Idaho death row inmate dies in prison
Published at
BOISE — A death row inmate in Idaho has died.
According to a news release from the Idaho Department of Correction, Erick Hall, 54, died Monday, around 10 p.m., of natural causes at a local hospital. His exact cause of death is unclear.
Hall was being housed on death row at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution and was serving a death sentence for two first-degree murder convictions in Ada County.
On death row since October 2004, Hall was convicted of raping and killing Lynn Henneman and Cheryl Ann Hanlon.
He was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Henneman, who died in 2000, and then was charged with the murder of Hanlon, who died in 2003, and he was sentenced to death again.
Hall’s defense attorneys argued throughout the 2003 trial that Hall and Hanlon had “rough, consensual sex” and that Hanlon’s death was an accident, according to The Spokesman-Review.
RELATED | Who is on death row in Idaho?
Hanlon’s body was eventually found by a teenager, who was walking a dog along a trail in the Boise foothills on March 1, 2003. The prosecution told the jury she had been beaten so severely that she looked like the victim of a traffic accident.
At the time, detectives were still looking for the person who killed Henneman three years earlier. Similarities between the cases included that both women had been strangled with something other than a pair of hands, and both had been severely beaten and raped.