British man confesses to stabbing Alabama fiancée’s father, burying him in concrete, documents state
A British man who confessed to killing and burying the father of his fiancée in a concrete-filled barrel in DeKalb County four years ago gave a detailed confession of the crime, according to court documents.
Marcus Gordon “Marky” Ricketts, 22, pleaded guilty to murder charges and received a 20-year prison sentence on Sept. 16, according to court records.
Inside the drum was the body of William Scott Goldin, 59, of Valley Head, who died with as many as 10 stab wounds, according to the medical examiner.
According to court documents, Ricketts wrote out a confession after a July 4, 2018 incident, in which he called a jailer to his DeKalb County Jail cell and said he “was seeing Scotty everywhere.”
He then stuck out a sheaf of papers on which he had scrawled an apparent confession.
Ricketts, a native of Birmingham, England, met his fiancée, Goldin’s daughter, online and came to the U.S. in 2017 to marry her. He moved in with the man and his daughter in December of that year, he wrote.
The relationship between Ricketts and Scott Goldin was turbulent, Ricketts stated in a written confession, saying that Goldin threatened to kill him and “mail me back to my moma (sic) in a box.”
“Scotty was OK with me as long as things were going well or he was high,” he wrote, stating that Goldin smoked methamphetamine and marijuana.
“But other times he was abusive and threatening. He told me several times that he would kill me.”
He threatened to kill him, he stated, if the family’s wifi dropped, or the sound went out on the TV, or for other reasons.
Ricketts stated that he was frightened enough to begin sleeping with a knife.
One day in early May 2018, while his fiancée was at work, Ricketts stated, Goldin came into the bedroom and began hitting him with a baseball bat. Ricketts, in a rage, stabbed him several times, killing him.
According to his confession, he dumped Goldin into a plastic barrel and cleaned up the blood.
When his fiancée returned home, he told her what had happened.
According to him, she told him that her father had instructed her that, if she ever killed anyone, to “put the body in a drum and fill it with concrete.”
Documents show Ricketts was seen by a store clerk buying six bags of concrete mix in May at a Fort Payne store, followed by six bags the next.
After about a week-and-a-half, he said, he buried the barrel to “avoid any trouble,” he wrote, since he was in the country illegally. Authorities later discovered the barrel after Ricketts told them where it was.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he wrote, in a barely legible scrawl. “I was scared for my life.”