A Stillwater man who admitted strangling his girlfriend at her St. Paul home last summer, staging the scene to look like a drug overdose and then raping a houseguest, was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison.
Ramsey County District Judge Timothy Mulrooney sentenced Ivan Dan Walker to 30 years for sexually assaulting the underage houseguest and a little more than 19 years for the slaying, according to the terms of a plea agreement. The two sentences will be served concurrently.
Earlier this year, Walker, 34, pleaded guilty to the second-degree unintentional murder of Shana Branch, 39, and the first-degree criminal sexual assault of a teenage house guest who was sleeping on Branch's couch the night of the killing in July 2018.
Branch's sons, ages 20 and 7, were in the East Side home at the time of the attack, and one of them called 911.
