Man receives 10-year term in '82 murder of teenager

In sentencing John Nicholas Athan — convicted of killing a 13-year-old Magnolia girl more than two decades ago — the judge said she was trying to take into account both his age at the time of the murder and the horror of the crime.

King County Superior Court Judge Sharon Armstrong said the 10-year minimum sentence she imposed was somewhere between what Athan would have gotten had he been convicted as a juvenile in 1982 and what the state's sentencing guidelines now recommend.

"This takes into account that he was 14 at the time, but also harmonizes with what's now required and appropriate," Armstrong said.

She said that had Athan been convicted of the crime soon after it occurred, he likely would have been given a sentence of three to seven years. Had he been convicted of the crime as an adult under current sentencing guidelines, he would have faced a 10- to 20-year sentence.

Athan, now 37, was convicted in January of second-degree murder in the strangulation of Kristen Sumstad, whose half-naked body was found in a cardboard box behind a Magnolia TV-repair store.

Athan, who police said was a long-standing suspect in the case, was linked to the decades-old crime when cold-case detectives tricked him into giving a DNA sample by having him lick an envelope in a ruse that promised him a piece of a class-action lawsuit.

Athan's lawyer, who has consistently argued that the DNA evidence from Athan was obtained illegally by detectives posing as lawyers, is appealing the case.