Adam Sheafe, the 51-year-old Arizona man accused of killing 76-year-old Pastor William Schonemann in April 2025, stood before a Maricopa County court on Thursday and asked a judge to give him the death penalty.
He wants this over. He says the victims want it over. He is representing himself, and he is not contesting a single fact in the case.
Sheafe told the court plainly:
"Put me on death row, set the execution date for right now."
Schonemann, the pastor of New River Bible Chapel, was found dead with his arms spread out in his bed and his hands pinned to a wall, Fox News reported. Sheafe previously confessed to the crime. He gave a full confession to the FBI before he was even indicted. And now he wants the system to do what he believes it should have done months ago: sentence him and end the proceedings.
A defendant who won't stop confessing
Sheafe's posture in this case is unlike anything most courtrooms see. Defendants typically fight charges, delay proceedings, and let their attorneys wage procedural war on their behalf. Sheafe is doing the opposite. He initially filed a petition to plead "no contest." When the Maricopa County Attorney's Office objected, he offered to plead guilty instead. A judge ruled that a future hearing must take place first to ensure the guilty plea is entered voluntarily.
That delay visibly frustrated Sheafe. He told the court:
"From day one, I've said I did this. These are the reasons why I did this, and I'm not contesting anything."
He went further, laying out the aggravating factors against himself as though he were the prosecutor:
"It's an undisputable fact that the victim, Pastor Bill Schonemann, was over 70 years old. It's an undisputable fact that the crime was heinous in nature. I intended it to be heinous. So they're two aggravating factors. And I have no mitigating factors. That's why I'm saying, why do we have to drag this on and on and on? Why can't we just go to sentencing? I'm not contesting anything."
He also complained that his speedy trial rights had been stretched from five months to what he described as "basically two and a half years." His argument, stripped of legal jargon, is simple: everyone knows what happened, everyone agrees on the facts, so finish it.
"What about the victim's families? What about me? What about my family? We want closure so we can move on with our lives."
The plot behind the killing
This was not a crime of passion or a random act. Sheafe told Fox 10 last year that the killing of Pastor Schonemann was part of what he called "Operation First Commandment," a plot targeting more than a dozen Christian leaders across the country. The number reported was 14 additional planned victims.
That detail transforms this case from a horrifying murder into something closer to a targeted campaign of religious violence. A man planned to systematically kill Christian pastors, carried out the first attack by pinning his victim's hands to a wall in a grotesque mockery of crucifixion, and then told anyone who would listen exactly what he had done and why.
Sheafe's father, Chris Sheafe, told the Arizona Family that his son had become "extremely interested in the Old Testament" and read it extensively. The elder Sheafe described a tattoo his son had gotten:
"It means God. It means he's directly related to God. And he wanted people to know that was his allegiance."
The father's account paints a picture of radicalization through distorted religious obsession. This was not orthodox faith driving a man to violence. It was something else entirely, a self-constructed theology that produced a kill list of pastors.
The system's uncomfortable position
There is a real tension in this case, and it has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. Sheafe says he is mentally sound. He is representing himself. He has confessed repeatedly, publicly, and in detail. He wants the maximum punishment. And yet the court is obligated to slow the process down to ensure that every procedural box is checked.
That obligation exists for good reason. The justice system cannot allow a defendant to rush himself onto death row without verifying that his plea is voluntary and informed. Courts have seen defendants attempt to manipulate proceedings in both directions, sometimes delaying indefinitely, sometimes accelerating toward martyrdom. A judge has to be certain this isn't theater.
But there is something deeply unsettling about a system that takes years to process a case where the defendant has confessed to the FBI, confessed in open court, described the crime as intentionally heinous, identified additional targets, and asked to be executed. At some point, procedural caution starts to look like procedural paralysis.
Sheafe framed the question in terms that are hard to dismiss:
"The victims want it. The victim's families want it. I want it, and the taxpayers want it."
What this case reveals
Anti-Christian violence in America rarely receives the sustained attention that other categories of hate crime command. When a man builds a kill list of pastors, executes one in a manner designed to evoke crucifixion, and openly declares a broader campaign against Christian leaders, the story deserves to be understood for what it is: targeted religious persecution on American soil.
The cultural conversation around hate crimes has been shaped almost entirely by the left, which means certain victims receive wall-to-wall coverage and institutional solidarity while others receive a news cycle and a shrug. A plot to murder 15 Christian pastors should be a national story. It should provoke the same institutional alarm that any other planned campaign of religious violence would provoke.
Instead, Adam Sheafe stands in a courtroom, representing himself, begging a judge to let him plead guilty to a crime he has confessed to in every forum available to him. The wheels of justice turn. The families of William Schonemann wait.
A 76-year-old pastor was killed in his own home, his body staged as a message. The man who did it wants to be sentenced. The least the system can do is not make everyone wait two and a half years to arrive at a conclusion no one disputes.
