Sarah Gonzales-McLinn on possible new sentence: ‘I just feel I have not had a choice’

Melinda Henneberger
·7 min read

Sarah Gonzales-McLinn might or might not be getting a new sentence for killing her three-times-a-week rapist in Lawrence, Kansas in 2014, when she was 19 and he was 52.

At a hearing on Tuesday, Douglas County District Court Judge Amy Hanley will consider whether to approve the deal that Gonzales-McLinn’s lawyer has struck with the new Douglas County district attorney, Suzanne Valdez. If she does, it will reduce Gonzales-McLinn’s sentence from a “hard 50” — meaning she would only be eligible for parole for the first time after 50 years behind bars — to a “hard 25,” or 25-to-life.

I wrote about this deal three months ago, and it hasn’t changed. This wouldn’t necessarily shorten Gonzales-McLinn’s sentence by a single day. And she could still spend the rest of her life in prison for killing her abuser, Hal Sasko, who hired her to work in one of his pizza restaurants when she was 14 and talked her into moving in with him when she was 17.

In return for this new sentence, she’d agree to drop the complaint that she received ineffective counsel because her attorney, Carl Cornwell, did not explain an offer of a plea deal and did not focus on the abuse that preceded this extraordinarily grisly murder.

Gonzales-McLinn drugged and nearly decapitated Sasko, then scrawled “FREEDOM” on the wall in his blood. Cornwell did not use what’s known as a battered woman’s defense, but instead argued that she should be found not guilty because she was suffering from dissociative identity disorder, which we used to call multiple personality disorder. Last month, the foreman of her jury, who was only 18 at the time, told me that the jury didn’t take that defense seriously, and really only focused on whether she’d done the crime, which was never in doubt.

I can’t help seeing this agreement between Gonzales-McLinn’s lawyer and the DA as a great deal for everyone but Sarah.

Her attorney, Jonathan Sternberg, not only looks like he got something for his client but wow, has come up with a legal maneuver that’s never before been tried in Kansas.

Valdez, the new DA, can claim to have shown the compassion toward abuse victims that she ran on last year. And Judge Hanley won’t ever have to rule on whether Sarah should have a new trial, which she must not be eager to do since the hearing on that issue was held more than a year ago, in December of 2019 and February of 2020.

Sarah’s mother, Michelle Gonzales, who spent Monday in Lawrence passing out 700 flyers about the raw deal her daughter is getting from Valdez, sees the whole thing this way: “She’s backed into a corner is why she’s taking it.”

‘Male attorneys more interested in having their own voices heard’

Lawrence defense attorney Sarah Swain, who has followed this case from the beginning, said that as she sees it, Gonzales-McLinn’s “male attorneys have been more interested in having their own voices heard than making sure Sarah’s story is told. This plea agreement, changing her sentence from hard 50 to 25-to-life, is purely symbolic. It shows no sympathy, empathy, or compassion for what she has endured in her life or what she endured at the hands of her abuser. The system is supposed to protect victims like Sarah McLinn. Instead, the system continues to show us that grand political moves often trump actual justice being served.”

An advocate who has worked with Sarah, Megan Stuke, of the Willow Domestic Violence Center in Lawrence, said this about the deal/no deal with which she was presented: “The deal offered to Sarah put her in a position to gamble with her life. I respect any decision she makes regarding this potential reduction in sentence, but ultimately it will not move Sarah closer to justice. She defended herself against an abuser who was torturing her. Her life was at stake. A jury should hear the whole story.”

I agree 1,000 times over. It’s outrageous that our criminal justice system is still fine with throwing abuse victims who kill into prison forever, with no more understanding than we had a century ago.

But it’s what Gonzales-McLinn thinks that matters. I asked her mother, who talks to her most days, to ask her a couple of questions for me on the phone on Monday night, and send me the audio of her answers.

First, did she feel pressured into taking this deal?

“I just feel I have not had a choice,” she said, given that her lawyer had explained that there was almost no chance that she’d get a new trial. “I can’t do the 50,” she said. “I just can’t. I know everybody says they’re the same” — the first chance for parole after 25 years or after 50 — “but they’re not.”

In taking the deal, “I at least have a chance” to someday be released. “Fifty is no chance.”

What she really wants people to know, she said, is how little those who run “the system” care about her situation, or that of anyone else behind bars. Decisions about her future are “all political,” she said. “Situations like mine are just not important because there are so many politics going on. It’s door closed after door closed after door closed. I feel like the only reason the door is halfway open now is because somebody called them out. And even after being called out, it’s still not enough.”

No one really even wants to decide what should happen to her, she said, so it’s “pass the buck for the next person, because they don’t want to have their hands” on her case.

Ultimately, she said, even if she did get a new trial, “I don’t trust that they would do anything better, I guess. The weight of the 50 I’ve been carrying around for years now, it’s a heavy weight. Having zero chance is hard. It’s easy to say from the outside, ‘Keep rolling the dice.’ ‘’ But she doesn’t like her chances, and why would she?

“I can just hope in the future maybe the state will be a little more enlightened and maybe someone somewhere will look on it with compassion.”

She was made out to be the manipulator

Every time I write about Sarah, I get letters from readers who remind me how distant that day might be.

They see her just as she was presented at her 2015 trial — not as a teenager who had been preyed upon since early childhood, and then turned into a “Barbie doll” by her former employer, but as someone who’d killed to see what killing would feel like.

In court, then-District Attorney Charles Branson questioned whether Gonzales-McLinn had really been sexually abused as a child or raped and burned with cigarettes in high school, though she was treated for trauma nightmares when she was 13, told a doctor about flashbacks at 14, and was hospitalized and diagnosed with PTSD following a suicide attempt after being raped at 16.

Branson made her out to be the manipulator in her relationship — if it can even be called that — with a man 33 years her senior who coerced her sexually and wanted to remake her through cosmetic surgery.

Some readers still parrot those points and worse. So when Sarah tells me on that tape that she doesn’t feel like rolling the dice, I have to respect that. And can hardly tell her she’s wrong, even if I do think the system is rolling her all over again.

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