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Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking
Speaker 3: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about him Gaesy Bundy Dahmer The Nightstalker VTK every
Speaker 3: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 3: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 3: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 4: Good evening on a spring afternoon in nineteen eighty five
Speaker 4: and Gary, Indiana, a fifteen year old girl kills an
Speaker 4: elderly woman in a violent home invasion in a city
Speaker 4: with a history of racial tensions and white flight. The girl,
Speaker 4: Paula Cooper, is black, and her victim, Ruth Pelk, is
Speaker 4: white and a beloved Bible teacher. The press swoops in
Speaker 4: when Paula is sentenced to death. No one decries the
Speaker 4: impending execution of a tenth grader, but the tide begins
Speaker 4: to shift when the victim's grandson, Bill forgives the girl
Speaker 4: against the wishes of his family and campaigns to spare
Speaker 4: her life. This tragedy in a Midwestern steel town soon
Speaker 4: reverberates across the United States and around the world, reaching
Speaker 4: as far away as the Vatican, as newspapers cover the
Speaker 4: story on their front pages, and millions signed petitions in
Speaker 4: support of Paula. As Paula waits on death row, her
Speaker 4: fate sparks a debate that not only animates legal circles,
Speaker 4: but raises vital questions about the value of human life.
Speaker 4: What are we demanding when we call for justice? Is
Speaker 4: forgiveness an act of desperation or of profound bravery? As
Speaker 4: Bill and Paula's friendship deepens, and as Bill discovers others
Speaker 4: who have chosen to forgive other terrible violence, their story
Speaker 4: asks us to consider what radical acts of empathy we
Speaker 4: might be capable of. In seventy Times seven, alex Maher
Speaker 4: weaves an unforgettable narrative of an act of violence and
Speaker 4: its aftermath. This is a story about the will to live,
Speaker 4: to survive, to grow, to change, and about what we
Speaker 4: are willing to accept as justice. Tirelessly researched and told
Speaker 4: with intimacy and precision, this book brings a haunting chapter
Speaker 4: in the history of our criminal justice system to astonishing life.
Speaker 4: The book that we're featuring this evening is seventy times seven,
Speaker 4: a true Story of Murder and Mercy, with my special guest,
Speaker 4: journalist and author Alex Maher. Welcome to the program and
Speaker 4: thank you very much for this interview. Alex Maher, thanks
Speaker 4: so much for having me. First off, just tell us
Speaker 4: how you came to the title of this book. It
Speaker 4: has a biblical reference. Tell us about that.
Speaker 5: Yes, so seventy times seven will seem a little mysterious
Speaker 5: to some readers. Others will get theirrought friends right away.
Speaker 5: It's from the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible, and
Speaker 5: it's a passage that means a lot to one of
Speaker 5: the central characters in the book. It's a moment where
Speaker 5: one of the disciples, Peter, is seeming kind of frustrated,
Speaker 5: confronts Jesus and asks, so, you know, are you saying
Speaker 5: that we are supposed to forgive the people who harm
Speaker 5: us what seven times? And Jesus says, no, I didn't
Speaker 5: say seven, I say seventy times seven. Right, So this
Speaker 5: is it's a great moment because it's a challenge to
Speaker 5: forgive those who harm us potentially a countless number of times,
Speaker 5: and that is the challenge at the core of this book.
Speaker 5: It's something that the different characters wrestle with, It's something
Speaker 5: I wrestled with as the writer, and it's at the
Speaker 5: heart of this really extraordinary story.
Speaker 4: What are just a couple questions that you did want
Speaker 4: to try to find answers for with the writing of
Speaker 4: this book.
Speaker 5: Well, when I learned about this terrible crime I, you know,
Speaker 5: and the fact that young girl had committed it, and
Speaker 5: that young girl, at fifteen had been sentenced to death
Speaker 5: for the crime, you know, I started to ask myself
Speaker 5: these larger questions. What is justice in that kind of scenario?
