From the Seattle Times
EVERETT, Wash. — Not long after he arrived at the Monroe prison complex nearly a decade ago, Byron Scherf was the focus of state corrections department warnings that today read like terrible prophecy.
The convicted rapist, now charged with the Jan. 29 strangling of Monroe corrections officer Jayme Biendl, was then about four years into serving a life sentence without possibility of release. He was being closely watched after threatening to kill himself over the conditions of his confinement.
“Staff are concerned that his next victim could be a staff person,” one corrections worker wrote June 1, 2001, in the running log state prison officials have kept on Scherf’s behavior since the mid-1990s.
Another log entry from that period probed Scherf’s mental problems, and the risk he appeared to pose behind bars.
Read more at SeattleTimes.com.