On the second day of testimony in his murder trial, a Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader pleaded guilty to killing an Oklahoma woman who backed out of an initiation ritual in November 2008.
Raymond "Chuck" Foster, 49, faces mandatory life in prison for shooting 43-year-old Cynthia Lynch of Tulsa. After changing his plea to second-degree murder, he apologized to Lynch's mother, Virginia, who was in the first row of the courtroom in Covington.
"I so desperately wish I could redo this whole thing,'' Foster told her, the New Orleans Times-Picayune writes. "My heart goes out to you."
"I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me," said Foster, head of the Sons of Dixie Brotherhood of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Bogalusa.
"He apparently had a guilty conscience," said a spokesman for District Attorney Walter Reed, the St. Tammany News reports.
Outside court, Virginia Lynch said of her daughter, ""She's got her justice," the Associated Press says. She expressed sympathy for Foster's family. "I'm happy he's going to prison in one way, and I'm sad in another."
Foster's son and two other people have pleaded guilty in the case. Foster's son was sentenced to three years in prison for obstructing justice.
