President Judge Thomas Doerr on Tuesday denied a request for a new trial from Butler County’s only death row inmate, ending an extension that had previously been granted.

A Butler County jury sentenced Donald Mitchell Tedford, 67, to death in 1987 after finding him guilty of raping and murdering Jeanine Revak, 22, on Jan. 10, 1986.

When prosecutors at the time mounted their case for the death penalty, Tedford instructed his attorney to offer no defense, leaving the jury no choice but to sentence him to death by electrocution.

Despite that decision, Tedford has since appealed his conviction and penalty on several court levels — most recently reaching the federal level, where it was sent back to the county for a final decision.

The state Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence and denied reargument in 1989. Tedford’s Post-Conviction Relief Act petition was denied in July 2004, with the Supreme Court affirming that decision in November 2008, according to Doerr’s filing.

A number of different attorneys have represented Tedford over the years. Currently listed as his attorneys are Adam Cogan, based in Greensburg, and Bruce Antkowiak who is based in Latrobe.

In this most recent appeal, which was filed in 2014 in Butler County Common Pleas Court as a second Post-Conviction Relief Act petition, Tedford asked Doerr to reopen the original case so that he can review the case material and has requested a new trial.

Responding to this request in a court filing, Senior Deputy Attorney General William Stoycos characterized the crime as “malicious and depraved conduct.”

“Tedford’s request is unprecedented, illogical, and illegitimate as a matter of law,” Stoycos wrote in the court filing.

In another section of his response to the request, Stoycos wrote, “The request is also an unlawful attempt to commence a ‘do over’ of his trial.”

Tedford presented the government with several options on which to base reopening the case. One of them was to test the DNA of semen found on Revak’s pants, but Stoycos rejected this argument.

And in Doerr’s order, he concludes, “The Court adopts the Commonwealth’s reasoning on this issue.”

Though the crime occurred in 1986, Tedford’s story begins in 1973, when he was sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to assaulting a Magee-Women’s Hospital nurse and her roommate with a baseball bat while he was trying to sexually assault the nurse.

Tedford behaved well as an inmate for the first 12 years of his punishment, and as a reward, he was given weekend furloughs and permission to work weekdays.

He was hired as the manager at Finishing Touches, a decorating supply store in Cranberry Township, where he met Revak. She aspired to be an interior decorator and had recently applied to La Roche College.

She had just moved into the township’s Woodlands Development neighborhood with her husband of eight months, James, who was a computer analyst.

Revak, a former Carrick High School homecoming queen and the daughter of a Pittsburgh police officer, quickly got two part-time jobs in township shops and was hopeful about a position at Finishing Touches. But just a few weeks after meeting Tedford, hunters found her partially naked body in wooded state game lands in Washington County.

Police identified Revak by the engraving on her wedding ring. They identified their suspect by matching cat hair found on Revak’s clothes to Tedford’s pet.

During the trial, jailhouse informants said Tedford told them he lured the woman to the shop by promising her a job.

But when Revak rebuffed Tedford’s sexual advance, he forced her to perform a sex act, knocked her unconscious and strangled her with a cord.

The informants said Tedford killed Revak to keep her from telling police what had happened and ruining his prison release arrangement.

In 2009, then Gov. Ed Rendell signed the execution warrant for later that year at the State Correctional Institution at Greene. Tedford stalled his execution by requesting several extensions which were granted.

Gov. Tom Wolf halted all executions in the state in 2015 and he said at the time in a prepared statement, “This moratorium is in no way an expression of sympathy for the guilty on death row, all of whom have been convicted of committing heinous crimes. This decision is based on a flawed system that has been proven to be an endless cycle of court proceedings as well as ineffective, unjust, and expensive. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty, 150 people have been exonerated from death row nationwide, including six men in Pennsylvania.”

Pennsylvania has executed three inmates since 1976 — all who waived their appeals. The last person executed was Gary Heidnick in 1999, according to the state’s Death Penalty Information Center.