Man pleads guilty to murder of Georgetown auto repair shop owner

A man pleaded guilty on Thursday to the murder of a Georgetown auto repair shop owner in February 2020.

Jimmy Tschoerner was sentenced to 60 years in prison for the killing of 50-year-old Harvey Huber. Huber’s body was never found, Williamson County Attorney Shawn Dick said on Thursday.

Tschoerner, 50, could have faced life in prison if he had not pleaded guilty, Dick said.

Tschoerner gave a prosecutor a letter on Thursday that “detailed exactly what he did,” said Dick. “He wanted it passed on to the family,” Dick said. The district attorney declined to discuss what Tschoerner said about how Huber was killed.

READ: Police: Blood, bone fragments found in case of missing Georgetown man

Dick also declined to talk about other details in Tschoerner’s letter but said Tschoerner’s account of his actions matched what investigators discovered.

According to an arrest affidavit, Tschoerner, a tow truck driver, had been having an affair with Huber’s wife and had asked her to divorce Huber several times but she refused.

Huber was last seen on Feb. 25, 2020, drinking after work with several people including Tschoerner at Huber’s business at 2425 N. Austin Ave., police said.

Video surveillance from nearby Georgetown High School and a business showed that later same night, Tschoerner had driven a white, flatbed wrecker to Huber’s auto repair shop and then left with a tarp in the back covering “what appears to be an object that is consistent in size with a human corpse,” the affidavit said.

It said investigators later found bloodstains and bone fragments from a human skull outside a drainage tunnel that Tschoerner had visited.

Tschoerner apologized to Huber’s family on Thursday, Dick said. Tschoerner said Huber had been his friend and had helped him.

“I think the family was grateful to see this to a resolution,” Dick said. “Obviously this was very tough on all of them.”

Tschoerner was convicted in the 1990s in Kansas of solicitation of murder, attempted rape, kidnapping and aggravated robbery, a court document said.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Jimmy Tschoerner gets 60 years in prison for murder of auto shop owner