Gaege Bethune
JACKSON CO., Ill. - A guilty verdict was rendered at about 10:30 p.m. last night in the case of the young man from Saline County charged with killing SIU-C student Pravin Varughese.
The jury trial, which Gaege Bethune, 23, of Raleigh in Saline County, insisted on following his arrest last summer, lasted well over a week at the courthouse in Murphysboro, Jackson County.
You can read all the material about Bethune at this link here, and about the February 2014 murder of Pravin Varughese here.
Bethune is reported to have been weeping when the verdict was read; it was his assertion that Varughese, who unlike Bethune has no criminal history, had attacked him in order to steal money from him because Varughese was a petty thug. That was among the many lies Bethune was caught in, some of which he admitted to on the stand.
Things also were muddied when the defense tried to portray the initial coroner's report as factual when it was not, stating that the report showed Varughese's body showed "no bodily harm." That, of course, was refuted by the family, who went to great lengths to prove that Pravin had indeed been beaten badly before his body being left in a wooded area outside of Carbondale, on one of the coldest nights of 2014.
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