PANAMA CITY — A Panama City Beach man who gunned down his former landlord on church property accepted a plea deal Thursday to 25 years in prison after learning his taped confession would be played for jurors during his forthcoming trial.
Christopher Ray Hyler, 50, accepted the plea deal, reducing the first-degree murder charges he faced after being arrested in May 2013. Hyler was scheduled for trial next week for the shooting death of 43-year-old Robert S. Ellison in August 2010 on a Panama City Beach church construction site. However, after a circuit court judge’s decision to allow prospective jurors to view a taped confession made at the time of his arrest, Hyler pleaded no contest Thursday to charges of second-degree murder.
Judge Brantley Clark then sentenced Hyler to 25 years in prison.
Ellison’s death lingered without an arrest for nearly three years before, in May 2013, authorities elicited a confession from Hyler during a taped interrogation.
Hyler was brought in after investigators began to look at previous tenants of properties owned by Ellison. After about an hour and a half of questioning, Hyler told investigators he’d gone to the First Baptist Church in Panama City Beach construction site, at 204 Cobb Road, in search of work when Ellison aggressively approached him. Hyler pulled the 9mm Luger — which he’d brought to ask for a job — and fired in self-defense, he told investigators.
The investigators then presented Hyler with the scenario that he confronted an abusive husband and pulled the gun out of self-defense. Hyler continued from there.
“He told me that I needed to mind my business and came out from behind the desk. … He looked pissed,” Hyler told investigators. “I pulled (the 9mm) in regards to thinking he’d back up. He got his hand on it once.”
At about 9 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2010, emergency crews discovered Ellison face down in the office with five gunshot wounds throughout his body.
Although no one distinctly saw Hyler leave the office, cellphone records would have been coupled with Hyler’s confession, court documents indicate.
Hyler attempted to have the video suppressed as the date of his trial neared. His legal counsel argued that after hours of intense questioning, he simply agreed to the facts presented by interrogators.
Defense attorney Henry Sims said Hyler’s intoxication, coupled with a reasonable self-defense scenario presented by law enforcement to “escape” the pressure being asserted on him, amounted to coercion.
Hyler “had used methamphetamine heavily prior to his arrest by law enforcement and was still under the influence of the drug during the interrogation,” Sims wrote in his motion to the court. Hyler’s “statement was a result of police coercion as evidenced by the video of the interrogation process.”
However, Clark denied the motion to suppress the murder confession, because it appeared Hyler voluntarily gave his confession, according to the ruling.
Though Hyler was not the only suspect on the authorities’ radar, he was the only person arrested and charged with the murder. An agreement to testify against anyone else who might be charged in the future was not part of Hyler’s plea deal.