An Arizona man was sentenced to 31 1/2 years in prison for strangling a former roommate, dismembering her body with an axe and scattering the parts around Phoenix.
"What I did was unbelievable. I can't believe it. I can't even explain it," Timothy Sullivan, 66, said in court before receiving his punishment.
Sullivan tried to blame a 1980s brain injury during nearly four years of legal proceedings that followed his November 2020 arrest in the slaying of 49-year-old Amy Leagans, Phoenix TV station KPNX reported.
But he pleaded guilty as charged in September after prosecutors lined up potential witnesses that included several women prepared to testify that he'd hurt them in the past, KPNX said.
On Friday, Judge Justin Beresky said Sullivan was obviously a danger to society before imposing consecutive sentences of 25 years for second-degree murder and 6 1/2 years for abandonment or concealment of a dead body, according to TV station KSAZ.
"Not only did you abandon or conceal, but you basically mutilated Amy and desecrated her body and treated her like trash," Beresky told Sullivan in Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix.
Leagans and Sullivan clashed while sharing an apartment in Chandler, Arizona, with Leagans telling police that he'd pushed her several times during an September 2020 argument, according to TV stations KTVK and KPHO.
No charges were filed and Leagans was reported missing the following month, leading investigators to learn Sullivan had moved to the Scottsdale, Arizona, home of a former girlfriend.
That woman alleged Sullivan had choked her and threatened to bury her "in the backyard like Amy," prompting police to obtain a search warrant and dig up human hair, jewelry and burned woman's clothing.
In November 2020, Phoenix police were alerted to a head and torso that were found partially buried near an overpass. Dental records confirmed the remains were Leagan's.
Sullivan was arrested days later and told detectives he'd "snapped" during an argument with Leagans and strangled her.
He said he initially buried her body behind his ex-girlfriend's house in Scottsdale but grew worried, dug it up and dismembered it before tossing the limbs in garbage cans around the East Valley.
"What that man did to my sister, what he did on this judicial system, his manipulations, his lies, is excruciating," the victim's sister, Lori Leagans Porth said, according to KPNX.
Another sister, Christa Leagans Holton, told the station, "He can't hurt anyone else and that at least helps me find some sort of peace."
