Man found guilty of murdering woman during 2015 fight in Sacramento hotel room
A man was convicted this week of murdering a woman more than five years ago in a North Sacramento hotel room.
A jury on Tuesday found Fredrick Tatum, who is also a convicted rapist, guilty in the 2015 murder of 42-year-old April Fowler and determined him to be legally sane at the time.
City police and fire personnel responded April 8, 2015, to reports of a deceased woman in a room at the Quality Inn on Northgate Boulevard, according to a news release from the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office announcing the conviction.
Tatum, 57, was found in the hotel room along with Fowler, who was lying dead on a bed with “obvious signs of trauma,” the news release said.
“Tatum inflicted extreme blunt force trauma on the victim including multiple broken ribs, a punctured lung, lacerated liver, broken jaw and a broken neck caused from strangulation,” according to the news release.
Tatum had invited the victim to stay with him at the Quality Inn, which is just off of Interstate 80 and has since been rebranded, a few days prior to what the DA’s office called a “violent struggle” between the two, resulting in Fowler’s death.
Tatum had multiple prior convictions in Sacramento County, including two counts of rape and another for forced oral copulation. Those charges came in 1996; Tatum pleaded guilty to all three in 2002 and was sentenced to 11 years in state prison, Sacramento Superior Court records show.
Tatum’s murder trial had been reset and continued multiple times from late 2015 through 2017, before proceedings resumed this January, court records show.
He is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 3 and faces a maximum of 80 years to life in prison.
