Woodbury man sentenced to 35 years for killing Tartan High grad

HUDSON, WIS. - A Woodbury man accused in the shooting death of a Tartan High School graduate and leaving her body in Wisconsin pleaded guilty in St. Croix County Circuit Court on Monday to second-degree intentional homicide and will spend 35 years in prison.

Christopher S. Ledesma, 30, admitted to slaying 19-year-old Kelly Lynn Dahm, whose body was found in his car outside the St. Croix County Government Center in Hudson on Sept. 20.

Judge Eric Lundell sentenced Ledesma to 35 years in prison without the possibility of parole. At the end of his term he will be put on 25 years of extended supervision, which is intensive probation.

The Dahm family wanted a harsher penalty and said Ledesma will be released from prison when he is 65, which they said threatens other women.

"It's not what we expected, not what we wanted," said Kelly's father, Timothy Dahm, outside the courtroom after the sentencing. "We fear for the next person."

Ledesma has left a trail of trouble since 1996 when he stabbed three people at a campground in Somerset, Wis. He had served four years of a 6-year prison term and was on probation when he killed Dahm. In February he pleaded guilty in Washington County District Court to felony charges of unlawful possession of a firearm. His parole in Wisconsin was revoked June 25.

On Monday, the girl's friends sobbed in court while seven sheriff's deputies and Hudson police officers watched two families torn apart, only a narrow aisle dividing them. Timothy Dahm brought a large framed photograph of his daughter to show the court.

"I have to rely on memories and pictures," he told the judge. "Kelly's death has left me shattered. I try to think of what could have been, or what should have been. When I see a woman on the street with kids I try to imagine Kelly as a mother."

One of Kelly's friends, Krysta Howes, called Ledesma "a controlling manipulative animal" and said she was fighting to understand how he could kill someone he professed to love.

A troubled person

Ledesma sat quietly, shackled and staring at the front of the courtroom, while the victim statements were read. When the judge asked him if he wanted to speak on his behalf, he shook his head no.

"You are a troubled person and you deserve to be behind bars for a long time," Lundell told him. His sentence will run concurrently with other sentences recently imposed in connection with Dahm's murder.

Dahm, who lived in Maplewood, was a 2007 graduate of Tartan High School in Oakdale, where she had played varsity softball. Her parents told a Hudson police detective that she was trying to break off her relationship with Ledesma.

An autopsy showed she died of a gunshot to the left side of her head, according to court records. She also was shot two other times in the upper body.

"She is dead. I put three bullets in her head," Ledesma told his wife after the shooting, according to the criminal complaint.

Woodbury police arrested Ledesma after a disturbance outside his parents' home the night Dahm was killed.

Ledesma initially was charged with first-degree intentional homicide. But both County Attorney Eric Johnson and defense attorney John Kucinski told the judge that the reduced plea was the best outcome given difficulties with some of the evidence. Even before Ledesma murdered Dahm the record shows that he suffered from various mental disorders, Kucinski told the judge as some Dahm family members shook their heads in disbelief.

He also contended that the medical examiner couldn't accurately determine the time of death and said that the trajectory of bullets didn't match Dahm's body in the car.

"Life didn't work out for him the way he wanted," Dominic Ledesma, Christopher's brother, told the judge before the sentencing. "He is no longer a misguided youth. He is a man today and will hold himself responsible for what punishment he's about to receive."

Dominic in his statement apologized to the Dahm family for their loss.

Ledesma the defendant, clad in orange jail coveralls, quietly acknowledged that he accepted the plea agreement. He didn't offer an apology.

"Your actions have spoken," the judge told him.

Kevin Giles • 612-673-4432