Metro-east man sentenced for cutting off girlfriend’s leg with truck along highway
A Madison County judge has sentenced a former Washington Park man to 60 years in prison for chasing down his girlfriend in a truck, intentionally hitting her, cutting off her leg and leaving her to die on the side of a highway.
An all-female jury had deliberated just 40 minutes before finding Richard Mayor, 60, guilty of first-degree murder on June 1.
Judge Kyle Napp presided over the trial and handed down the sentence Tuesday morning.
“That is 100%,” Assistant State’s Attorney Luke Yager said after Mayor’s sentencing hearing at the Madison County Criminal Justice Center in Edwardsville. “He has to serve the entire 60 years, if he lives that long.”
Mayor, who was shackled and wearing a gray-striped jail uniform, asked for an appeal to be filed immediately.
Lisa Dunnavant-Polach, 46, also of Washington Park, bled to death on Feb. 21 after telling a witness and an emergency responder that the person responsible was Mayor, her boyfriend, who was driving a white Ford F-150 truck, prosecutors argued at his trial.
The truck hit Dunnavant-Polach along Illinois 111, near Gateway Commerce Center, in Pontoon Beach. A truck driver testified that she was trying to escape by climbing into the cab of his tractor-trailer.
On Tuesday morning, Mayor told sheriff’s deputies that he didn’t want to attend the sentencing hearing, according to Yager.
“He said that he was going to fight whoever came to get him out of his cell,” Yager said. “... There was not a fight, but he still was demanding as he was leaving his cell that he wanted an attorney.”
Mayor had elected to represent himself during the trial.
Napp started Tuesday’s hearing early, expecting that Mayor’s request for an attorney would prompt a continuance. Then he apparently changed his mind.
“It don’t matter,” Mayor said. “Just get it over with.”
The penalty for a first-degree-murder conviction is 20 to 60 years in prison. Yager and Assistant State’s Attorney Morgan Hudson argued for an extended term based on Mayor’s recent parole related to another felony. Napp ruled that it wasn’t an option under the circumstances.
Before the judge’s ruling, when prosecutors asked for a 95-year sentence, Mayor said, “Let’s go the whole hundred.”
Madison County State’s Attorney Tom Haine characterized Mayor’s statement as “hyperbole” while talking to reporters after the hearing. He said swift justice in the case benefits all county residents.
“(Mayor) is a repeat offender,” Haine said. “This is a dangerous individual. This is an individual that we do not want on the streets of Pontoon Beach, I can tell you that, and we’re glad that he will be now, we believe, incarcerated for the rest of his natural life.”
Mayor’s two-and-a-half-day trial, which began May 30, was both dramatic and chaotic at times. He served as his own attorney, despite no law degree or legal training. Napp repeatedly admonished him for breaking courtroom rules and not following proper procedure.
Mayor maintained that the killing was an accident.
“At no time did I plan on hurting Lisa,” he said. “She was my life. We were going to get married. All we had was each other.”
Yager and Hudson told jurors that Dunnavant-Polach and Mayor had been arguing on Feb. 21 and that he had threatened bodily harm two weeks prior in a message to her daughter.
Jurors rejected Mayor’s claim that he wasn’t arguing with Dunnavant-Polach on Feb. 21, that she was distraught and suicidal over issues with her children, that he was trying to calm her down and get her in his truck, and that he accidentally hit her when his foot got stuck under the brake pedal.
Mayor was arrested shortly after the hit-and-run. He told jurors that he was rendered “unconscious” by the trauma of the crash and didn’t remember driving 4 miles to an area where he pulled over his disabled truck, whose shredded left-front tire had fallen off.
Mayor made a last-minute decision to testify on his own behalf, despite being warned by Napp that it would allow prosecutors to bring up his 1995 conviction for aggravated criminal sexual assault of a minor as a way to discredit him.
Some of the most compelling testimony came from prosecution witnesses Stacy and Steven O’Dell, the tractor-trailer drivers who had tried to help Dunnavant-Polach. Jurors also watched blurry but dramatic surveillance footage from the nearby Yazaki warehouse.
Mayor’s witnesses included his grandson, as well as two lifelong friends who testified that he and Dunnavant-Polach were in love, not prone to arguments and planning to get married March 31.
Mayor stated that he worked as a forklift driver at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis, owned his own home and property, operated a towing business, regularly provided shelter to homeless people and otherwise helped them get back on their feet.
