A Murderer's Deadly Deal

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By Newsweek Editors

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Death-row prisoners often pursue every legal strategy to avoid their date with the executioner. Larry Eyler, a convicted killer in Illinois, is trying one that may be unprecedented. In exchange for life without parole, his lawyer says he will admit to committing or knowing about the sexual torture and slaying of as many as 20 young men in Illinois and Indiana during the early 1980s. The 37-year-old Eyler would make the grotesque admission to get himself off death row for a 1984 murder. He says someone else killed a Chicago teenager named Danny Bridges.

Law-enforcement officials say Eyler is just trying to escape execution. They also fear that a deal would effectively reward a death-row inmate for committing multiple murders. To improve his credibility - and avoid a second death sentence - Eyler pleaded guilty last month to the 1982 killing of Steven Agan, a 23-year-old car-wash worker from Terre Haute, Ind. He also named an accomplice: 52-year-old Robert Little, a former professor at Indiana State University. Eyler claims Little exerted a Manson-like influence, pushing him to find victims for bondage and murder. (Little will stand trial April 2 in the Agan case.) Eyler is giving the state until the end of January to accept his offer or he'll take his secrets "to the grave." That puts the state in a strange predicament: to let a multiple murderer escape the death penalty - or let 20 alleged homicides go completely unpunished.

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