TACOMA, Wash. — Julia Wheeler is the only person who survived a violent rampage by Aaron Livingston last May when he used an ax to murder a man he accused of having an affair with Wheeler. He also beat Wheeler’s 60-year-old aunt to death with a dumbbell.
Livingston, 38, pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated first degree murder in Pierce County Superior Court Thursday. He also admitted to one count of attempted murder for trying to kill Wheeler. He choked her until she was unconscious, but left her alive.
“I’d like to think he stopped, but in that moment of rage who knows?”
Livingston had been arrested shortly before the murders on suspicion of assaulting Wheeler and Geissler but was released because there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him. Wheeler said she never expected this sort of violence from the man she once loved.
“There was never a point in our relationship where he’d ever laid a hand on me in the past.”
Livingston apologized in court, saying that pleading guilty was the only way he knew to show his remorse. “My actions, they were cowardly, selfish and as far as I’m concerned, unforgivable,” Livingston said.
Judge Bryan Chushcoff sentenced Livingston to life in prison without the possibility of parole or release. Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney Mark Lindquist had announced in September that his office would not seek the death penalty in the case.
KIRO
