A North Carolina man pleaded
guilty Friday to fatally stabbing his 6-year-old daughter as national
park rangers approached rather than give up custody of the girl.
Seth Willis Pickering, 38, of Leicester, is expected to spend the
rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree murder
for killing his daughter in September 2016, federal prosecutors said.
Two national park rangers said he stabbed Lila Pickering in the heart
and lung as they were walking toward him to talk along the Blue Ridge
Parkway in North Carolina.
“Now they will never be able to take her away from me,” Pickering
later told a ranger, according to an affidavit filed by an FBI
investigator. It added that he also said something to the effect of
“she’s happier now. … It’s what she wanted.”
Lila had been in protective custody for a month when her father, who
was allowed to see his daughter in supervised visits, took her from the
home over the objections of her temporary caretaker. The first-grader
had previously lived with Pickering. It’s unclear why social workers
removed Lila from her father’s care and placed her in the home of a
classmate.
Lila’s mother, who is Pickering’s estranged wife, lived in Florida at the time.
Pickering’s plea agreement states that he will be sentenced to life
in prison without possibility of parole, sparing “the family the trauma
of a lengthy trial and decades of appeals,” U.S. Attorney R. Andrew
Murray said in a statement.
Pickering, clad in a baggy brown jumpsuit and chains, declined to
make a statement Friday before U.S. District Judge Max O. Cogburn Jr.
accepted the plea agreement, the Citizen-Times of Asheville reported.
Defense attorneys S. Frederick Winiker and Mary Ellen Coleman declined
to comment after the plea deal was accepted.
Winiker said Pickering has been treated for mental illness in the
past and is taking a prescription drug used to treat symptoms including
depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, the newspaper reported.
Pickering also had been treated for alcohol abuse a month before he
killed his daughter, Winiker said.
His estranged wife, Ashley Pickering, told the Citizen-Times in 2016
that she had since been fighting for custody of Lila after moving to
Florida, adding that Seth Pickering was a doting father and Lila
idolized him.
Pickering won a restraining order against Ashley Pickering in 2015 after alleging that she threatened him and the child.
Rangers approached Seth Pickering and his daughter near nightfall on
the day of the slaying after noticing a car parked along the scenic
parkway, part of the National Park System.
The rangers noticed a man and
young girl walking down an embankment in an area with no trails, picnic
areas or designated campsites less than an hour after Pickering took his
daughter from her custodian’s home without permission, the FBI agent’s
affidavit said. Pickering had built a small fire with underbrush that he
cut before the rangers approached to investigate the illegal campfire
and other possible violations.
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