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No contest plea ends murder case Jacksonville man faces 25 years for '98 shooting By Chris Bristol of the Mail Tribune One year later to the day, a Jacksonville man accused of ambushing a woman and a man giving her a ride outside a local restaurant pleaded no contest to murder Friday. A prosecutor described the shooting -- in which Douglas Jay Simpson was shot twice in the head as he sat in his car in the parking lot of the Back Porch BBQ -- as the product of a weird misunderstanding on the part of defendant Brian Earl Whitten. "This was not so much a love triangle as an acquaintance triangle," Jackson County Deputy District Attorney Holly Smith said. Whitten, 40, also pleaded no contest to attempted murder for taking a shot at Jennifer McNeilly, a bartender at the restaurant who was waiting for a ride home from Simpson. In exchange for the plea, Smith agreed to drop charges of aggravated murder and murder. The various charges involved different theories of the crime. Whitten faces an automatic sentence of 25 years in prison with no chance of parole. Judge Daniel Harris ordered a pre-sentence investigation. A sentencing date was not set. Whitten turned himself in at the Britt Festivals grounds the day after the shooting, which occurred late on the night of Oct. 29, 1998. Authorities said McNeilly witnessed the shooting and that Whitten then fired at her when she ran back inside the restaurant. Nobody else saw what happened and nobody else was hurt. In court Friday, defense attorney Robert Abel said his client could only plead no contest rather than guilty because couldn't remember the shooting. As part of the plea agreement, Whitten was to be given credit for the year he has served in jail awaiting trial. Smith said she agreed to the plea because her case hinged almost solely on the testimony of McNeilly, the only witness. Whitten never confessed and the murder weapon was never recovered. "She has great credibility," Smith said of McNeilly, "but you just never know what a jury might do." With his plea, Whitten escaped a sentence of 30 years to life. Smith said she never planned to seek the death penalty in the case, which is a possible sentence for aggravated murder. Police initially described the shooting as the result of a love triangle, but Smith said that wasn't really the case. Simpson, 41, was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. "The defendant was just lonely," she said. After the shooting, locals described Whitten as a mouthy drunk. A self-employed painter, he had two convictions for drunken driving dating back to 1995. Authorities couldn't recall another murder in Jacksonville for at least 30 years. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA