Joliet man loses appeal in 2009 attempted murder of ex-girlfriend

The Illinois Appellate Court confirmed the 2016 conviction of Bradley Schlott Monday in the attempted murder of his former girlfriend in 2009.

Schlott, 51, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for attempted murder after he attacked his ex-girlfriend with a knife in March 2009, the Will County state’s attorney’s office said. He began to beat her in their Joliet home as she prepared to leave for work, eventually choking her and slicing her neck and breast with a large hunting knife. According to the state’s attorney’s office, Schlott believed the woman was having an affair.

The woman convinced Schlott to call 911 after telling him she would say her injuries were an accident, the state’s attorney’s office said. A physician who testified at the trial said she would have died had she not been treated for her injuries.

According to the state’s attorney’s office, Schlott’s lawyer’s said he attacked his former girlfriend under the involuntary influence of prescription depression medication. Prosecutors were unconvinced after Assistant State’s Attorneys Tricia McKenna and Marie Griffin presented letters written by Schlott to prove he intended to kill his former girlfriend.

Will County state’s attorney’s office

In one letter, Schlott apologized to the woman’s family for her murder and alleged that she was cheating and robbing him of his money, family, career, dignity and sanity, the state’s attorney’s office said. In a second letter addressed to the woman’s boss, he said he “was not sorry at all for what [he] did,” and accused the boss and her coworkers of covering up the alleged affair.

“Bradley Schlott savagely slashed his former girlfriend of more than nine years as part of a brutal plan to kill her and commit suicide because he could no longer control her,” Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow stated. “I applaud the appellate court’s decision. Schlott is right where he deserves to be--behind the cold steel bars of a prison cell.”