Arapahoe County – Phillip Effland will spend at least four years and a day in prison for being the lone survivor in a suicide pact with his wife and 24-year-old daughter last year.
“I cannot find that shooting your wife two times in the head is assisted suicide, I cannot,” District Judge Marilyn Antrim said in handing down her sentence.
Effland sat emotionless before sentencing, even as his sister and daughter wept and begged the judge for mercy.
He had not testified in his weeklong trial in June and offered only three sentences Tuesday. He did not mention his dead daughter, who, like him, suffered severe manic depression.
“I did not murder my wife,” he told the judge, his voice quivering slightly. “I realize there is no way for you…to understand the love between the two of us.
“I can assure you no man ever loved a woman as much as I loved Denise, and that stands until this day.”
Effland, his wife, Denise, and daughter Brenna took an overdose of painkillers on July 30, 2005, and waited to die.
Effland had lost his job, the family was out of money and was being evicted from their home.
He awoke about 2 a.m. to find his daughter dead from the overdose, but his wife still breathing.
He shot her in the head with the .38 caliber pistol he had retrieved from the garage earlier, “in case anything went wrong,” he told investigators.
A day and a half later, when family could not reach the Efflands, sheriff’s deputies broke into their Centennial home to find Effland rolling on the floor, frothing at the mouth.
Antrim sentenced Effland to 16 years for the second-degree murder of his wife, and four years for the manslaughter conviction in the death of his daughter.
The sentences run concurrently. Effland could be eligible for parole after four years and a day.
“He has a second chance,” prosecutor Dan May said after the sentencing. “The rest of his family does not.”
Effland’s surviving daughter, Marna Arnett, who had married and moved out of the home, wept as she asked the judge for mercy for her father and the rest of his family Tuesday.
“When you sentence him, you sentence my children,” she said.
Arnett said a long sentence would mean she would only get her 58-year-old father “back in a body bag.”
Prosecutor Vicki Klingensmith told the judge that Effland had a history of domestic violence, and had never accepted accountability.
He was convicted of child abuse once, when Arnett had been severely beaten by her father; she told police the physical abuse had gone on for years. In another attack, she had fended him off with pepper spray, Klingensmith said.
“Here he is, found guilty by a jury of his peers, and he is still not taking responsibility,” Klingensmith told the judge.
In an unusual move, jury forewoman Layne Kopas asked the judge to give leniency.
“Mr. Effland is not a threat to society,” she said. “He is not a cold-blooded killer.”
Staff writer Joey Bunch can be reached at 303-820-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com.
