Man gets life in Amherst murder

AMHERST — Before he was sentenced to life in prison Thursday, an admitted killer told Judge Michael Gamble that he had no remorse for murdering Michael Kent Jamerson.

“I have no regret for what happened to Mike Jamerson at all,” Robert Charles Gleason Jr. said. “I gave that man what needed to be done.”

Jamerson’s murder was unsolved for months. Gleason, 38, was arrested and charged with his slaying in December. He pleaded guilty in late April.

Gleason told the court Thursday that he killed Jamerson because he believed he was going to implicate him in a Campbell County methamphetamine-dealing ring under investigation by federal agents.

“He was going to take my life or take my freedom,” Gleason said. “It was him or me.”

He also refuted prosecution claims that he ambushed Jamerson.

“I gave him time to get right by God,” Gleason said. “I did it in front of him.”

A turkey hunter found the body in a wooded area along Virginia 130 on May 9, 2007, Commonwealth’s Attorney Stephanie Maddox said. Jamerson had been shot four times with a .40-caliber pistol.

Gleason later admitted to shooting Jamerson the day before his body was found.

Maddox earlier said Gleason and Jamerson were friends and had been riding around that day in western Amherst County looking for drugs.

“We see what he does to his friends,” Maddox said Thursday. “He murders them and leaves them on the side of the road like trash.”

During the hearing, Maddox showed the court a letter sent from Gleason to a man known only as “Big Jeff,” asking him to take two of the prosecution’s witnesses and his attorney, Greg Smith, “for a ride in the country.”

Maddox said Gleason also asked in the letter for the three to be killed by May 8, the anniversary of Jamerson’s slaying.

Smith objected to the prosecutor’s characterization of the letter and added that “Big Jeff” is now dead.

At the end of the hearing, Gleason told the court, “I know I’m going to die in the joint,” and said he was on his way to Miami on federal charges because he was implicated in nine murders there.

“Only in his head,” Maddox said after the hearing.

The federal investigation into the methamphetamine ring, responsible for bringing pounds of meth into the region, began after Jamerson’s son, Thomas Kent Jamerson, was pulled over in Gretna in 2006.

During that stop, federal prosecutors said, the younger Jamerson was found smuggling a pound of meth from Georgia.

Thomas Jamerson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to sell the drug and possession with intent to sell the drug in 2006. His sentencing in U.S. District Court in Lynchburg has been postponed repeatedly since then — three times openly by order of the court followed by five sealed motions from the government between May 2007 and March this year.

Four members of the ring were sentenced last month in federal court to between 10 months and 24 years in prison.