Speaker 5: It is not a question that we really have a
Speaker 5: consensus about, and that was one of the challenges for me.
Speaker 5: What is also the role of the family members on
Speaker 5: either side of a crime. Do they possibly have something
Speaker 5: in common that the system isn't allowing them to recognize
Speaker 5: and explore? So that was a big part of the picture.
Speaker 5: You know, what are the principles that guide us when
Speaker 5: we're thrown into an extreme situation like the violent death
Speaker 5: of a loved one. Do you respond based on the
Speaker 5: faith you were raised with? Do you respond based on
Speaker 5: your belief in the life, letter of the law. Do
Speaker 5: you decide to take a stance that no one around
Speaker 5: you agrees with. So that was some tough and challenging
Speaker 5: stuff that I wrestled with while I worked on this,
Speaker 5: for it ended up being more than five years.
Speaker 4: You take us initially to a dramatic scene Gary, Indiana
Speaker 4: and nineteen seventy nine and a garage and Gloria and
Speaker 4: her two daughters, Ronda who's twelve and Paula who's nine,
Speaker 4: and this is the Cooper family. Tell us what's happening
Speaker 4: in this scene that you take us to initially in
Speaker 4: your book?
Speaker 5: Right, So, you know, when you're writing about a story
Speaker 5: with a violent, violent crime at its center, there is
Speaker 5: immediately the question of when do you introduce the crime?
Speaker 5: How do you set it up so that the reader
Speaker 5: may have a little bit more of an open mind
Speaker 5: towards the different players involved, the potential for empathy in
Speaker 5: surprising places. So instead of opening with the crime itself,
Speaker 5: I actually stepped back in time to nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 5: as you say, and I wanted to give the reader
Speaker 5: a sense of a moment that had a profound impact
Speaker 5: on young Paula Cooper. So I open the book with
Speaker 5: a morning, very early morning when this woman Gloria takes
Speaker 5: her two daughters, the older sister Ronda, the younger sister, Paula.
Speaker 5: She takes them out to the garage in the morning,
Speaker 5: closes the garage door, loads the kids into the car.
Speaker 5: She rolls down the windows, and she starts the engine.
Speaker 5: She has decided that they're all going to die that morning,
Speaker 5: and she allows them all to sit in the car
Speaker 5: till they pass out. She has a change of heart,
Speaker 5: thank God, at the last moment, and carries the girls
Speaker 5: back into the house, puts them in their bedroom, and
Speaker 5: she leaves them a note. Ronda, the older sister, eventually
Speaker 5: wakes up totally disoriented. She sees the note from her
Speaker 5: mom that says that she's gone back outside and she's
Speaker 5: going to finish what she started. So in a panic,
Speaker 5: she runs out. She goes to the neighbor's house. She
Speaker 5: gets one neighbor, she gets another neighbor. They drag her
Speaker 5: out of the garage. She sees these different people performing
Speaker 5: CPR on her mother. The medics come the fire department.
Speaker 5: At this point, young Paula is standing outside as well,
Speaker 5: and she's absolutely hysterics seeing these strangers trying to revive
Speaker 5: her mother and her mother's still passed out on the ground. Eventually,
Speaker 5: Gloria the mother, is taken to the hospital and the
Speaker 5: girls are sent to stay with family. But a week later,
Speaker 5: their mother checks herself out early she picks up the girls.
Speaker 5: It's never mentioned again. You know, this is not a
Speaker 5: scenario where the girls were placed in anyone else's care.
Speaker 5: Ronda told me personally that she remembered very clearly, no
Speaker 5: one even took their pulse that day, no one checked
Speaker 5: to see how the girls themselves were doing. And she
Speaker 5: told me that she was so shocked when her sister
Speaker 5: Paula committed this murder at fifteen years old a few
Speaker 5: years later, and she never understood exactly the moment when
Speaker 5: her sister changed enough to be capable of that act.
