Las Vegas pimp gets life in beating death

Tears streamed down the face of a Las Vegas pimp sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the vicious beating death of a 21-year-old woman.

“Your honor, I’m willing to do whatever you give me,” Marshall Greene told District Judge James Bixler.

Nearly four years ago, Greene scolded Alicia Lee as she begged for her life while he strangled her and whipped her for almost three hours with the edge of a folded black leather belt, according to prosecutor Richard Scow.

“He was about as cold as you can be,” Scow said.

The day before she was killed, Lee had called her mother, Dianna Williams, saying she was afraid to return home because she lost $300 while gambling with a friend and knew Greene would be upset.

Greene told detectives he had planned to move out of their apartment in the 3700 block of South Arville Street after the two quarreled over another woman, not money, though he claimed Lee actually lost $400, and she came home drunk.

He pulled out his belt because “he knew he was too strong to hit her with his hands. He knew his fists would do too much damage,” court records stated.

Lee suffered more than 65 external injuries across her body on October 8, 2010, and she was beaten so badly that her blood stopped running through her veins, causing her to feel thirsty and out of breath.

“Daddy, my uh, my, I can’t really breathe,” she pleaded with Greene, according to a report of his interview with detectives. “I need some water.”

Greene refused to help her. Instead, he continued to beat Lee “relentlessly and callously,” Scow said.

“You just want some attention,” Greene told her. “Now you want me to care about you? And you didn’t care about me all night. You stayed out all night.”

Lee suffered injuries from compression on her neck, indicating she had also been strangled, Scow said.

After he woke up hours later, Greene wrapped Lee’s body in a bed sheet, left the apartment and called police to report the death.

In court Tuesday, Williams tried to imagine if her daughter had survived the attack. Lee would have struggled living with the scars and explaining “how she allowed herself to be whipped like a slave,” her mother said.

Greene’s long criminal history began with a 1997 conviction for carrying a loaded firearm in a public place when he was 19, “already indicating a proclivity to violence, to breaking the law,” Scow said.

The pimp’s subsequent rap sheet includes five prior felony convictions, along with six misdemeanor convictions.

He was known to punish prostitutes with a belt when they “got out of line,” Scow said.

In a Reno hotel room in 2009, Greene hit a woman, threw her to the floor between a bed and a wall, smothered her with pillows, and started whipping her with a belt, the same way he whipped Lee. He broke the belt and the woman’s wrist, Scow said.

Defense attorney Bret Whipple, who called a former Nevada Department of Corrections warden and a former parole board commissioner to testify during the sentencing, argued for a chance at parole, saying Greene had accepted responsibility for “a horrible horrible horrible act.”

“He’s more than just the creature that Mr. Scow would like you to believe,” Whipple said. “It’s more than just an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. There’s more to Mr. Greene than that one incident.”

Shackled and wearing navy blue jail fatigues, Greene wept behind black and pink framed glasses as he apologized to Lee’s relatives and his own family, seated on either side of the gallery behind him.

“She was a beautiful human being, and it was my own immaturity [that] got me,” Greene said. “This never was supposed to happen, to nobody. Words ain’t even enough to really explain how much I regret this whole situation. I can’t even begin to articulate my words properly enough to even tell you all how sorry I am.”

Then Williams asked for the maximum sentence.

“We don’t get a happily ever after,” she told the judge. “I don’t see why he should get one either. I think he should actually die in prison. … A mad dog wouldn’t be as vicious as he was, and we’d put that mad dog down.”

In handing down the sentence, Bixler called Lee’s death “as brutal and torturous a beating as I’ve ever seen.”

While Greene avoided the death penalty in October when he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, on Tuesday the judge added a consecutive 18 to 20 years to Greene’s life sentence for the aggravating factor.

After the sentencing Williams said, “I feel like justice has been served. I do. I really do.”

Contact reporter David Ferrara at 702-380-1039 or dferrara@reviewjournal.com. Find him on Twitter: @randompoker.