Death penalty sought again for Tiffany Hall
By Nicholas J.C. Pistor
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
08/16/2007

Tiffany Hall is leaves the St. Clair County Courthouse after her apperance in court.
(Odell Mitchell Jr./P-D)

BELLEVILLE — Tiffany Hall, who is accused of killing an East St. Louis woman, her unborn fetus and her three children, was told Wednesday that she was facing the death penalty in a second case.

Just moments before walking into a St. Clair County courtroom, she was told by her attorneys the state would seek the death penalty in the killings of the children. She is accused of drugging them with cough syrup, drowning them and stuffing them into a clothes washer and dryer.

Robert Haida, the St. Clair County state's attorney, was already seeking the death penalty for the killing of the children's mother, Jimella Tunstall, and her unborn fetus. The two cases, for the moment, are being tried separately — although they could be consolidated before trial, which is expected next year.

Hall, 25, wearing a mustard yellow jumpsuit, spoke in a soft voice when Circuit Judge Milton Wharton asked if she understood the state's intent to seek death. Advertisement

"Yes," she said. Her face was expressionless; her body did not move.

Last September, prosecutors charge, Hall beat Tunstall over the head and used scissors to cut her fetus from her womb. She then left the mother of three to bleed to death in a bathtub, wrapped her in a shower curtain and dropped her in a weeded East St. Louis lot, authorities allege.

Several days later, prosecutors charge, she drowned Tunstall's three children in the same bathtub, one by one.

"It's time to take a bath," Hall called out to the children before the killings, according to police.

The slain children were DeMond Tunstall, 7; Ivan Tunstall-Collins, 2; and 10-month-old Jinella Tunstall. All three knew Hall. She was their baby sitter and their mother's best friend.

Hall was indicted by a grand jury in October on murder charges in the death of Jimella Tunstall and her fetus. She was indicted in April in the drowning deaths of the three children.

Prosecutors waited to charge Hall with the killing of the three children so they could build a stronger case.

In testimony at a coroner's inquest earlier this year, police said Hall had tried to claim Tunstall's dead fetus as her own. She even arranged a funeral service for the child — an event that lured her boyfriend home on leave from the Navy.

At that service, police say, she told her boyfriend that the baby was not theirs and that she had killed a woman and taken it.

The boyfriend then notified police, ushering in a string of grisly discoveries, eventually leading to the murder charges. Authorities have never suggested a possible motive in the killing of the children.

EXECUTIONS ON HOLD

In Illinois, executions continue to be on hold. Former Gov. George Ryan issued a freeze on the death penalty in 2000, and current Gov. Rod Blagojevich has continued it.

Prosecutors still can seek the penalty, and if the freeze is lifted, anyone sentenced to the death penalty could be put to death.

Haida said the last person sentenced to death in St. Clair County was Lorenzo Fayne, who was convicted of killing six children in and around East St. Louis from 1989 to 1993. His sentence was later commuted by Ryan to a life sentence, which he is serving at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Ill.

npistor@post-dispatch.com | 618-624-2577



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