The inmate behind a reported plot to murder an assistant district attorney has been sentenced to a hefty prison term once again for threatening to kill people who testified against him in 1989.
Ryan Richard, 56, was originally arrested in 1989 in Berks County for murdering his wife, for which he was later convicted. Prosecutors note that he took the lead role in a community theatre production of a murder-mystery play leading up to his real-life murder.
After being sentenced to seven to 20 years behind bars, Richard was transferred to Centre County to serve his term. According to a news release from the Centre County District Attorney’s office, Richard was briefly paroled but was arrested again after hitting a police officer with his car.
On Thursday, Richard was sentenced to serve seven to 17 years in a state prison for a different series of crimes. During his time at the State Correctional Institute at Rockview in Bellefonte, Richard sent a series of detailed letters to witnesses from his 1989 murder trial, threatening to dismember, mutilate and murder them.
The DA’s office says Richard sent a list of his intended victims to his mother, and indicated that he would act on it when released from prison. The list included information about the current locations of the former witnesses, even though prosecutors say Richard should have had no way of knowing their addresses after his years in prison.
The letters reportedly detailed plans to break into random homes, steal supplies and kill the residents as part of larger plan to disappear into Canada. Richard also placed an unsupervised phone call to his daughter during the course of the trial, threatening to murder her and his own brother.
Richard was found guilty of felony intimidation of a witness and two counts of making terroristic threats.
Richard was also involved in a reported plot to murder an assistant district attorney. This plot is connected to the now-disproved forgery allegations against Centre County District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller.
According to an affidavit filed by Bellefonte police to obtain a search warrant for Parks Miller’s office in January, she allegedly forged a judge’s signature on a fake bail order as part of a plan to investigate Richard’s plot to murder an unnamed ADA. Parks Miller has since been cleared of these allegations by an investigating grand jury.
The affidavit states that Richards approached another inmate, Robert Albro, in 2013 seeking help in murdering an ADA.
Albro brought the plot to the attention of law enforcement officials, who reportedly moved him to another facility as part of an undercover investigation into the murder plot. The court order that Stacy Parks Miller was alleged to have forged appeared to lower Albro’s bail in order to make it look like he had made bail instead of being transferred.
Parks Miller and her attorney Bruce Castor have publicly criticized the Bellefonte police for making this information available to the public, saying it compromised the integrity of the undercover investigation and put the unnamed ADA’s life in danger.
In March, former Centre County Assistant District Attorney Nathan Boob took a job elsewhere in Pennsylvania. According to his letter of resignation, Boob had been the target of death threats made by a convicted murder he helped prosecute.
Boob also said that sensitive information had been made public that unnecessarily endangered his life and his family’s lives.
