Killer who terrorized and shot his ex-wife is facing execution

The man's lawyer asked Friday for a delay to the execution.
LORAIN, Ohio (AP) -- Before 27-year-old Lisa Huff Filiaggi was killed, she was terrorized. Her ex-husband raged against her and hunted her down.
James J. Filiaggi, who is to be executed by lethal injection Tuesday, made it clear to her that she was going to die and shot her in the shoulder. Then he cursed her as he fired into her head.
"It was an execution," said Cel Rivera, the Lorain police chief who was a detective captain investigating the crime scene Jan. 24, 1994. "I'm not a big proponent of the death penalty, but I can't conjure up a whole lot of sympathy for this guy. It was so calculated and brutal."
A three-judge panel in Lorain County in July 1995 convicted Filiaggi of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, burglary, felonious assault and domestic violence. His insanity defense, that a brain disorder made him unable to control anger-filled outbursts, didn't work. A month later, he was sentenced to die.
Gov. Ted Strickland agreed with the Ohio Parole Board on Thursday and denied the 41-year-old Filiaggi clemency.
The state has put 24 inmates to death since resuming executions in 1999, all under former Gov. Bob Taft. Filiaggi originally was scheduled to die Feb. 13, but was given a reprieve along with two other condemned inmates while the newly elected Strickland reviewed their cases.
Seeking a delay
Filiaggi had been considered a volunteer -- a condemned inmate willing to die. But a lawyer for Filiaggi asked the Ohio Supreme Court and a federal judge Friday to delay his execution so that he can join a federal lawsuit brought by other inmates that argues death by injection is unconstitutional and cruel. He had stopped his appeals in 2006.
The state attorney general's response was that Filiaggi waited too long to join the lawsuit, which has been pending since 2004, and as recently as Wednesday Filiaggi's attorneys told the state they didn't intend to file further legal claims for him.
During a pool media interview in January at the Mansfield Correctional Institute, Filiaggi said he never intended to kill.
"That wasn't my intention that evening," he said. "I was planning to put my brains on her wall. With depression, you don't think straight.
"Like I said, if I could take it back, I would," he said. "Switch places? Gladly. At least my girls would have their mom. If I could take anything back, I would take it all back. It would never have happened and things would have turned out a lot better. It's sad that it happened that way. I mean, I wish I could explain."
According to Rivera's account and investigative documents reviewed by the parole board, the night of her death Lisa Filiaggi made a 911 call and pleaded for police to help. She ran out of her modest, red-brick home's front door as James Filiaggi bashed in the back door trying to get at her. Their two daughters slept upstairs.
She pounded on the front door of her neighbor's home, but no one responded. Terrified, not knowing where to turn next, she ran to the front yard of the next house and frantically screamed, "God help me, someone, please, help me! He's going to kill me!"
Robert Mutnansky heard her plea, opened his door and let her into his house. Lisa ran to the back part of his home in the middle-class neighborhood, and hid in a linen closet.
Mutnansky closed the front door and locked it, but that didn't matter. Filiaggi forced it open with a couple of fierce blows.
Bought a pistol
Just two days before, Filiaggi had bought a 9 mm Luger pistol, the one he pointed at Mutnansky and ordered him to help find Lisa. Mutnansky offered no help, but Filiaggi searched anyway and opened the closet where she hid.
Married only eight months when Lisa filed for divorce, she could not escape her ex-husband's abuses.
"You're talking about someone who wanted to exercise total control," Rivera said. "He had a girlfriend of his own, and still wanted control of his ex-wife's life."
Often, when Lisa would pick up their children after court-ordered visitations, she was subjected to his threats, especially in the fall of 1993 when she got engaged. In one incident, he grabbed her neck and fractured the face of her intended new husband, Eric Beiswenger.
Marilyn Zeidner, executive director of Genesis House, a shelter for battered women in Lorain, said Lisa Filiaggi is remembered in Lorain as a tragic example domestic violence.
"She did everything she was supposed to do," Zeidner said. "It didn't matter, unless she had a bodyguard. A protection order is just a piece of paper. Someone like him was not about to comply with it. He was intimidating and bullying."
At Mutnansky's linen closet, Filiaggi grabbed his former wife's arm and pulled her into a bathroom. He fired two shots. With a shoulder wound, Lisa broke free and ran to a bedroom.
Filiaggi followed. Mutnansky heard Filiaggi shout and curse at Lisa. There were two more shots, then the footsteps of someone walking out of the house.
Mutnansky found Lisa Filiaggi slumped against a bedroom wall, shot in the head.
The rampage didn't end there. Filiaggi went to the trailer home in nearby Amherst Township of Delbert Yepko, Lisa Filiaggi's stepfather. He bashed in that door and said to Yepko: "Are you ready to die?" Yepko pepper-sprayed Filiaggi's face.
Manhunt began
What followed was a bizarre manhunt. Filiaggi fled to stay for a night with friends near Athens, in southeast Ohio. Filiaggi graduated in 1992 from Ohio University with a business administration and accounting degree. When his friends found out the next day that he was wanted for murder, he fled again.
He ended up at two ski resorts, in Pennsylvania and New York. He used a credit card at one of them to buy flowers for his girlfriend in Ohio.
By the time a group of Lorain police started to search one of the resorts, Filiaggi had returned to Lorain County and turned himself in at the sheriff's department. Rivera said Filiaggi most likely had gone to ski hoping to have one last good time, knowing he would soon be arrested.
Two lawyers represented Filiaggi at a clemency hearing in January offered nothing on his behalf.
Jeffrey Gamso, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio, said Filiaggi did not attempt then to be part of other death row inmates' lawsuit against capital punishment by lethal injection.
Parole board member Trayce Thalheimer interviewed Filiaggi in prison. Filiaggi told her the clemency process "is a farce."
During his media prison interview, James Filiaggi said: "The state's going to make my daughters orphans in the name of justice. Like I said, I've accepted my punishment, and they can bring it on."
Brother's words
Filiaggi's younger brother, Anthony Filiaggi, and his wife are raising James and Lisa Filiaggi's daughters, now 16 and 14, in Elyria. Anthony now considers them his daughters, although not officially adopted.
"I'm trying not to comment about my daughters, and I'm trying to protect them from the media," he said. "He's my brother. I know he did something wrong. Part of me is sad. He's my flesh and blood. I also still remember Lisa and what happened."
Anthony Filiaggi said he has no plan to attend his brother's execution.
In a note to the parole board, 14-year-old Jasmin Filiaggi wrote about her father: "He shot my mom. So I think he should be shot. I have no sympathy for him, and what needs to be done is accepted by me. I agree with everything."
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