A Washington Man Killed His Ex-Wife After Fatally Shooting a Homeless Victim for Practice (FPD CASE VAULT)

A Washington state man was accused of murdering a homeless person as practice four months before he killed his ex-wife.

Now, he will spend at least 66 years in prison.

Beal was convicted of killing Mary Schaffer, 32, in August 2020 outside his home in Brown's Addition. She had gone to his apartment to pick up their son and daughter, KREM reports.

Court documents revealed Beal previously threatened to "put a bullet" in Schaffer's head, according to KREM.

A Spokane judge sentenced Nathan O. Beal, 39, to more than three decades in prison for killing Schaffer.

He then went on trial for the April 2020 murder of Andrew Michael Bull, 30, a homeless man whose body was found in a downtown Spokane alley, according to KREM-TV.

After his conviction in that case, Beal was sentenced in 2023 to serve an additional 35 years behind bars, KREM reported.

Beal and Schaffer's kids spent the summer at their father's house and spent the rest of their time with their mother in Oregon, the Spokesman reported. The news outlet also noted that Schaffer's sister, Donnella Ray, asked the judge to give Beal the most severe punishment possible.

She said he was cruel toward her daughter with a disability and would talk about killing her and her whole family.

“Nathan Beal must never be released,” Ray wrote, the Spokesman reported. “Mary was not the only one he intended to murder.”

During trial, Beal said he was "frustrated" with Schaffer, but he denied killing her. However, ballistic evidence linked a gun found in his apartment to her death. The same gun matched a shell casing found in Bull's death as well, court documents said, according to the Spokesman.