TAMPA - A third man was sentenced to life in federal prison for the 1998 slaying of a Polk County police officer.
Robert Winston, 27, was sentenced to life plus 10 years Monday for his role in the March 3, 1998, slaying of rookie Haines City Officer Christopher Todd Horner.
Prosecutors said Horner, 35, was killed in a cemetery, where he approached a car with no visible license plates. A group of men sitting in the car had just robbed a hotel and were planning to rob a bank, prosecutors said.
They forced Horner to his knees and shot him in the back of the head with his own gun, then slipped the weapon under his body, prosecutors said.
Two other men - Christopher B. Gamble, 30, and Andre Page, 28 - are serving life sentences after being convicted in Horner's slaying. A fourth man, Charles Andrew Fowler, 26, who investigators think was the trigger man, was indicted by a federal grand jury on a murder charge last week.
The case went unsolved until 2004 when Gamble, serving a 20-year sentence for robbery, pleaded guilty in Horner's death and began cooperating with authorities.
The Associated Press
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