Speaker 5: But in the process of us speaking, she said, you
Speaker 5: know what, I think it has something to do ultimately
Speaker 5: with you know, the change must have started that morning.
Speaker 5: And so that's how I opened the book.
Speaker 4: Tell us more about the family life of the Cooper family,
Speaker 4: and a little bit more about Gary, Indiana in the
Speaker 4: seventies and the eighties, and this suburb and Marshalltown where
Speaker 4: they are living.
Speaker 5: You know, Gary, Indiana has such an incredible history, and
Speaker 5: I think other books could easily be written just about Gary.
Speaker 5: It was a town that was created in the early
Speaker 5: nineteen hundreds just so that US Steel, which was building
Speaker 5: a plant there, could have somewhere for executives to live.
Speaker 5: As the town was built, you saw that all of
Speaker 5: these immigrants who were coming from Europe, and black workers
Speaker 5: and families migrating up from the South to get jobs
Speaker 5: in the mill, they were kind of left to fend
Speaker 5: for themselves, right, So immediately you had these middle class
Speaker 5: white executives who lived in a properly cared for part
Speaker 5: of the city. Everyone else was improvising in shacks at
Speaker 5: the edge of town. It really grew into a heavily
Speaker 5: segregated city to the point where eventually it was a
Speaker 5: northern industrial town that was as segregated as parts of
Speaker 5: the Jim Crow South right. And that's relevant background for
Speaker 5: the story in that by the time you jump ahead
Speaker 5: to the eighties, the city has experienced economic depression and
Speaker 5: white flight into the suburbs further south. So it's a
Speaker 5: predominantly black city where somehow the black population that has
Speaker 5: you know, there's a robust black community there, there's a
Speaker 5: civil rights movement that's burgeoning. There's a lot of positive
Speaker 5: things going on in Gary, but they just can't get
Speaker 5: a leg up, and the white population tends to blame
Speaker 5: black leadership in Gary for messing up, when actually much
Speaker 5: larger forces are at play. So when you get to
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty five, Ruth Pelke's living in what's known as
Speaker 5: the Glen Park neighborhood, and that neighborhood had remained predominantly
Speaker 5: white for a long long time. Black families were not
Speaker 5: welcome there. It had started to integrate by the eighties.
Speaker 5: But the fact of these four black girls, including Paula,
Speaker 5: talking their way into this elderly white woman's home, robbing her,
Speaker 5: and ultimately killing her, that had another dimension. People saw
Speaker 5: it as a symbolic crime in terms of how the
Speaker 5: white locals interpreted the event, some of them in terms
Speaker 5: of the Cooper family themselves. They lived in Marshalltown, that
Speaker 5: was not that far away, and that was, you know,
Speaker 5: a very simple housing development. The two girls were, you know,
Speaker 5: Paula and Ronda were very close. Their father was rarely
Speaker 5: home when he was he was physically abusive. Their mother
Speaker 5: drank a great deal, worked long hours at a local hospital,
Speaker 5: They were happiest when they were alone, just the two
Speaker 5: of them together, because they could just create their own
Speaker 5: little world. You know, they would have little dance parties.
Speaker 5: To Jackson five records, the Jackson five were heroes. They
Speaker 5: grew up not that far away in Garret, and you know,
Speaker 5: they would do each other's hair. They were just regular
Speaker 5: kids who truly just loved each other and Ron that
Speaker 5: in a way played the part of their real mother.
Speaker 5: All of that came crashing down with the crime.
Speaker 4: Tell us about the circumstances that bring these four young
Speaker 4: girls fourteen, fifteen and two that are sixteen to Ruth
Speaker 4: Pelk's door. She is seventy nine years old and a
Speaker 4: Bible teacher. So tell us how the circumstances in which
Speaker 4: April and these other three other girls, including Paula come
Speaker 4: to the attention of Ruth Pelki come into her orbit.
