Man Gets 9 Years for Plot to Kill Ex-Wife

A former Los Angeles County fire captain was sentenced Friday to nine years in state prison for soliciting a man to kill his ex-wife.

Gary Lee Sizemore, 45, was sentenced in Pasadena Superior Court on one count of soliciting murder by hiring his cousin to kill Judith Sizemore.

In court, a bespectacled Sizemore, who wore a blue business suit, asked the court for leniency, saying, “I’m sorry for everything that’s taken place.”

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Rhonda Saunders disagreed. She accused him of plotting more than once to kill his one-time wife of 17 years. He also schemed to bomb her workplace, expressed no concern for others who might be caught in the blast, and once “choked [her] so hard that the blood vessels in her eyes burst,” Saunders said.

“He is cold, has no feeling and has shown no remorse,” Saunders told Superior Court Judge Joseph F. De Vanon before he issued the sentence.

The jury deadlocked on a second murder solicitation count involving the bomb plot, but Saunders said she will not retry it because, even if he were convicted, he would not receive much more prison time.

Sizemore has been held on $2-million bail since he was arrested in April 1999 for attempting to hire his cousin, Mark Tatum of Glendora, for $30,000 to kill his ex-wife. Tatum instead went to authorities.

The bombing charges were added to the case later, after an investigation also showed that he allegedly tried to hire his former girlfriend, Alison Oliver, to plant a bomb at Judith Sizemore’s workplace.

The former firefighter, who was a captain at a Pasadena fire station, was also accused of setting a fire under his estranged wife’s bed before a 1997 court date in a lawsuit she had filed against him. He was never arrested or charged with the incident.

Before handing down the maximum sentence, De Vanon asserted that Sizemore will be punished only for the crime he was convicted of but concluded: “I cannot think of anybody who holds a higher trust of the citizenry than a fireman.” He added that Sizemore’s actions “fly in the face of that trust.”