Death for killer of baby, grandmother

To the end, Raghunandan Yandamuri wouldn't say he did it.

A Montgomery County Court judge on Thursday sentenced Yandamuri to death for the 2012 murder of a baby and her grandmother during a failed kidnapping plot in King of Prussia.

When given a chance to speak, Yandamuri remained unemotional, defiant, and at odds with his court-appointed attorneys, just as he was during his trial.

He offered a rambling and sometimes nonsensical allocution that included an apology to the victims for their deaths, but not at his hands.

"I feel sorry for them," said the 28-year-old former software programmer, squeezing a folded piece of yellow legal paper between his fingers.

He apologized to the legal community as well for causing any inconvenience. And he tried to submit a lengthy post-conviction filing against his attorneys' advice.

When Judge Steven T. O'Neill admonished Yandamuri for "one of the most brutal, heinous, cold-blooded crimes that could ever be imagined," the defendant focused on his legal pad, jotting down notes.

O'Neill added 31 to 62 years in prison to Yandamuri's sentence for the crimes related to the murders, including kidnapping, burglary, and abuse of a corpse. "Each of these crimes," the judge said, "should be considered for their own brutality, born of a wicked heart."

The proceeding capped Yandamuri's journey through Pennsylvania's lower-court system. His case will get an automatic appeal to Pennsylvania's Supreme Court because it ended with a death-penalty sentence.

Yandamuri fatally stabbed Satyavathi Venna, 61, and caused her 10-month-old granddaughter, Saanvi Venna, to suffocate in a failed plot to ransom the baby to pay off his gambling debts. The child was later found dead in the apartment complex's trash-strewn sauna.

Yandamuri knew the baby's family through the local Indian community and the King of Prussia apartment complex in which they lived.

During the trial, Yandamuri chose to represent himself, although he consulted with court-appointed attorneys. Last month, a jury, after less than four hours of deliberation, recommended the death penalty.

After Thursday's hearing, one of his court-appointed attorneys, Henry Hilles, said the jury might have spared Yandamuri's life if he had conceded he committed the murders. "It made no sense to pursue a defense that he didn't do it," Hilles said.