Speaker 5: Well, so these four girls who were you know, Denise
Speaker 5: was fourteen, April and Paula were fifteen, Karen was sixteen.
Speaker 5: They all were at Luell's High school and they decided
Speaker 5: to skip class one afternoon. They went to the video arcade.
Speaker 5: They ran out of money and they went over to
Speaker 5: April's house, and she suggested, you know, we could try
Speaker 5: to steal some money from this older woman who lives
Speaker 5: across the way. She's a Bible teacher, she's older, she
Speaker 5: lives alone, she has nice things in her house. I've
Speaker 5: been over there. Just go over there and you say
Speaker 5: you're interested in Bible study lessons and see if she'll
Speaker 5: let you in. Three of the girls go over there.
Speaker 5: One of them, Paula, has brought a knife from April's kitchen,
Speaker 5: and the idea is to scare missus Pelki. The situation
Speaker 5: escalates quickly, and Paula ends up striking missus Pelk over
Speaker 5: the head, and ultimately she seems to snap and ends
Speaker 5: up stabbing missus Pelki thirty three times on her dining
Speaker 5: room floor. It's a horrible crime. When they leave, the
Speaker 5: girls have found ten dollars and the keys to missus
Speaker 5: Pelki's plymouth, and they drive off. Within just a couple days,
Speaker 5: all four of them have been arrested and they've confessed,
Speaker 5: and Paula gave a very explicit confession. So from very
Speaker 5: early on this was not going to be a case
Speaker 5: of wrongful conviction. That that is not at play in
Speaker 5: this story, and it's also part of why I was
Speaker 5: drawn to it. There's something really challenging about asking the
Speaker 5: reader to look at this situation. Here is a fifteen
Speaker 5: year old girl, Here is this horrible crime. She absolutely
Speaker 5: did this. Now, what what do you think is the
Speaker 5: just response in this situation?
Speaker 4: Tell us about each girl's parental situation and as a result,
Speaker 4: if any of these people get private attorneys.
Speaker 5: You know, Karen and Paula both had very difficult home situations.
Speaker 5: Karen and April had both lost their mothers a couple
Speaker 5: of years earlier. Karen had gotten pregnant at thirteen and
Speaker 5: had had a young son at the time. April was pregnant,
Speaker 5: I think seven or eight, eight months pregnant. They all
Speaker 5: had very unstable home situations. And Paula, you know, I
Speaker 5: mentioned the abuse, but also she and Ronda would run
Speaker 5: away from home. They would run away and ask for help.
Speaker 5: They told a social worker, you know, you've got to
Speaker 5: help us out, they told At one point, paul on
Speaker 5: her own, went to a police station in the middle
Speaker 5: of the night and said, you know, you've got to
Speaker 5: help me. I'm being beaten. And she'd be put in
Speaker 5: foster care or an emergency shelter, sent right back home.
Speaker 5: It was always temporary. Denise, the youngest one, was probably
Speaker 5: the least likely candidate who to have ended up there
Speaker 5: that day. She just kind of got scooped up socially
Speaker 5: that afternoon. Her family was doing all right, and she
Speaker 5: was the one who ended up getting the lightest sentence,
Speaker 5: although although the three girls who were sentenced to prison
Speaker 5: rather than to death did receive relatively long terms. So that's,
Speaker 5: you know, that's the background there. When all four were arrested.
Speaker 5: I will say that the Lake County prosecutor at the time,
Speaker 5: Jack Crawford, he was extremely pro death penalty. He'd been
Speaker 5: elected on essentially tough on crime, classic tough on crime platform,
Speaker 5: had a press conference announced, we've got the suspects, we
Speaker 5: have confessions. These are four young girls, and I'm going
Speaker 5: to push for the death penalty for as many of
Speaker 5: them as I can, which is an incredible statement to
Speaker 5: make about people who are so young. And ultimately he
Speaker 5: pursued the death penalty with Paula and Karen, and Paula
Speaker 5: because of the depth of her involvement and the heinousness
Speaker 5: of the crime in a death penalty state, you know,
Speaker 5: she took her public defender decided she should plead guilty.
