By Associated Press
Lexington, KY – The adult daughters of former state Rep. Steve Nunn told police they spent up to two hours talking by phone to him while he sat in a Hart County cemetery after his ex-fiancee had been slain in Lexington.
Documents released by Lexington officials Wednesday say Nunn told his daughters he was near his parents' graves and had slit his wrists and was going to die, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
Mary Elizabeth Nunn and Katharine Courtney Nunn told police seven days after 29-year-old Amanda Ross was shot to death that their father "just kept saying he was sorry." They said they didn't discuss Ross' death with him and said he apologized to them for "embarrassing them" in the past.
Nunn, 58, the son of former Gov. Louie B. Nunn, pleaded guilty to murder in June and was sentenced to life without parole.
The newspaper requested the case file under the Kentucky Open Records Act, but the Lexington Division of Police and the city's law department refused in early July to release it until Nunn's sentence was complete. The city later reversed that decision and said it would release portions of the file. The first volume was released Wednesday.
A summary of the police interview with Nunn's daughters was among hundreds of documents released, including search warrants, email messages and summaries of interviews with Nunn's friends, acquaintances and political colleagues.
The daughters told police they talked with their father for about 1 1/2 to two hours before Hart County deputies arrived Sept. 11, 2009, according to the documents. Their phones dropped the connection several times, and once, he seemed to pass out, the women told police.
They heard someone say, "Hey, Steve, put the gun down," as sheriff's deputies got closer, and Nunn then hung up.
They told police they had noticed shift in their father's personality since Ross took out a domestic violence order against him, causing him to lose his job with the state in March 2009.
"Since then he had gone into a really deep depression ... and his phone, which used to ring off of the hook, had received progressively fewer calls," the report said.