KANSAS CITY, Kan. — A KCK man will spend the next 57 years in prison for murdering a woman and trying to kill her roommate last year.
A Wyandotte County judge sentenced Scottie Lindsay, 31, this past Friday after a jury found him guilty of murdering 37-year-old Melinda Fuller Bates and attempting to kill her roommate, Julius Lamont Boyd.
Bates’ mother, Janie Harris, said it was heart-wrenching to face her daughter’s killer inside the courtroom, but she can sleep better at night knowing he’s now behind bars for a very long time.
“When he in that split second decided to kill my daughter,” Harris said, “and try to take another person`s life, he was in turn taking his own life.”
Harris said Bates was a proud mother of three children, which makes her murder all that more tragic.
“Her kids are so important to her,” Harris said. “She was very, very close to her kids.”
She said the worst part is that Bates will miss her children’s milestones, like graduating high school, getting married and one day having kids of their own.
As for the specifics of the crime, prosecutors said Lindsay shot and killed Bates and then tried to kill her Boyd at the duo’s KCK apartment during an argument.
“There was some sort of a misunderstanding and there were some drugs involved, partying and that kind of stuff going on,” Harris explained.
She said Lindsay was new to Bates’ circle and she’s still not sure why he snapped, but she does know the pain he’s caused her family.
“It’s heart-wrenching,” she said. “It just drags you down and it`s hard to function, to keep going, to keep your mind on what you need to be doing, be strong for everybody else in the family.”
Harris said her family is finally finding a sense of closure in his sentencing – knowing he will spend the next 57 years in prison and every day be forced to think about what he did.
“Anyone that is in that state of mind,” she said, “that they`re mad, or upset and they have a gun and they`re thinking about this, think twice because you`re not going to get away with it.”
A jury also found Lindsay guilty of attempted murder and criminal possession of a firearm in this case. He’d already served nearly a decade in a Kansas correctional facilities for voluntary manslaughter and had only been free for about a year before he decided to kill Bates.
If you want to help Bates’ children save up to one day go to college, her family has set up the Melinda Fuller Bates Memorial Fund. You can contribute at any US Bank simply by mentioned her fund’s name.
