Texas Home Remodeler Gets Life for Using Saw, Vat of Chemicals to Get Rid of Girlfriend He Killed

A Tarrant County jury on Tuesday found a man guilty of murdering a woman and dissolving her dismembered body in a barrel full of chemicals, officials said.Kevin Wayne Powell, 50, received an automatic sentence of life in prison after the capital murder conviction, KXAS-TV (Channel 5) reported.Powell's murder charge stemmed from the 2015 killing of Kasey Rae Nutter, 28. Nutter was Powell's girlfriend, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. She told police that Powell had assaulted and tried to kill her in November 2015, a month before the murder.A prosecutor told the jury Powell killed Nutter in retaliation for the charges against him from the November assault, the Star-Telegram reported.The defense argued that Nutter was not dead, pointing to the fact that authorities never found her body. Prosecutors said all evidence pointed to the account Powell told a relative being true: that the self-employed home remodeler had killed Nutter, chopped her body into small pieces with a table saw and dissolved her in a barrel of chemicals. Powell was indicted on the capital murder charge in October 2016. Jurors took two hours to return a guilty verdict after the weeklong trial that began on May 14.Powell is currently in custody at the Tarrant County jail.  Continue reading...