photo by: Linda Harris

Joshua Gamble pleads guilty to murder Friday in Jefferson County Common Pleas Court. Seated is his attorney, Eric Reszke.

STEUBENVILLE — Joshua Gamble showed no emotion Friday as Jefferson County Prosecutor Jane Hanlin read into the court record the long, horrific list of wounds his wife, Tina, endured at his hands before her death three years ago.

Abrasions and contusions of her scalp, face and neck. Bruises on both of her eyes, already purple when police arrived. Lacerations to her forehead, and more on her chin. Her right parietal bone and the base of her skull were fractured. She had epidural, subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhages, blunt force injuries to her torso, lacerations to her torso and a fractured clavicle. Nearly all of her ribs were broken, and there were divots on her face and torso where chunks of skin and tissue were missing.

And the big one — a “chop-style” injury to her scalp “so severe that you can see her brain, it split her scalp, it split her skull,” Hanlin said as Joshua Gamble stared straight ahead, stone-faced.

“When they actually went to take the picture, you could see inside her head — that’s how big the wound to her head was,” Hanlin told Common Pleas Judge Michelle Miller, adding the victim “was beaten and chopped in almost every way.”

On Friday, Gamble, 40, pleaded guilty to the Aug. 29, 2022, murder, an unclassified felony under Ohio law, and was sentenced to life in prison with at least the possibility of parole after 15 years. It’s the maximum sentence allowed under Ohio law.

Horrific as Tina Gamble’s final moments were, Hanlin said the circumstances didn’t meet the statutory requirements of aggravated murder, which would have been punishable by life in prison without parole or the death penalty.

“For the families, there’s never justice enough in a murder case,” she said. “It’s frustrating for the state and for the family members that no matter how violent the crime is, if it doesn’t fit into the definition of aggravated murder, our only option is life in prison without the possibility of parole for 15 years. That can be frustrating — and certainly is frustrating in this case — just because of the sheer brutality of the crime.”

When police arrived at the Dillonvale-area residence, they said Tina Gamble was covered in blood but still alive, though she was unresponsive and her breathing was shallow.

“He had virtually no reaction, no tears,” she said. “There was nothing. The entire time they were at the house — and the entire night that they interviewed him, which went on for some three or four hours, not one time did he ask how she was, whether she was alive. I wish, as does the family, that this was a crime for which there was a higher penalty than life in prison, without the possibility of parole after 15 years, but the fact is that the statute doesn’t allow for it. (What he did) does not fit into the crime of aggravated murder. It fits squarely into the crime of murder.”

Hanlin told the judge that in the early hours of the investigation, Joshua Gamble gave police any number of explanations for his wife’s death, each one more outlandish than the last.

“Seven days later, he asked to meet with the Jefferson County sheriff. At that time, he’s brought into the interview room and there’s an audio-video recording in which the first words out of his mouth as the sheriff is trying to Mirandize him are, ‘I’m guilty. I’m going to jail for life, and I’m dying in prison.'”

During that interview, she said Sheriff Fred Abdalla Jr. had asked Gamble where he hit his wife, she said.

“He said he hit her ‘everywhere.’ And when he was asked to describe whether she was standing, he (said) the first two hits were with this garden tool, like a pickaxe, for lack of a better word — that he put her out, and then he ‘went to work on her when she was on the ground.’ And when you look at (the crime scene photos) he did, in fact, go to work on her when she was on the ground, and continued to beat and just chop at her. This pickaxe (he was using) had a sledge on one end — he referred to it as ‘a very handy garden tool’ and made reference to the fact that they had been arguing because she wouldn’t sign divorce papers. He makes repeated reference to how he was on house arrest and knew he couldn’t leave the house, so he had to pick which bad thing he was going to do — break his house arrest or break almost every bone in his wife’s body. And he chose the latter.”

Tina Gamble’s sister, Angela Whitacre, and their 84-year-old father were in the courtroom, listening intently as Hanlin described her injuries as well as her husband’s seeming nonchalance.

“He didn’t just kill her,” her sister said. “He killed part of our family.”

Whitacre said her sister “had a heart of gold.” Her first husband had succumbed to cancer, “then he (Gamble) got with her and took advantage of her and killed her.”

“I carry this guilt that I couldn’t be there to protect her,” she said, crying. “He always gave me bad feelings every time I would go around and visit my sister. I always had this bad feeling and I didn’t want to be around him. It got to the point where I would only visit her when he wasn’t there, because something inside me told me (he was evil.)”

Whitacre said they’d waited a long time to see her killer punished, “and I thank God that my dad is able to see justice for my sister.”

His trial had been scheduled to begin Tuesday. The maximum penalty had it gone to the jury would have been the same — life without parole for the first 15 years — but it would have only taken one holdout to put him back on the street. That’s a risk the state was unable to take.

Hanlin said they were “100 percent ready for trial” when Gamble decided he wanted to plead guilty.

“I think that saved the family from having to see the autopsy pictures and the police body cam videos that showed the state of their family member’s body,” Hanlin said. “Tina was mutilated, and this would have been a very tough trial for the family to sit through, and a very tough trial for jurors to sit through. These are not easy pictures or videos to look at, because it just brings home that this woman died a terrible death at the hands of Joshua Gamble and he didn’t have a mark on him. We’ve never believed that this is a self-defense case, or that there was any justification for it at all and the statements that he made to the sheriff about ‘going to work on her once he got her on the ground’ were just bone chilling.”

In exchange for his guilty plea, the state agreed to dismiss a secondary charge of tampering with evidence. Gamble will be credited for time served, which to date totals 1,114 days in jail. If, at some point in the future, he is paroled, he’ll be under community control for five years.

Before sentencing, Gamble told the judge, “I have nothing to say.”

Hanlin, though, said Tina Gamble’s death was “tragic in every sense of the way. Nobody should die that kind of death.”