Something straight out of a movie right here:
Ricky Wassenaar, pictured here,
... was in a Tuscon, Arizona, prison serving 16 life sentences for a 2004 incident where he and a few fellow inmates at another Arizona prison took two guards hostage for 15 days.
It's still the longest prison standoff in American history.
Wassenaar allegedly used a kitchen guard's uniform to trick another guard into letting him into a prison watchtower.
He obtained the uniform by overpowering an officer with a handmade weapon.
Now, Wassenaar is in it again, and he's the only suspect in the murder of three fellow inmates — Saul Alvarez, Thorne Harnage, and Donald Lashley — at Arizona State Prison Complex Tucson.
Alvarez was behind bars for a Maricopa County murder, Harnage was convicted in Pima County of sexual conduct with a minor and Lashley was serving a sentence for child molestation in Pima County.
There's already a docuseries on the 15-day standoff, and now Ricky Wassenaar did this.
Yes, the story just got wilder. If you didn't hear,
Ricky Wassenaar called Donna Leone Hamm, the Director of Middleground Prison Reform, in November of 2024 after he says he strangled his cellmate, 81-year-old Joseph Desisto, to death in a Tucson state prison. He asked her to intervene before he did it again.
Hamm says, "He seemed to want to kill any person who would be put in a cell with him." She also sent "email after email" this winter, warning the director of the prison Wassenaar was held at that he would strike again. However, they said they investigated and found that he wasn't the killer in the aforementioned strangling.
Needless to say, they might want to reconsider that investigation.
Wassenaar is now the only suspect - I mean, come on! - in the murder of these three inmates.
A friendly reminder that yes, Arizona does offer the death penalty.
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