Background: The Burnsville, Minn., neighborhood where Josephine Powers killed Michael Robert Riccio on July 9, 2024 (Google Maps). Inset: Josephine Powers (Dakota County Sheriff’s Office).
A Minnesota woman who shot a man at her father’s home then tried to hide the body will spend the next two decades in prison.
Josephine Powers, 27, was sentenced to just under 22 years behind bars on Tuesday after pleading guilty to second-degree intentional murder. Powers was arrested after she told police that she shot 70-year-old Michael Robert Riccio at her father’s home in Burnsville, Minnesota, on July 9, 2024. Her father was on vacation at the time, and when he returned home, he saw what he believed were “splatters” of “brown paint” all over the house.
When he came home for a lunch break from work, he encountered a man in a hazmat suit “cleaning up the brown paint” and ripping up the carpet in the basement.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Powers’ father told police that two days after he saw the man in the hazmat suit, he smelled “a strong odor of bleach” and saw patched-up bullet holes in the wall. Two days after that, on July 18, 2024, one of Powers’ friends told Powers’ father that Riccio had been killed in his house while he was on vacation. That was the same day Powers reported the fatal shooting to the police. She initially told police that Riccio was shot by a male friend, and she enlisted 48-year-old Christopher Hawkins to help clean up the scene and store the body.
The man in the hazmat suit was identified as Hawkins, who told police that Powers had asked him to “move a package […] in exchange for a truck,” according to the criminal complaint. When Hawkins arrived at the Powers house to retrieve the “package,” he told police he saw blood throughout the home and “something wrapped up in garbage bags and rugs” that he believed was a dead body. Hawkins helped Powers clean up the scene then wrapped up Riccio’s body and put it in his pickup truck.
Riccio’s remains were found in a gray storage tote on Hawkins’ property. He died of a single gunshot wound to the head.
According to the complaint, Hawkins said Powers told him that Riccio was “f—ing with her and she could not take it anymore, so she shot him.” Another witness who was in the home at the time of the shooting told police that he heard Powers and Riccio arguing and throwing things. After Powers shot Riccio, she “freaked out and ran around the house.”
Powers pleaded guilty to second-degree intentional murder and was sentenced to 261 months in prison. She received credit for 669 days served.
Hawkins pleaded guilty to aiding an offender after the fact and is scheduled to be sentenced on June 18.
Matt Naham contributed to this report.
