A Michigan man will spend the rest of his “natural life” in prison for strangling his ex-girlfriend to death and keeping her rotting, partially-dismembered corpse his basement for seven months.
A Macomb County judge sentenced Matthew Lewinski, 42, to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Tuesday for the murder of his girlfriend, 52-year-old Courtney “Jerri” Winter, according to various news outlets.
A jury found him guilty of first-degree premeditated murder, disinterment and mutilation of a dead body, and concealing the death of an individual in May, after deliberating for several hours over two days on the 2020 homicide.
Prosecutors argued Lewinski strangled his ex-girlfriend at his home, initially left her body in the bathtub, and then took it to the basement and periodically removed “portions of the victim’s remains in an effort to conceal and dispose of the body.”
However, Lewinski was hospitalized in July 2021 after neighbors reported seeing him “wandering” his condo complex “only clothed in his underwear, mumbling incoherently,” according to a summary of the case in an appeals court document.
When his sister went to his home she discovered Winter’s body wrapped in a tarp in the basement.
According to a report in the Macomb Daily:
Lewinski killed Winters in the living room of his home at Crosswinds Condominiums off Hayes Road near 17 Mile Road in December 2020 when she unexpectedly visited him about a month after they broke up and after she informed him she had an abortion.
When Lewinski went to the kitchen to make tea for her, she undressed and was sitting naked in a Lazy Boy-style chair when a verbal dispute escalated into exchanged slaps and Winters biting him, he stated. Lewinski said he choked her with one hand. He claimed in his hospital-bed confession she “egged” him on.
His confession was initially tossed by the trial court judge over Miranda rights issues but was reinstated by the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Michigan holds the criminal-justice distinction of being the first English-speaking government in the world to outlaw the death penalty in 1846. Instead, courts impose the no-parole sentence for premeditated murder, a sentence convicts commonly call “natural life.”
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel formerly covered many Michigan crimes stories as a writer for the Detroit News and Detroit Monthly Magazine. He is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.