Hagy pleads no contest, sentenced to life

Hagy Jr/Photograph Eric Brady

William R. Hagy Jr., convicted of first-degree murder for strangling a Roanoke woman in 1984, pleaded no contest today to the 1985 murder of another woman in her Old Southwest home and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hagy, 49, was sentenced to two concurrent life terms by Roanoke Circuit Judge William Broadhurst. Under a plea agreement, the prosecution dropped the charge in the Audrey West (33) rape-murder. Prosecutors also dropped charges that he abducted and raped a teenager in 1984, resolving all the charges against him.

A no contest plea means that the defendant doesn’t dispute the charges and accepts that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict him. The plea allows the defendant to avoid admitting he committed the crimes, but the conviction and sentence is exactly the same as pleading guilty.

Hagy said he wants to spend the rest of his life at the state’s supermax Red Onion prison, where he’s been imprisoned a quarter-century for raping and sodomizing a 14-year-old girl. “I’m not the same person I was before my incarceration,” he said in court today. “I’m tired of fighting. I want to go back to the Red Onion as soon as possible. Put me back in the cell there.” Read more here.