Murderer seeks new sentence
A West Bethlehem Township man serving a life sentence for the first-degree murder of his ex-wife’s boyfriend has petitioned Washington County Court to be re-sentenced.
Ralph Eugene Good, 72, acting as his own attorney, filed a petition from prison under the Post-Conviction Relief Act. Good outlived Judge David Gilmore, who presided over his case.
Gilmore died in 2004.
Washington County Judge Valarie Costanzo, who is now handling the case, last week appointed attorney Stephen Paul of Pittsburgh to represent Good.
This is the first activity in Good’s case since 1992, when state Superior Court upheld his conviction on charges of first-degree murder, attempted homicide and aggravated assault.
Good’s estranged wife, Darlene Takacs, then 37, and her boyfriend, Mark Donahoo, 41, of Marianna R.D.1, were exiting his home on the night of June 27, 1988, when several shots were fired from a rifle. One shot killed Donahoo and another injured Takacs, who identified her ex-husband as the person holding the rifle.
Good was a fugitive until his arrest 64 days later at the home of a relative. He claimed he was in the Central American nation of Belize and also in Texas.
At another relative’s property, police found the barrel of a .243-caliber rifle – the same caliber as the murder weapon – that was destroyed and hidden in a fence post. It was too mangled to allow a ballistics comparison.
In a three-week trial, a jury convicted Good but members could not unanimously decide on a death sentence. In that situation, the mandatory penalty is life imprisonment, a sentence Gilmore formalized May 14, 1990.
The judge also imposed a concurrent 5- to 10-year sentence for the attempted killing of Takacs.
“This case was, by all accounts, a complicated and hard-fought prosecution,” in the opinion of Superior Court, which reviewed six volumes of testimony.
Good, in his recent petition, claims his sentence is unconstitutional.
As part of a seven-page typed document filed with Washington County Court, Good cited a state Supreme Court case that “simply requires a petitioner to allege and prove that there were facts” about his case unknown to him even though he exercised due diligence.
He asked the court to vacate his sentence and re-sentence him while taking into account mitigating circumstances related to his prior record, pre-sentence investigation or other applicable remedy.
He did not specify additional circumstances, but Good’s prior record included a vehicular “chop shop” ring that then-Judge Thomas J. Terputac called “a massive illegal enterprise” that was alleged to have operated in four states. He was convicted in 1979 of receiving stolen property, and Terputac sentenced him to serve 3 to 7 years in prison, fined him and ordered him to repay crime victims and insurance companies more than $32,000.
Good, according to a 1988 news account of court records, was also a decorated U.S. Marine Corps veteran who earned a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a Vietnamese Cross. In an appearance at the time before a magistrate in 1988, he also described himself as “disabled.”
Takacs filed for divorce from Good in April 1987, but the split had not been finalized at the time of the shootings.
No hearing date has been set on Good’s petition. An inmate incarcerated in the state prison at Rockview, Centre County, he said he learned of the Supreme Court case on which he based his petition while reading about it in early November in the law library at the penitentiary.