State appeals against early release for child killer

The State Attorney’s Office on Monday appealed the parole board’s decision to free Zvi Gur, who was sent to prison in 1980 for kidnapping and murdering 8-year-old boy Oron Yarden.

The state opposes Gur’s release, which is set to take place on Wednesday, after he served 37 years of his 45-year sentence.

The Attorney’s Office said that the parole board did not give proper weight to the gravity of the crimes and their unusually cruel circumstances.

The state’s petition said that in its opinion the massive outcry over the murder of Yarden hadn’t died down even after all those years.

The murderer “showed a cruel, cold-hearted and well-planned kidnapping,” the Attorney’s Office said. “The kidnapping was planned from the outset with the goal of extorting money from the child’s parents.”

The state cited evidence that Gur had planned the kidnapping in advance, including switching the license plates on his car and canceling a scheduled reserve duty. The State Attorney said, “There can be no dispute that this murder was unique in every aspect.”

In addition, the state said Gur had not accepted full responsibility for his actions. The parole board had ignored a psychological diagnosis that found that Gur “did not regard the offense as kidnapping and murder. He described the chain of events as a series of bad decisions and a failure to consider the consequences. He does not attribute malicious intent in relation to murder.”

The appeal will be heard at the Lod District Court on Tuesday.

Gur, who was 33 at the time he committed the murder, was originally sentenced to life imprisonment and an additional 34 years for kidnapping and blackmail. His sentence was subsequently commuted to a total of 45 years in 1999 by then-president Ezer Weizman.

Gur, an illustrator of children’s books, demanded and received a ransom of 2 million Israeli shekels ($9,400 at the time, or about NIS 106,000 or $30,000 in today’s money) for Yarden. He was captured two weeks later, when he deposited the money in a bank account and a teller recognized the serial numbers on the bills, which had been marked. After his capture, Gur showed police where he had buried Yarden’s body, in Netanya.

He gave several different explanations as to how the boy died, claiming initially that he had suffocated in the car. He subsequently claimed the abduction was ordered by the head of a crime organization and that she was the one who had killed Yarden.

However, the court found that Gur killed Yarden shortly after the kidnapping, and before the ransom money had been paid.

Due to his model behavior in Ayalon Prison, Gur was allowed to paint unsupervised on the outer walls of the prison, and managed to flee in 1985. He was captured six days later, after a massive manhunt.