SEATTLE — King County Superior Court Judge Michael Ryan on Friday stopped a senior deputy prosecutor from reciting the facts of Charles Becker’s crimes out loud, saying that everyone in his courtroom knew the horrific details and Ryan did not want to see anyone retraumatized in the telling.
He made clear from the bench that he would send Becker, 33, to prison for life if he could for murdering 56-year-old Mavis Kindness Nelson, a member of the Rock Creek band of the Yakama Nation who was reported missing in Seattle in May 2022, a month before her dismembered remains were found discarded in a University District ravine.
“The facts of this case are unlike any this court has ever seen,” Ryan said, adding that the superlatives “horrific” and “gruesome” don’t even begin to capture Becker’s “extreme depravity.”
Noting that he did not have the legal authority to impose an exceptional sentence, Ryan reluctantly sentenced Becker to 34 years in prison — a high-end, standard-range sentence jointly recommended by the state and defense. He said that while he usually tries to find reason to hope for a defendant’s rehabilitation, in Becker’s case, he searched in vain.
“There is no coming back from this,” Ryan said. Becker, he said, is “an individual beyond hope” for his heinous acts and the trauma he inflicted on Nelson, her loved ones, the Yakama Nation and the Seattle community.
In October, Becker was arrested and charged with first-degree murder with a deadly weapon and sexually violating human remains. He pleaded guilty to those crimes as well as unlawful imprisonment with sexual motivation June 15. That charge was added after investigators determined he held Nelson in his room in a U-District boardinghouse for two weeks before killing her and storing her body in his closet, court records show.
The unlawful imprisonment with sexual motivation charge provides the state with a basis to potentially seek a future jury verdict to civilly commit Becker as a sexually violent predator once he’s served his prison sentence.
In plea negotiations, King County and Clallam County prosecutors agreed not to charge Becker in two unrelated sexual assaults on two other women. He has a previous second-degree manslaughter conviction for the 2015 accidental killing of his infant son in Pullman, court records show. The baby died after his airway was obstructed by a piece of a plastic bag, and Becker was sentenced to just over two years in prison.
Nelson’s friends and family packed Ryan’s courtroom Friday, the mood somber as Becker was led to the defense table in red jail scrubs.
Nelson, who was nicknamed “Boots” for her love of the Nancy Sinatra song “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” was remembered for the love and kindness she effortlessly exuded, her big heart and distinctive laugh, along with her willingness to take in and feed people who were down on their luck.
She was raised in a prominent family on the Yakama Nation’s reservation and was “a compassionate, happy person (who) would be the first to open her door to those in need,” said Charlene Tillequots, an elected member of the Yakama Nation Tribal Council.
Tillequots, who appeared by Zoom, is also chair of the council’s missing and murdered Indigenous people committee.
“Non-Indians have preyed on our people,” who’ve been victims of homicides, rapes and human trafficking, Tillequots said. “Everyone here knows someone who has been murdered, violated or is missing. … We lose a piece of ourselves every time someone takes a member of the Yakama Nation from us.”
But the ways Nelson was violated “goes beyond the white man’s laws and natural law,” Tillequots said. “She leaves behind a community that won’t be able to overcome the trauma of her passing.”
Historically, rapists and murderers “would be tortured and killed by our tribe,” she told Ryan. “In our culture, we believe that when you take the life of another person, you take on all their sins.”
As a result, Tillequots said, Nelson is “pure and innocent as the day she was born.”
Ernestine Morning Owl lamented the violence Nelson experienced at the hands of “this man who took my sister for his own twisted gratification.”
“He will always carry her burdens and will answer to the Creator,” Morning Owl said. “I pray Charles Becker will suffer for his remaining days, that he shall never walk free again.”
Nelson’s niece, Daw Kenoras, told Ryan that at her Auntie Boots’ funeral, she and her cousins gathered in the longhouse’s kitchen and recalled how Nelson would cuddle and kiss them, stroke their hair and call them “baby.”
“She would rub us and comfort us and make us feel like we were the most important people in the world, that we mattered. It was the greatest feeling in the world,” Kenoras said. “We said, ‘How can somebody take that love from us?’ There wasn’t anything bad or mean that she ever did.”
Kenoras also thanked Ryan for not allowing a recitation of the horrors Nelson suffered.
“You saved us from that,” she told the judge.
Becker did not address the court.
Defense attorney William Prestia acknowledged that with “a set of crimes of this magnitude, there is little the defense can say.”
He said the defense didn’t submit any mitigation materials and wasn’t asking for leniency.
“Mr. Becker’s crimes are notorious, and he’ll arrive at the Department of Corrections carrying the stigma of his crimes,” Prestia said.