Speaker 5: With no deal on the table. He put up very
Speaker 5: very minimal defense. Is arguments that are sentencing hearing were
Speaker 5: very thin, and so in a way, inevitably she was
Speaker 5: sentenced to death by the judge.
Speaker 4: What was the situation in terms of death penalty sentences
Speaker 4: for juveniles in Indiana previous to this.
Speaker 5: It was a rarity. You know, this was a rare event,
Speaker 5: and certainly for a girl to be sentenced to death
Speaker 5: made it even more extraordinary. However, on the books in Indiana,
Speaker 5: what this case revealed to the public is that it
Speaker 5: was possible for someone as young as ten years old
Speaker 5: to be sentenced to death. That was state law. No
Speaker 5: one had looked closely at this and which is really
Speaker 5: mind blowing. A local representative in Gary named Earlene Rodgers,
Speaker 5: the day after Paula's death sentence made all these headlines locally,
Speaker 5: she publicly made a statement, did not miss a beach.
Speaker 5: She said, you know, the first thing I'm going to
Speaker 5: do in the next Assembly session is I'm going to
Speaker 5: introduce a bill that's going to raise the minimum age
Speaker 5: for the death sentence in the state of Indiana because
Speaker 5: we may not agree on everything, but I'm pretty sure
Speaker 5: we can agree that we shouldn't be killing kids. That
Speaker 5: was her statement. And she's such an extraordinary figure. There
Speaker 5: are all these great characters in this book, real life characters.
Speaker 5: She was a public school teacher, she'd been a public
Speaker 5: school teacher for about twenty years at that point in
Speaker 5: her forties, ran for public office and was really proud
Speaker 5: to be representing Gary. But she had this special perspective,
Speaker 5: which was, you know, I work with young teenagers every day.
Speaker 5: I have teenage kids myself. She had a daughter who
Speaker 5: was Paula's age, and she said, you know, this is
Speaker 5: wild to be trying to treat kids that age as
Speaker 5: if they're as culpable as an adult in that situation.
Speaker 5: The death sentence should not be on the table. And
Speaker 5: so she jumped into the story. So you have little
Speaker 5: by little people started responding to this death sentence in
Speaker 5: passionate ways. So, I mean, I don't know if we
Speaker 5: should get into Bill Pelke's role.
Speaker 4: Well, yes, you introduced a central figure to this story
Speaker 4: is Bill Pelke. Who is he to Ruth? And what
Speaker 4: happens one day to Bill?
Speaker 5: So Bill was Ruth Pelk's grandson, who at the time
Speaker 5: of the crime was thirty nine years old. We meet
Speaker 5: him at first sort of in passing. He shows up
Speaker 5: in court for Paula Cooper sentencing. He's in favor of
Speaker 5: the death penalty in this case, like the rest of
Speaker 5: his family, and that's that justice has been served. A
Speaker 5: couple months go by, though, and Bill's going through a
Speaker 5: lot of turmoil in his personal life. Not only is
Speaker 5: he still grieving his grandmother, but his relationship with his
Speaker 5: girlfriend is falling apart. He has had to declare bankruptcy
Speaker 5: because of some bad decisions. He feels lost and directionless.
