FORT FAIRFIELD, Maine -- A Connecticut prisoner charged with killing a cocktail waitress says he'll confess to the 19-year-old crime and another unsolved murder if he's guranteed the death penalty in return.
'I'm on a collision course with the gates of hell,' accused killer Philip Adams, 42, said in an interview published Wednesday in the weekly Fort Fairfield Review.
The interview was the first of three with Adams to be published in weekly installments, the newspaper said.
Adams was indicted July 19 in the slaying of Donna Mauch, 24, who was found beaten to death in her Fort Fairfield apartment in February 1965.
Adams, a former farm worker in Fort Fairfield, told Review Editor Tom Harvey he would confess to woman's slaying and a still-unsolved murder two months earlier if the governor promises him the death penalty.
Maine has no capital punishment.
In addition to the Mauch murder, Adams said he was prepared to confess to killing Cyrus Everett, 14, a newsboy who disappeared the day after Christmas 1964. His body was found under a log in a swamp in May 1965.
'I've been a shadow cast over my children's eyes. I'm willing to give up my life to lift that shadow,' Adams, a 10th-grade dropout, said in the interview.
Adams is currently serving a maximum 20-year sentence in Connecticut Correctional Institute in Somers, Conn., for the beating of a 10-year-old boy.
