28 July 2019 :

A Cuyahoga County jury sentenced Thomas Knuff, 44, White, to death for the May 11, 2017 murders of John Mann, 65, and Regina Capobianco, 50. Jurors on Tuesday recommended that Knuff be executed for fatally stabbing his former prison pen-pal and the man she lived with, then trying to hire a man to set fire to the home that housed their decaying bodies. Common Pleas Court Judge Dena Calabrese, who presided over the six-week trial, will sentence Knuff in August. Knuff befriended Capobianco through an inmate-to-inmate pen-pal program in the 2000s and moved in with her and Mann on Nelwood Road in Parma Heights in April 2017 when he was released on parole, after serving 15 years for an aggravated robbery conviction. Capobianco’s felony record meant that she and Knuff could not both stay in the same house, and prosecutors contended at trial that the 2 got into an argument after Mann chose to keep Capobianco in the house over Knuff. Knuff stabbed her to death and then killed Mann during the argument, prosecutors said. Knuff and his lawyers maintained that he acted in self-defense after he stumbled upon Capobianco stabbing Mann. His girlfriend, Alicia Stoner, a former prison social worker who met Knuff while he was locked up the in Trumbull County Correctional Facility, pleaded guilty last year to charges that accused her of helping Knuff to dispose of the bodies and was sentenced to probation. Knuff tried to have Robert De Lugo, to burn down the house, starting in the bedroom with “the most incriminating s—t,” which prosecutors said was a reference to the decaying bodies of Mann and Capobianco. He also directed Stoner to pay De Lugo and buy materials to help start the fire, prosecutors said. De Lugo did not follow through with the plan.