GUILTY PA - Margaret 'Peggy' Kriek, 52, brutally murdered, Connellsville, 22 June 2013

For the family of Peggy Sue Kriek, the details surrounding her brutal murder are difficult to comprehend and even harder to talk about...

State Police say the 52-year-old was sexually assaulted, badly beaten, and strangled by Craig Rugg and Paul Bannasch. Both are 24 years old and both have criminal backgrounds.

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Witness Hilary Emerick, 22, identified the men and testified that she saw them with Margaret Kriek at Sidewinder's bar on June 21, and watched all three walk outside into the dark, shortly before Kriek was killed...

Rugg said he initially punched Kriek because she wouldn't have sex with him. "Her mouth had a little bit of blood over it from the smack and I believe right around her eye area where I had punched her was bleeding a little bit," Rugg said in the recording.

Rugg told police they continued the assault because they were scared, but he didn't offer a motive for killing her. "We really had no purpose. We just got it out of frustration and everything. Us being scared, that's what it led to us doing," Rugg said. He added the only reason he stopped kicking Kriek was because his leg started to hurt.

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Prosecutors are urging a judge to allow them to present evidence that a woman, whose body was recovered in the Youghiogheny River last year, was kidnapped and tortured prior to her death...

Rugg’s attorneys want prosecutors barred from seeking the death penalty because they cannot prove Kriek was kidnapped or tortured.

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The sheer number of wounds a Connellsville woman suffered when she was strangled to death is enough for prosecutors to argue she was tortured, according to a judge's ruling...

To justify the death penalty under state law, jurors must find that at least one “aggravating circumstance” existed at the time of a homicide. One of those circumstances is torture, which Heneks will try to prove at the men's trials...

Wagner said the autopsy showed Kriek suffered numerous injuries, including a neck-bone fracture, blunt-force trauma, fractured ribs, a broken nose, a perforated lung, and multiple bruises and abrasions.

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A Connellsville man was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for pleading guilty to first-degree homicide and numerous additional charges in a woman's brutal killing in 2013...

Rugg's guilty plea included charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, unlawful restraint, abuse of a corpse, kidnapping and conspiracy for each charge.

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A Uniontown man was sentenced to 29 1/2 to 67 years in prison Tuesday for his role in the 2013 murder of a 52-year-old woman in Connellsville whose body was dumped in the Youghiogheny River.

Paul Jerome Bannasch pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, unlawful restraint, abuse of a corpse, conspiracy and kidnapping before Fayette County Court of Common Pleas Judge John Wagner, in exchange for sex charges against him being dropped and a death-penalty-eligible homicide trial being averted.

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