My father would later recount in Vanity Fair how the judge now rejected the argument that Sweeney had acted in the heat of passion. “I will state on the record that I believe this is a murder. I believe that Sweeney is a murderer and not a manslaughterer…. This is a killing with malice. This man held on to this young, vulnerable, beautiful, warm human being that had everything to live for, with his hands. He had to have known that as she was flailing to get oxygen, that the process of death was displacing the process of life.”
