ashe’s car and took clothing that she had purchased as Christmas gifts. He then walked back to Bradlees, got in his car and drove home, pausing at the dam to confirm that his quarry was dead.
Her fiancé reported Ashe missing that night, but her body would lie undiscovered for days.
Meanwhile, detectives in the Waterbury area were closing in on a serial sex fiend.
Sedrick Cobb, 27, of nearby Naugatuck, had been arrested that June in an attempted rape in his hometown.
While that case was pending and Cobb was free, he became a suspect in two more sex assaults, in Naugatuck on Dec. 13 and in adjacent Oxford on Dec. 15.



While searching Cobb’s apartment and car on Dec. 20, police found clothing and other items that Julia Ashe had purchased on the night she disappeared. Cobb explained that he found the items in a bag in the Bradlees parking lot.
On Christmas Day, a group of teenagers saw a pair of feet protruding from City Mills Pond, which had frozen over. Gashes on Ashe’s body told a graphic story of the brutality she had faced. Her car was found nearby, with the valve stem missing from the flat tire in the trunk. Police found a valve stem remover in Cobb’s Mazda.
Intermittently for a week, Cobb had been questioned by different investigators looking into the Waterbury-area sex crimes spree.
On the morning of Dec. 27, Lt. Robert Deely and Det. Neil O’Leary of the Waterbury police were waiting when Cobb arrived at the courthouse for arraignment in the Dec. 13 rape.
Deely asked him about the murder of the young Christmas shopper, and Cobb replied, “I want to get this off my chest.”
For 30 minutes, he spilled the details of his flat-tire scam, the rape, the robbery and the ghastly murder. He used Death Row common sense to explain the homicide: He had to kill Ashe, he said, because she had seen his face.
The cops said Cobb’s narrative was chillingly dispassionate. He was as frosty as the pondwater he drowned Julia Ashe in.
Cobb chose a trial before a panel of three judges rather than a jury. He sat impassively through the proceedings, even when the judges announced a guilty verdict and, six weeks later, condemned him to die.
His mother, Lottie, tried to save the killer’s life in the punishment phase. She said Sedrick was a normal guy until he served a stint in the Army. Stationed in Germany, he struck up a relationship with a native woman and fathered a son, but they stayed behind when he returned to the United States in 1988.
Thereafter, she said, “Everything he touched turned bad.”
Twenty-four Christmases after the murder, Cobb, 51, has lived more than two decades as a condemned man. Connecticut abolished capital punishment in 2012 but did not make the change retroactive.
Cobb has the second-longest tenure of the 11 men on Death Row. His appeals have failed, and in October he and fellow inmates lost an eight-year battle to have capital punishment declared racially biased.
The state’s last execution was in 2005, the first in 45 years.

[Sharon]

What an evil bastard

Sad story, interesting read

[Kelseecat65]

Pure evil is what comes to mind.

[deanmine]

[Photoplay]

Interesting read and info

[Jere]

crazy p.o.s

[imbok]

If he had been convicted in Texas, he'd be dead already.

[Daley]

Interesting read

[crmnlelemnt]

prick

[emeraldlizards]

What a fucking animal! RIP, Miss Julia Ashe!