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Ex-Officer Admits to Killing Two Officers in '05

A former police officer facing the death penalty in the 2005 killings of his one-time fiancee and a co-worker she was dating pleaded guilty Wednesday to their murders and was sentenced to two concurrent life terms in prison.

The pleas from Eugene Victor Perry Jr., 35, spared him a death sentence and wrapped up the long-delayed case in the deaths of two Baltimore city police officers.

Perry, who worked as a state Department of General Services police officer, spent about a year at a maximum-security psychiatric facility in Jessup after a judge ruled in 2006 that he suffered from a mental disorder and was incompetent to stand trial.

Lawyers were scheduled to begin picking a jury Wednesday morning in what was to be a capital murder trial.

“I’m satisfied. He said he did it,” said Bernice Johnson, the mother of Leslie A. Holliday, who was once engaged to Perry.

Holliday, 34, and her co-worker, Adam Vazquez, 26, were shot to death Dec. 21, 2005, in the bedroom of his Pikesville townhouse. Both worked the midnight shift at the Baltimore Police Department’s Northwest District.

Defense attorney Warren A. Brown said that he and prosecutors worked out the plea agreement after his client had turned down an offer to avoid a capital murder trial by accepting a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, and then a second offer of two consecutive life sentences.

The two concurrent life terms allow the possibility of parole, although any release would have to be approved by the governor.

“It wasn’t going to get any better than that. There wasn’t any hope of winning, of getting an acquittal,” Brown said. “There was too much evidence in the case. It was too horrendous of a crime—two police officers killed in their beds. But he went from facing the death penalty to having some light at the end of the tunnel.”

Prosecutor S. Ann Brobst said the pleas offered the family the finality that a death penalty trial - with its years of appeals - rarely does.

“Guilty pleas are always beneficial,” she said. “This family has already waited almost 2½ years just to get to trial. These people have already been through so much.”

At Wednesday’s brief hearing, Perry apologized to Holliday’s parents, lawyers in the case said. Her father, Cyril A. Johnson, accepted the apology.

Holliday and Perry met when they were both working in Baltimore at the city’s central booking facility. They were engaged to be married but split up in the fall of 2005.

By then, Holliday, the mother of three children, was working as a city police officer in the Northwest District.

Perry became jealous of the romantic relationship between Holliday and her co-worker, Vazquez, according to a statement of facts offered Wednesday in support of Perry’s guilty pleas.

According to that account, Perry went twice to Vazquez’s Pikesville home “to observe” the couple and told a mutual friend that he could kill them both.

On Dec. 21, 2005, Perry drove a third time to the townhouse on M’Ladies Court. He punctured the tires of Holliday’s car and left a note that read, “knew you would do it again,” according to the statement of facts.

At noon, he knocked on the front door and asked to speak to Vazquez. But before the wife of Vazquez’s cousin - who answered the door and whose family was staying there at the time - could return to the door with an answer, Perry pushed his way in.

As he headed up the stairs to the bedroom he drew the .40-caliber Glock service weapon that he carried as an officer with the General Services Administration. The small police force is responsible for security at state facilities in Annapolis, Baltimore and Reisterstown.

Perry burst into the bedroom where Vazquez and Holliday were sleeping. As Vazquez reached for his gun on the nightstand, Perry shot him three times and Holliday five times, according to the statement of facts.

With the help of his brother, Perry later turned himself in at the Baltimore County Police Department’s Woodlawn precinct.

Although Perry was found incompetent to stand trial in July 2006, an evaluation revealed in January of last year that his competency had been restored and a judge scheduled the murder case for trial, court documents show.

Vazquez, a native of the Bronx, N.Y., was a 4½-year veteran of the city police force.

Holliday, a graduate of Joppatowne High School, was raising at her mother’s Joppa home a daughter and two sons from a marriage that ended in divorce.

“Life as I knew it had ended,” Bernice Johnson wrote of her only child’s death in a victim impact statement to Baltimore County Circuit Judge Robert N. Dugan. Since then, she wrote, Holliday’s former husband moved to North Carolina with the children.

Johnson added, “I feel helpless and very sad.”

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