KENNY Richey will "burn in hell" according to the aunt of Cynthia Collins, the two-year-old victim of the 1986 fire.
Valerie Binkley broke down in tears as she made a dramatic and emotional statement at yesterday's court hearing.
"How do you go about putting into words what a two-year-old means?" she asked. Turning and pointing to Richey, who stood less than 10f
t away, Ms Binkley said: "I want you to know you've fooled nobody no more. Nobody. You will burn in hell."
The judge also heard a statement from Cynthia's father, Robert, read out in his absence. It said: "The situation surrounding the death of my little girl has haunted me for 21 years. I try not to think about how she died but it consumes my thoughts.
"The unthinkable reality of her choking, crawling, crying and her little lungs filling with smoke has been etched in my mind since her death."
During the statements, Richey sat looking straight at Shelley Price, a victim support officer, who was also in court.
Hope Collins, Cynthia's mother, has never spoken publicly of her decision to leave her daughter alone in their flat while she went to a party. In court, she maintained that she left Cynthia, who was just days away from her third birthday, in Richey's care.
After spending 45 days in jail, and receiving a two-year suspended sentence and three years' probation for involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment – the same charges for which Richey ended up serving 21 years as a result of the plea deal – she remarried.
Journalists who call at the ranch house Hope, 43, shares with her second husband, Thomas Sterling, and their two children in Ohio, have never been welcome, including a television crew once reportedly chased off with a shotgun.
Richey and neighbours Candy Barchet and Peggy Price were at a drunken party in Collins's flat at the ramshackle Old Farm Village apartment block they all shared. Richey had a fling with Ms Barchet, who lived in the flat below Collins.
Witnesses said he was consumed with jealousy when she left the party with a new boyfriend. According to Ms Price and others, he was shouting his intention to burn down the building. At the trial that resulted in Richey's death sentence, they argued that he started the fire in Collins's flat.
Richey was convicted, despite a fire department investigator saying a faulty electric fan might have caused the blaze and a claim that evidence was tainted.
Collins's own role in the tragedy also came under scrutiny. Christine Underwood, a former manager of the apartment block, reported her to social services for regularly leaving the baby unattended.
Ken Parsigian, Richey's lawyer, believes the toddler might have started the fire herself. "She was fascinated with matches," he said, claiming that firefighters had been called out twice to extinguish fires the girl had started.
Richey says Cynthia's mother hid her own negligence by blaming him and making sure her side of the story was the one accepted by police, prosecutors and local residents.
"They only ever got one side of the story," Richey said.
