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King George County prosecutor closes the case on murder-suicide Date published: 10/15/2009
By PAMELA GOULD Jerry Puckett wasn't terminally ill as his family believed when he blasted his way into his former girlfriend's Fairview Beach house, killed her, nearly killed her sister and killed himself, King George prosecutor Matt Britton said yesterday. An autopsy found no evidence macroscopically or microscopically that Puckett, 70, suffered from any form of cancer at the time of the Oct. 3 murder-suicide and arson, Britton said. Puckett's two adult children said two days after the killings that their father had previously been treated for a melanoma and that they understood from him that he was dying of kidney and liver cancer that doctors could not treat. "The autopsy report shows that is untrue," Britton said. Britton released the information from Puckett's autopsy yesterday during a more than 90-minute meeting with local media after closing the case. King George Sheriff's Detective Sgt. Monty Clift attended the meeting and also provided details from the investigation. Rita Lund, 59, met Puckett in 1992 and sometime afterward moved into his Fairview Beach home on Dauphin Landing. She also worked for his company, Puckett Brothers Construction. The pair separated Aug. 25, and she moved five blocks away into a house on Fifth Street that she and her husband owned and that had been occupied by her sister, 57-year-old Donna "Judy" Jewell Knight. After the separation, Britton said Puckett and Lund called the sheriff's office 22 times with various complaints. On Aug. 31, Lund called to report that she felt her life was in danger. The next day she sought and was granted a preliminary protective order barring Puckett from any contact with her directly or through a third party, or with Knight. At the time of his death, Puckett awaited a hearing on a charge that he had violated the order on all counts. Clift said that in the weeks after Lund moved out, she and Knight had done their best to fortify their house because they feared Puckett. They had gotten two-way radios to quickly contact family, if necessary. They had installed what Clift described as "heavy gauge barrel-bolt locks" to two of their doors and placed rods in the track of their sliding glass door. And they had armed themselves. "Within the last month, both Miss Lund and Miss Knight had been given handguns for personal protection," Clift said.
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