MONROE — Over 70 people packed into a Green County courtroom Wednesday to watch the sentencing of a Janesville man convicted not once, but twice, of killing someone while driving.
The sentencing brought together the families of Nathan L. Leopold’s victims, killed 15 years apart.
Bailiffs had to bring in extra chairs to accommodate the victims’ families and friends who showed up, testified and supported each other throughout the nearly three-hour hearing. They passed around a box of tissues, hugged and reached out to hold each other’s hands.
A collective sigh of relief met Judge Thomas Vale’s announcement at the end that he would give 46-year-old Nathan L. Leopold the maximum prison sentence allowed under state law, 15 years.
“You will not be a young man when this sentence is over with,” Vale told Leopold, as the defendant stood before him shackled in green prison scrubs. The 15-year sentence will begin when Leopold completes his current prison sentence in 2022. Vale also ordered Leopold to serve an additional five years on extended supervision after he gets out of prison.
Leopold has a history of reckless and intoxicated driving going back over 20 years, with two people killed as a result, but the latest case stems from an accident near Juda at dusk on Oct. 20, 2017. He was driving home after having two beers in Monroe after work when he crossed the centerline of Wisconsin 11 and hit an oncoming minivan.
The minivan flipped and the driver, Dave Leck, 70, Juda, died at the scene. His granddaughter, Emily Withee, then 12, was his only passenger and managed to crawl out of the crashed vehicle with cuts to her arms and legs. A deputy at the scene noticed a strong smell of marijuana coming from Leopold’s vehicle, where synthetic cannabis was also found. His blood tested positive for delta-9-THC and carboxy-THC, two chemicals from marijuana.
Leopold’s blood-alcohol concentration tested at 0.02 percent, much less than the state threshold for intoxicated driving, but he was on probation and under court orders not to drive with any alcohol in his system. That probation was revoked and he was sent back to prison.
Fifteen years earlier, in April 2002, Leopold hit a jogger along a Dane County road, her body flying up over the windshield. He kept driving. The body of Aimee Kubler, 28, was found by her husband and brother in a ditch. Police found her blood on the front of Leopold’s truck.
At his sentencing in 2003, Leopold said he was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the accident and hadn’t realized he hit Kubler but insisted he would have stopped had he known. Police didn’t locate Leopold until three days after the crash, which was too late for him to be tested for alcohol.
Leopold was sentenced to seven years in prison on that case. He also received a lengthier probation sentence in a related bail jumping case, which he was still serving at the time of the accident that killed Leck.
In 1999 in Green County, he reached a plea deal in a second-offense intoxicated driving case from the prior year. The misdemeanor intoxicated driving charge was dismissed and Leopold pleaded no contest to a non-criminal citation of reckless driving endangering safety. He was fined.
In the latest case, Leopold pleaded no contest in May to a Class D felony charge of homicide by driving under the influence of a controlled substance and a misdemeanor charge of causing injury to a minor. Related charges were dismissed but “read in,” meaning the judge could consider them at sentencing.
Dave Leck’s family and friends stood up, one after another and gave wrenching testimony. They described the man they loved as the “rock” and role model of their large extended family, expressed raw anger at Leopold and begged the judge to sentence to the fullest extent of the law.
“Please don’t make anyone else suffer in the way that we have,” said Kori Sagen, one of Leck’s daughters. The day before the crash that killed her father, he told her “he thought he had a good 17 years left,” she said, adding that Leopold should have to serve at least that long in prison.
Kristine Leck, a daughter-in-law to the victim, said she was struggling to forgive Leopold.
“You got to walk away — again,” she told Leopold. “You have single-handedly ruined a family.”
The crash happened on a Friday evening. As was their routine on many Friday evenings, Dave Leck picked up his granddaughter, Emily Withee, so they could get an early start in the morning to the Saturday farmer’s markets where he sold Decatur Dairy cheese and was known as “the cheese guy.”
Shaking with sobs, Emily Withee described the immediate aftermath of the crash.
“I was so terrified, I could hardly breathe,” she said. “I remember looking to my left and seeing him, the man who had just hit us. I stared at him and he stared back. As I looked into his eyes, I saw nothing. No remorse, nothing. I saw a cold-blooded killer.”
She called her grandfather “the man who taught me to be who I am today.” Nearly two years after she lost him, “people tell me all the time it will get better.” But it doesn’t get better, she said: “From that day forward, I haven’t been myself.”
Walking back to her seat, she cried so hard she started hyperventilating. Family members consoled her. “You’re a brave girl,” one told her while embracing her in a hug.
District Attorney Craig Nolen noted that “to this date, nothing has been effective at rehabilitating” Leopold. In general, he said, more supervision is better because it tests a defendant’s longterm ability to follow the law.
Defense attorney Steven Zaleski argued for eight to 10 years in prison, citing mitigating factors like Leopold’s lifelong attachment to the area and his family, with roots in Brodhead, and his reputation as a hard worker and “conscientious” employee.
Leopold showed little emotion during the hearing. When given an opportunity to speak, he apologized for causing “so much pain to these people.”
“I know it doesn’t help, but I am sorry,” he said.
After the sentencing, Teresa Withee, Dave Leck’s daughter and Emily Withee’s mother, said the family was grateful for the 15-year sentence.
“It’s what we wanted,” she said, noting that the hearing was “painful” to sit through but it also showed how many people were invested in her father’s life: “It’s amazing how many people this affected.”
The victims from Leopold’s prior case in Dane County came to Wednesday’s sentencing, too. Aimee Kubler’s parents sat outside the Justice Center afterward and remembered their own loss.
Watching Leopold get sentenced again was “very hurtful,” Bonnie Stamm said. “It was like going back to my daughter’s death.”
“He didn’t learn a thing. He just blew it,” said her husband, Norm Stamm. “At least this time he said he was sorry.”
For years, “we shut him out of our lives,” Bonnie said. She wanted to live a happy life, “with happy memories of Aimee.” In the intervening years, she and her husband started a project called KEYS (Keep Everyone You know Safe). They tell Aimee’s story to educate about drunken driving and have distributed over 200,000 glow-in-the-dark plastic keys for people to have as a reminder not to drink and drive.
It was devastating for the Stamms to learn that Leopold had caused another death, “like deja vu in a way,” Norm said. The two victims’ families have connected.
“It was good for us to be able to give them some comfort,” Bonnie said.
Aimee Kulber’s mother-in-law Kathleen Watson also attended Wednesday’s sentencing. She had hoped to read a statement to the court that day, but the judge limited testimony to Dave Leck’s family.
Her son, Toby Kubler, was 26 when he lost his wife. Toby and Aimee had been together eight years and were married a year and a half when she was killed. After he found her at the accident scene and realized she had no pulse, “he curled up next to her in the ditch,” Watson said.
Losing his wife sent his life into a tailspin.
“He drifted for four years,” Watson said. “That was the hardest part — to see your child in pain and not be able to do anything.” He has since pulled his life together. Watson’s eyes welled with tears of pride as she said her son has completed college, gone on to graduate school and is now working as a teacher and pursuing a career as a school principal.
Kubler was unable to attend the sentencing but wrote in a statement to the court that he regretted the leniency Leopold received after his wife’s death. Kubler had participated in a restorative justice program by visiting Leopold in prison and also gave his blessing for Leopold to be let out of prison early.
“I can’t describe to you the breaking of my heart in October 2017 when I heard that he had killed another person while intoxicated. I felt responsible!” Kubler wrote. He asked the judge to “do everything in your power to be sure Nathan never has the opportunity to kill anyone again.”
“I feel Aimee deserves at least this. She was a wonderful person, and I still miss her.”