Last Tuesday, Eric Robert Motis sat in his one-man cell in Huntingdon State Prison, near State College, and wrote a long farewell letter to his parents in Bucks County.
In it, Motis acknowledged that he had been involved in a triple murder in Hilltown Township but said he had not killed his neighbor and her two teenage sons as they slept in their beds in 1990. He said a person with him, whom he called Robert, had killed the three.
Still, he said, the pain of knowing he would never again be free was too great.
Motis, 26, serving three life sentences for first-degree murder, dropped the letter in the mail on Friday.
On Saturday, authorities said, he knotted a bedsheet around his neck and hanged himself from the ceiling of his cell.
Yesterday, Bucks County District Attorney Alan Rubenstein learned of Motis' suicide.
``Either his life became so intolerable or he finally came to grips with the magnitude of his guilt,'' said Rubenstein, who termed the triple slayings ``the most brutal, vicious crimes committed in the history of Bucks County.''
Motis was found about 9:30 a.m. Saturday, said Huntingdon Superintendent Frederick K. Frank.
Rubenstein said he had been told that Motis fashioned a noose from a bedsheet and tied it around the top of an electrical conduit on the ceiling of his cell.
Motis, then 19, pleaded guilty March 11, 1991, to murdering three sleeping neighbors who considered him their friend on Oct. 15, 1990.
The former Pennridge High School honor student, who had planned to become a chemical engineer, acknowledged killing Louise Hoopes, 42, and her sons Douglas, 17, and Daniel, 14, with whom he had sometimes eaten dinner. He sneaked into the house, directly across the street from his home, in the early-morning hours of that day, he said.
He also admitted raping Louise Hoopes, rifling the house and stealing her car, which he drove to Miami Beach, Fla. He was arrested there on Oct. 20, 1990.
Prosecutors said Motis had gotten into the house with a spare key; crept up to the second floor, where the victims slept in separate bedrooms; crushed their skulls with repeated blows from a small sledgehammer; and slit Louise's and Daniel's throats.
Thomas Baldwin, Louise Hoopes' brother, said yesterday that he was shocked by the suicide, but that it might bring closure to ``just a horrible nightmare.''
