Utah doctor convicted in ex-wife’s death to be sentenced

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Salt Lake City pediatrician who was convicted of killing his cancer researcher ex-wife and is set to be sentenced Wednesday still maintains his innocence.

In a letter sent recently to the judge, John Brickman Wall, 51, said people around him misinterpreted his confused state as guilt when he was actually dealing with grief and psychological trauma from police interrogation.

“If the available physical evidence is examined with the logical and intellectually honest approach of a scientist, I am exonerated,” Wall wrote in an eight-page letter picking apart the evidence prosecutors used at trial. “I am innocent, before my God.”

A jury found Wall guilty of murder earlier this year in the 2011 death of his wife, Uta von Schwedler. Her death initially was ruled a suicide, but he was charged with murder more than a year later after her friends and family pushed investigators to look at Wall as a suspect.

Prosecutors said Wall attacked the 49-year-old von Schwedler with a knife, gave her the anti-anxiety drug Xanax and drowned her in her bathtub. Wall’s attorneys said it was more likely von Schwedler killed herself.

His oldest son, Pelle Wall, became convinced his father killed his mother, based partly on his dad’s bizarre behavior and comments after von Schwedler’s death. That included John Wall asking his children shortly after their mother’s death if he was a monster and responsible for her death, his daughter testified during trial.

After his father was found guilty in March, Pelle Wall called the verdict an end to a 3

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