PORT ANGELES – A Port Angeles man will spend the rest of his life in prison for killing his wife, her three children and setting their mobile home on fire.
Matthew Wetherington was sentenced Monday in Clallam County Superior Court after changing his plea to guilty to two counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
The bodies of 34-year-old Valerie Kambeitz and her three children; Lilly, Emma and Jayden, all under 10 years of age were found inside a trailer home after an early morning fire July 6, 2019 at the Welcome Inn Trailer Park in west Port Angeles.
During his sentencing hearing, Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Michele Devlin said the crime July 5th of 2019 was very premediated. She told the court, forensics showed the family had no smoke in their lungs showing they had been killed before the fire. Forensics also showed sharp trauma and their blood was found on Wetherington’s clothes.
“The defendant thought about this a lot. He planned down to the Last Detail. He manipulated his way into the family of Valerie Kambietz he married her family a few months prior to his destruction.”
Before sentencing, several family members and friends of the victims told the court how the crime has impacted them, including Valerie Kambietz’s mother, Debra Borden.
“I don’t understand why you did what you did. I had to stand there and watch that place burn, which cause me a mild heart attack. I will never get see my grandkids grow up or get married or have children. I don’t get to grow old with my daughter. You took it all away.”
Judge Brent Basden handed down the mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for two counts to be served consecutively
“You have visited this community with incalcuable harm. Your actions of brutally murdering a mother and her three children leave many with the unanswerable question of why. And the painful truth is that the justice system doesn’t answer that question. All it does is represent a clear and unmistakable condemnation of your depravity. Your musings as to why are simply evidence of the tragic proportions to which your individual focus killed, both figuratively and literally, a family focus. the sentence that you’ll receive is the maximum sentence that the justice system allows. It extends to you a mercy that you never extended to your victims.”
Wetherington is a convicted sex offender. He had been released from prison just months before the murders.