Creech: Love has provided reason to live

BOISE Beyond glances across courtrooms, convicted killer Thomas Eugene Creech has never seen the woman he married by phone from his Death Row cell.

Yet her love, he says, has tamed the killer within.

In a near-tearful plea on Monday, Creech asked the judge who three times before has condemned him to death for another chance at life in prison.

"If it was just me, I'd say kill me today," the former church sexton told 4th District Judge Robert Newhouse during his sentencing hearing. "But I have my wife and my (step)son back there, and I love them. I'm trying hard not to cry."

Creech, 44, pleaded guilty to the 1981 murder of fellow inmate David Dale Jensen, 23, who was beaten to death with a sock filled with batteries. His latest death warrant, signed by Newhouse in 1986, was stayed by U.S. District Judge Harold Ryan.

Creech also was convicted of a 1974 double murder in Valley County and another murder in Oregon. At times, he has claimed a role in 42 other slayings. It was the appeal of his death sentence on the 1974 murders that resulted in the Idaho Supreme Court voiding the state's death penalty law in October 1977 to comply with U.S. Supreme Court directives on capital punishment.

Despite his past, Sherry Miller Creech still hopes for a future with her husband.

She began writing to her Death Row love from her Mississippi home in 1986. Three years later, she moved to Boise, and he proposed.

"We had to fight to get married," she said. And in April 1992, via phone link to the Idaho Maximum Security Institute, her dream came true.

They keep in touch through letters, telephone calls and her daily prison drive-by.

Creech said he spots his wife's car each morning from his cell. He waves a towel as she gazes at him through binoculars.

"The warden won't allow us to visit," she said, noting her teen-age son looks up to Creech. "I think he thinks more of Tom than he does his own dad."

Creech credits Sherry for his conversion from violence, citing a potentially explosive confrontation with fellow inmate, child-killer James Wood.

Wood was convicted of the 1993 slaying and mutilation of an 11-year-old Pocatello girl, Jeralee Underwood.

"I don't like him," Creech said. "He made a remark to me that maybe he would beat me up, and I just responded, I'm not that little girl.'

"If I was the way I used to be before Sherry that guy would've been thrown off the top tier. I was probably the most dangerous person on the face of the Earth. I made bad choices. ... Because of Sherry, I have changed."