Jury Orders Death for Killer of Couple

A jury in Medford unanimously sentenced a 29-year-old failed businessman to die by injection for the killings of a lesbian couple in a botched robbery in December 1995. Robert Acremant was a former trucking company efficiency expert looking for money to win back a stripper who had spurned him. He pleaded guilty to killing Roxanne Ellis, 53, and Michelle Abdill, 42, whom he lured to an apartment where he tried to force them to write him $50,000 in checks from their property management business. When they refused, he bound and gagged them with duct tape and forced them to lie in the back of a pickup truck. Each was shot.