BANGOR, Maine — A Guilford man who testified in a 2010 murder trial admitted Wednesday in U.S. District Court to selling drugs twice last year to an undercover agent.
Willie W. Harper, 47, pleaded guilty to one count each of distribution of oxycodone and distribution of heroin in August 2015.
By pleading guilty, Harper admitted that on separate occasions he sold 20 bags of heroin for $500 and 10 30-milligram oxycodone pills for $500 to an agent he met in store parking lots in Guilford.
Information about where Harper obtained the drugs was not included in court documents.
Harper was arrested March 16 after being indicted by a federal grand jury on March 10. He has been held without bail since then.
A sentencing date has not been set. There is no plea agreement in the case.
Harper, who moved to Dexter from Chicago in 1999 or 2000, testified about where Colin Koehler hid the weapon he used to kill 19-year-old Holly Boutilier on the Bangor waterfront on Aug. 8, 2009. Now 41, Koehler is serving a life sentence for murder at the Maine State Prison in Warren.
Harper was the last witness called by former Assistant Attorney General Andrew Benson before he rested his case.
When asked by Benson if he had a criminal record, Harper quickly answered, “Hell, yeah.” When asked if it was long and filled many pages, he said, “It could fill this whole room.”
He told jurors he was in jail from April 2009 until March 2010 and was sometimes put in the “hole” or locked in his cell because he “had trouble with authority” and did not get along with some of the corrections officers. Why Harper was in jail during that period was not explained in court, but according to previously published reports he was awaiting trial on a gross sexual assault charge. He was found not guilty in March after a jury-waived trial and released.
Although Harper’s testimony was vague about whether Koehler had confessed to him that Koehler had stabbed Boutilier, Harper said the defendant had told him he had hidden the knife in a wall by a church across from Koehler’s Columbia Street apartment.
If convicted of the federal drug charges, Harper faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $1 million.