MISSOULA, Mont. — A Montana judge sentenced a man and a woman Friday to life in prison after they pleaded guilty to stabbing two people to death, including a teenager, and trying to dissolve their bodies in tubs filled with chemicals.
District Judge James Wheelis gave both Augustus Standingrock and Tiffanie Pierce life terms with the possibility of parole for the 2017 deaths of Jackson Wiles, 24, and Marilyn Pickett, 15.
The sentences are in line with the recommendations prosecutors made in plea agreements. Standingrock pleaded guilty to deliberate homicide and accountability to deliberate homicide, while Pierce pleaded guilty to attempted deliberate homicide and accountability to deliberate homicide.
Pierce’s plea to attempted deliberate homicide was from a separate attack in which she entered a Missoula home and stabbed a woman eight times, injuring her.
Pierce wept and Standingrock sat silently as relatives and friends of Wiles and Pickett testified for about 90 minutes about the pain they suffered after the killings, Missoula news station KGVO-AM reported .
Pierce’s former roommate told police he was awakened by a woman’s screams in their Missoula home in August 2017, according to court records. He said he found Pierce and Standingrock in the bathroom washing off blood and that Pierce told him there was a dead woman in the basement.
Police found Wiles’ and Pickett’s bodies dismembered and partially dissolved in the basement.
Prosecutors previously said Standingrock believed Wiles had sexually abused a young girl close to him.
Given the chance to speak in court, Standingrock said: “I apologize. There’s nothing I can say or do to bring anything back,” he said.
The roommate told investigators that Pierce said Standingrock brought over a couple of people and that he took them to the basement and attacked one while Pierce attacked the other.
Pierce said she never intended to cause anyone’s death.
“Especially someone so young and beautiful and with as much potential as Marilyn,” she said. “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t wish I could trade places with her.”
