A 35-year-old father found to be sane when he
killed his three young daughters last July was sentenced to three life sentences
without the possibility of parole Monday.
St. Croix County Judge Howard
Cameron said the lives of sisters Amara,11, Sophie, 8, and Cecilia, 5, were each
so important that Aaron Schaffhausen had to serve each sentence
consecutively.
"Each child has to be recognized
as an individual girl," Cameron said. "To make it concurrent would diminish what
happened to those young girls."
Schaffhausen and his wife Jessica
had recently divorced when he came to spend the day with his daughters last
year.
According to the criminal
complaint, Jessica -- who was not home at the time -- told police that two hours
after Schaffhausen went to see the girls, he called her and said, "You can come
home now because I killed the kids."
Jessica, who was in court Monday,
was quiet throughout the proceedings. But her sister, Mary Elizabeth Stotz,
called Schaffhausen an "evil coward" who "should rot in hell" during the victim
impact statements.
"Aaron Schaffhausen, the man who
helped genetically make those girls and shape them ... Aaron became the
darkness, the boogeyman, and the monster under the bed," Stotz said. "He was so
evil that he took their unconditional love for him and used their love to lure
them close enough so he could kill them. Their last memory is what an evil
killer their dad was."
Stotz also expressed fear that if
Schaffhausen was allowed to be released on parole, he would get revenge on her
family.
Schaffhausen sat through the
proceedings with no visible emotion, avoiding eye contact and almost inaudibly
saying "no" when the judge asked him if he had anything to say.
His attorney, John Kucinski,
emphasized that his client suffered from a "rare mental illness" who committed a
"rare catathymic homicide."
"Nobody wins in this case,"
Kucinski said. "Both families suffer, Jessica suffers, uncles, aunts.
"You can say, 'Three young girls
are dead, we've lost their lives, he did it because he hated Jessica, let's get
our revenge.' Or you can try to actually take a look at mental illness and
prevent things in the future," Kucinski said.
A large photograph of the
sisters stood by the judge, who finished his sentencing by saying, "People in
general, there is sometimes an evil, and there is goodness," Cameron said.
The girls' aunt remembered them
as "amazing people."
