DA offered to remove death penalty possibility for info on missing co-ed Wilberger

Accused killer Joel Patrick Courtney refused a plea agreement last week designed to spare his life. He could have escaped execution by leading authorities to the body of Brooke Carol Wilberger.

The clock ran out on the agreement at the end of last week. Benton County District Attorney John Haroldson said several proposals were on the table, but authorities were most interested in finding Wilberger’s body. In exchange, they were willing to give Courtney immunity from the death penalty.

With no word from Courtney and his lawyers, Haroldson said the accused could still face death by lethal injection if found guilty at his trial, scheduled to begin a year from February.

Wilberger was 19 when she was abducted May 24, 2004, in the parking lot of the Oak Park Apartments on the edge of the Oregon State University campus. She was a freshman at Brigham Young University on summer break.

Police arrested Courtney, a 42-year-old Beaverton resident, following a 15-month investigation. He is charged with 14 counts of aggravated murder, kidnapping, sexual abuse, rape and sodomy.

He already had pleaded guilty of abducting and raping a 22-year-old University of New Mexico foreign exchange student in November 2003. He accepted a plea agreement in that case, including 18 years in prison.

Courtney was extradited to Benton County in April. Along with the Wilberger case, he also was indicted on unrelated charges for assaulting two OSU students the same day that Wilberger disappeared. For those assaults, he faces two charges each for attempted murder, attempted sodomy, attempted sexual abuse and attempted first-degree rape as well as four counts of first-degree attempted kidnapping.

Haroldson said the proposed plea agreement would have resolved all those charges as well as the Wilberger case. “Despite all our efforts on all these cases, we were unable to bring them to resolution,” he said. He added that there will be a series of pretrial motions leading up to the Wilberger trial. Most will take up to six weeks. They mostly center on constitutional issues involving Courtney’s rights, he said.

“With any capital murder case, there are going to be numerous constitutional issues raised,” Haroldson said. “These are clearly the most litigious cases.”

Wilberger’s family continues to offer a $15,000 reward for the recovery of her body.

Tom Henderson covers police and courts for the Gazette-Times. He can be reached at tom.henderson@lee.net or 758-9548.