Froberg sentenced to life in prison for murder, kidnapping of Morgan Violi

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – More than three decades after the murder and kidnapping of 7-year-old Morgan Violi in Bowling Green, the man behind her death is now sentenced to life in prison.

On Monday, Nov. 2, Robert Scott Froberg appeared before the Warren County Circuit Court to be sentenced after pleading guilty to kidnapping resulting in death.

During this time, Froberg apologized to Violi’s family and asked for forgiveness.

Under the plea agreement, federal prosecutors and the defense agreed in July that the appropriate sentence was life imprisonment.

On Monday, Kyle Bumgarner, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, said, “This brings it to closure ,and this is a remarkable win for a community and for a family that have waited 30 long years to see justice done for Morgan. So this is the end of that chapter.”

The case remained unsolved for decades before federal investigators announced earlier this year that advances in DNA technology led them to Froberg, resulting in federal charges.

Brian Butler, first assistant United States attorney for U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Kentucky, said Monday that Will Kurtz, a special supervisory agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “picked the case up out of the corner, dusted it off and took investigative steps that hadn’t been done and started the process.”

Butler continued, stating, “A lot of people got involved after that, and ultimately, it got solved. But from my perspective, Will Kurtz is a hero.”

Violi was abducted around 12:30 p.m. on July 24, 1996, from the parking lot of her family’s apartment at Colony Apartments in Bowling Green. Witnesses reported seeing a white man driving an older maroon 1978 Chevrolet van grab the child and force her into the passenger side of the vehicle before speeding away. Investigators said the van had been stolen the day before in Dayton, Ohio and was later recovered in Franklin, Tennessee.

Ultimately, officials say Froberg admitted to parking in a wooded area in White House, Tennessee, where he climbed in the back of the van and caused Violi’s death before leaving her body in the woods.

Her remains would not be found until three months later on Oct. 26, 1996.

Bumgarner also commented on life imprisonment in this case, stating, “So ultimately, the attorney general of the United States, ultimately is the only one that has the authority to decide whether we’re going to seek the death penalty or not. I get to make a recommendation to the attorney general as the United States attorney about what, which remedy you, if you will, or which punishment we’re going to seek as a part of that recommendation. One of the things that I relied on the most significantly was how does the family feel? What is it that they want? What is the outcome they want to achieve? As the judge said, life, life imprisonment seems wholly inadequate here. This does seem like a case where the death penalty is warranted, but what you have to realize with death penalty litigation is that we would have been multiple years out before a trial, and we would have had to put this to a jury, and then there would have been multiple years thereafter waiting for the appellate process to wait.”

Bumgarner continued, saying, “We had a 30-year-old case where the family was desperate for answers, and to hear Robert Scott Froberg say that he did, in fact, kidnap and kill Morgan Violi, that was their wishes. And that was absolutely what I supported and what the attorney general of the United States agreed with.”