Nephew’s Christmas revelation leads to cold-case killer’s prison sentence

EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. – A convicted killer who’d escaped his crime for more than a decade learned he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

It began as a missing person case in 2013, when Patrenia Butler-Turner disappeared. Nine years later, the killer’s nephew walked into the Pontoon Beach Police Department to report he’d witnessed the woman’s murder.

Nathan Beyer said it had been eating at his conscience until he was finally motivated by a touching Christmas commercial to tell police he watched his uncle strangle a woman. He then led police to Butler-Turner’s skeletal remains in a wooded area behind a storage center in Madison County.

Roger Dale Sutton, 57, argued that she died from a drug overdose and that he’d hidden her body out of fear. A jury didn’t buy it. The nephew’s testimony was key.

“I really appreciate him for speaking up, but I also feel on the other and that I wish I would have seen her, you know, in the casket,” Carmillya Butler, Butler-Turner’s daughter, said. “He should have said something a little earlier.”

At sentencing Thursday, Madison County Assistant Prosecutor Lauren Maricle said Butler Turner was killed over something trivial.

“He killed her for her jewelry, with his bare hands, for the profit from the jewelry and just for the sport of it,” she said.

Defendant Sutton quietly apologized for hiding the victim’s body but maintained his innocence for murder. The judge looked at the defendant and told him, “You had 10 years to tell police about the body. You had 10 ten years to put the family to rest. The victim’s body would still be buried in the woods if your nephew hadn’t come to police.”

Sutton was then remanded to prison, where the judge sentenced him to 35 years.

“After witnessing all that, I really feel he should have gotten more time; the death penalty instead of just 35, cause I’m still without a mother and I still feel like this wasn’t right,” Carmillya Butler said.

The victim’s former boyfriend, James Gibson, agreed.

“The circumstances was aggravating, and he should’ve gotten significantly more time than he did,” he said.

“Either way, he’s still going to rot in there,” Carmillya Butler said, adding that she carries her mother with her every day – on her purse.

“Within my spirit; everywhere I walk,” she said. “You never can get over something like that. That’s something I’ll never get over.”