PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Former commodities broker Christopher Hightower was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison Tuesday for the bloody 1991 slayings of a Barrington, R.I., family.
Providence Superior Court Judge John Sheehan sentenced Hightower, 43, to two terms of life without parole for the deaths of Ernest Brendel and his 8-year-old daughter, Emily, and a third life sentence for the murder of Brendel's wife, Alice.
Sheehan, who called the slayings the 'most abhorrent evil' he has ever seen, ordered all three sentences to be served consecutively, rather than together.
Hightower was convicted in April on 11 counts for the grisly slayings, which prosecutors said were committed in a rage over a failed business deal with Ernest Brendel. He was sentenced to at least five years on each of the other counts, which include breaking and entering and illegal burial of bodies.
'The important thing is Mr. Hightower will never see the light of day,' said Stephen White, a spokesman for state Attorney General Jeffrey Pine.
Prosecutors charged Hightower killed the Brendels on Sept. 20, 1991, shortly after Brendel filed a securities fraud complaint with federal regulators over the loss of a $12,000 foreign currency investment.
The family's remains were unearthed seven weeks later in a shallow, lime-lined graves half a mile from their home in Barrington, a well-to- do Providence suburb. Brendel had been killed with a crossbow while his wife had been strangled. The daughter died of a forced overdose of sleeping pills, autopsies showed.
