McKees Rocks man pleads guilty in 2015 slaying of widower

A McKees Rocks man pleaded guilty Tuesday to killing an 81-year-old widower in Kennedy seven years ago.

Stephen Day, 39, will serve 10 to 60 years in state prison under a plea agreement reached in the case.

He pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, burglary, theft and receiving stolen property before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Elliot Howsie. Day also pleaded guilty to four other burglary and theft charges stemming from other incidents.

Police said Day burglarized Thomas Nicholson’s home in Kennedy on Dec. 27, 2014, and then returned to the house on June 15, 2015, when he killed him.

Nicholson was found dead in his bedroom the next day, with his hands and feet bound. He also had chemical burns and ligature marks.

The medical examiner’s office said that congestive heart failure, hypertension and heart disease contributed to Nicholson’s death.

Neighbors said that Nicholson had lived on his own since his wife died several years earlier.

The motive for the attack, prosecutors said, was money to feed Day’s drug addiction.

When he was arrested in connection with Nicholson’s death, Day was already incarcerated for a home invasion two months earlier.

When he was questioned by investigators, Day told several inconsistent stories — first telling detectives he knew about an “old man (who) was beat and tied up” in Kennedy.

Day told investigators that three men he knew had gone to Nicholson’s home to rob him, and when they returned, they got nervous and went back to “clean up.”

But in another interview days later, Day said he was involved in planning the burglary but not the homicide.

He was charged in the homicide three years later.