Speaker 5: And he was someone who was a crane operator in
Speaker 5: a local steel mill. That was his job day and
Speaker 5: day out for almost twenty years. At that point, he
Speaker 5: wasn't someone who asked big questions about the world. He
Speaker 5: didn't think of himself as political or you know, like
Speaker 5: someone who's going to make a big statement in public
Speaker 5: about an issue. But he was up in the crane
Speaker 5: in the steel mill one night, and you know, the
Speaker 5: warehouse was dead. He was doing a late shift and
Speaker 5: he started kind of having a breakdown. He finds himself
Speaker 5: crying just thinking about the state of his life. And
Speaker 5: he has a moment where he suddenly pictures Paula Cooper,
Speaker 5: pictures this kid's face. He'd only seen her one time,
Speaker 5: it was that day in when she was sentenced to death,
Speaker 5: but he pictures her now on death row. You know,
Speaker 5: he's not sure what it would look like, but it's
Speaker 5: got to be some terrible small cell kind of roughly
Speaker 5: the same size as the crane that he's operating, that
Speaker 5: crane cab. And he thinks, you know, I may feel alone,
Speaker 5: and I may feel desperate, but there's someone I can
Speaker 5: think of who's more desperate than me, and I bet
Speaker 5: she is full of regret. And he thinks about his grandmother,
Speaker 5: and he thinks about, my grandmother would not have wanted
Speaker 5: the death sentence for this girl, to execute this kid
Speaker 5: in her name as the form of justice. He's totally
Speaker 5: rocked by this feeling, and he becomes completely convinced that
Speaker 5: actually his grandmother would like him to extend some kind
Speaker 5: of compassion towards this girl, and that what he needs
Speaker 5: to do is to actually try to forgive her and
Speaker 5: try to get her off death row. Not that she
Speaker 5: shouldn't be severely punished, but that death is a step
Speaker 5: too far. By the time time he gets down out
Speaker 5: of that crane that night, he is truly a changed man,
Speaker 5: like a man who suddenly has a purpose. And in
Speaker 5: the morning he wakes up, he gets some paper and
Speaker 5: he sits down and he just writes by hand a
Speaker 5: letter to this girl on death row in Indianapolis who
Speaker 5: killed his grandmother. You know, he just tries to come
Speaker 5: up with something to say, and he puts it in
Speaker 5: the mail, and he waits and it's the beginning of
Speaker 5: truly an incredible relationship that starts up between the two
Speaker 5: of them against all odds. And I had the incredible
Speaker 5: experience of reading hundreds and hundreds of letters between the
Speaker 5: two of them that took place over years, and to
Speaker 5: see this really fraud relationship evolve was for me, it
Speaker 5: was the stuff of great novels.
Speaker 4: You introduce a bunch of other instrumental characters, including Monica Foster,
Speaker 4: tell us about some of the people that assemble, and
Speaker 4: was very very interesting too and surprising that the initial judge,
Speaker 4: Judge Kimbrow, the situation that he considered himself put into
Speaker 4: in the judging of and the sentencing of Paula Cooper.
Speaker 4: But now he does something behind the scenes because he
Speaker 4: has he feels something about the judgment that he says
Speaker 4: he was he was coerced into doing, or something about
Speaker 4: along those lines.
Speaker 5: Judge kimbre Isn't to me was an incredible person to
Speaker 5: learn about. He was at the time in his late
Speaker 5: forties early fifties. He had been the first black public
Speaker 5: defender in Lake County. He'd been the first black criminal
Speaker 5: court judge in Lake County, possibly in Indiana. At the time.
Speaker 5: It was a big deal that he'd made those leaps.
