SCOTTSBORO, Ala. – An Alabama preacher's son and convicted felon who lived in a remote, mountainside cabin is set to be sentenced Thursday for the 1997 slaying of his first wife. His second wife and stepdaughter later disappeared, never to be seen again.
Forty-six-year-old Barry Whitton was due in court before Jackson County Circuit Judge John Graham. He faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Charged earlier this year after an 18-year investigation, Whitton was convicted of murder in September in the death of Michelle Whitton. Evidence showed she was killed by a blow to the head. Her body was found in 1998 under sticks and rocks on a craggy hillside in DeKalb County in northeastern Alabama.
His second wife Kimberly Whitton and her 11-year-old daughter Haleigh Culwell went missing in 2007.
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