Fox News Flash top headlines for Dec. 15
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A 33-year-old Nebraska man on death row for killing four people within 10 days in 2013 has at least one friend still in his corner: a 46-year-old Texas woman who reportedly has confirmed that she and the killer plan to marry.
But Dawn Arguello of Lubbock isn’t happy that Nikko Jenkins – who authorities say committed the murders within three weeks of being released from prison on a robbery and assault conviction – recently had her name tattooed on his face.
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“I was very (ticked) off that he did that,” Arguello told the Omaha World-Herald. “He doesn’t need to be self-mutilating like that.”
Arguello added she isn’t happy about the way her husband-to-be has been portrayed in the local press.
“If you believe the media,” she said, “he’s the most hated man in Nebraska besides Charles Starkweather.”
Nikko Jenkins has been linked to four murders committed within 10 days in 2013, authorities say.
The reference was to the 1950s serial killer of 11 people whose story inspired several movies, including “Badlands” in 1973 and “Natural Born Killers” in 1994. After his conviction in one of the murders, Starkweather was executed in Nebraska in 1959 at age 20.
Jenkins is not like Starkweather at all, she said.
“He’s not what the media has made him out to be,” she told the World-Herald. “He’s an enigma. He has feelings. He’s very sensitive.
"He’s not what the media has made him out to be. He’s an enigma. He has feelings. He’s very sensitive."
“He’s very intelligent,” she added, “and, yes, he’s very manipulating.”
According to authorities, Jenkins received help from family members in executing the four murders to which he’s been linked. They say he convinced his sister and a female cousin to lure two men with a promise of sex acts in an Omaha park, then Jenkins himself appeared and suddenly blasted the two men in their heads with a shotgun.
A few days later, Jenkins, his sister and another man went to a neighborhood in Omaha, supposedly to commit a robbery. Instead, Jenkins killed the man, authorities said.
Then a few days after that, Jenkins pulled a mother of three out of her SUV and killed her, according to authorities.
Jenkins' death sentence, issued in 2017, was Nebraska's first since the state's voters reinstated capital punishment in a November 2016 vote.
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In 2014, however, the Nebraska Legislature ordered a special investigation into Jenkins’ case because some critics noted that, while in prison prior to the murders, Jenkins had spent more than half of his sentence in solitary confinement. The critics claimed the isolation may have had an effect on his mental health, possibly resulting in the killing spree so soon after he was released.
Arguello met Jenkins while doing volunteer work for a nonprofit organization that advocates for death-row inmates and their families. She also has a criminal record of her own, with convictions for misdemeanor domestic violence, felony child abuse and felony credit card abuse, the World-Herald reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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