Speaker 5: And he was a liberal. Lake County was you know,
Speaker 5: it's always been this kind of blue bubble in a
Speaker 5: very red state. But to be a Democrat in Lake
Speaker 5: County is not like being a Democrat in New York,
Speaker 5: you know, so so a little more conservative to begin with,
Speaker 5: but he was. He was a liberal, and he knew
Speaker 5: that he was against the death penalty. Jack Crawford, the prosecutor,
Speaker 5: wanted the right optics for this case, and so he
Speaker 5: looked around and he thought, well, we have one black
Speaker 5: criminal court judge and behind the scenes, and this is
Speaker 5: not legal. He had one of his deputies, he told
Speaker 5: me this in recent years, he had one of his
Speaker 5: deputies rig it so that the Ruth Pelke murder and
Speaker 5: the cases of those four girls, they would all take
Speaker 5: place in the court room of Judge Kimbro, the one
Speaker 5: black criminal court judge, so that if the death sentence
Speaker 5: was handed down, no one could cry racism. That was
Speaker 5: one of the ideas behind that that was unspoken when
Speaker 5: Paula's public defender did such a weak job in defending
Speaker 5: her and you know, pled guilty without a deal, made
Speaker 5: hardly any any kind of meaningful argument at her sentencing hearing,
Speaker 5: called very few witnesses or experts. Judge Kimbro felt, you know,
Speaker 5: he really believed in the letter of the law, and
Speaker 5: he felt that this is a terrible crime. There were
Speaker 5: three other girls who did not get death. One of
Speaker 5: the other girls he gave sixty years to. So what
Speaker 5: are we going to do in a situation where this
Speaker 5: is the girl who committed the worst part of this crime.
Speaker 5: She actually repeatedly stabbed this woman to death, and he
Speaker 5: felt that the only option was death. Ultimately, that changed
Speaker 5: his life. He never recovered from that decision. That day,
Speaker 5: when he handed down that sentence in court, he went
Speaker 5: back to his chambers and he called in one of
Speaker 5: the appellate defenders who were on the team there, this
Speaker 5: man Bill Touchet, and privately he said to him, you know,
Speaker 5: distraught about what took place today, I'm putting you on
Speaker 5: her appeal. You need to get her off, You need
Speaker 5: to get her sentence reduced. And Touche said, you know,
Speaker 5: I'm going to do the best that I can. And
Speaker 5: he shared that with me. He hadn't shared that information
Speaker 5: with anyone. He told me that just a couple of
Speaker 5: years ago, that the judge had made that extraordinary statement
Speaker 5: to him that day. And so he and Monica Foster,
Speaker 5: who you mentioned, they took up Paula's appeal and they
Speaker 5: took it all the way to the Indiana Supreme Court.
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Speaker 4: plus to your subscription today. Now, we were talking about
Speaker 4: this mission to try to save Paula Cooper and get
Speaker 4: her off death row. We haven't spoke about the effects
Speaker 4: that the story we talked about in the introduction. This
Speaker 4: story reverberating around the world, but especially in West Germany
Speaker 4: and particularly in Italy. Tell us about two journalists that
Speaker 4: again involved in this fight, and how the Pope and
Speaker 4: the Vatican all in Italy get involved in this story.
Speaker 5: It's really an incredible aspect of this story. It's no
Speaker 5: one in Lake County, Indiana was accustomed to having events
Speaker 5: in that region reported on across Western Europe. It just
Speaker 5: wasn't kind of unprecedented. So part part of how this
Speaker 5: went down is Anaguaita was a journalist for Messagero in Rome.
Speaker 5: She was based in New York City as a foreign correspondent,
Speaker 5: and she saw just one of those little capsule news headlines,
Speaker 5: I think it was in USA today, where they used
Speaker 5: to have rundowns of just news items, you know, a
Speaker 5: couple pages in and it said that a fifty young
Speaker 5: girl had been sentenced to death in Indiana for a
Speaker 5: crime committed at fifteen years old. She thought, is this true?
Speaker 5: How can this possibly be true? It seemed to her
Speaker 5: something that maybe this had been misreported. She made some
Speaker 5: calls and found out that, you know, yeah, this is
Speaker 5: this actually just took place. So she called her editor,
Speaker 5: who teamed her up with another journalist in New York,
Speaker 5: Jumpaulo Pioli, who was writing for another Italian paper. They
Speaker 5: went together, they got some money from their respective papers
Speaker 5: and were sent to Indiana, and they were the first
Speaker 5: foreign press to do original reporting on the ground in Gary,
Speaker 5: knowing nothing about the region, only knowing this one item
Speaker 5: of news, and they went. They met with Paula's grandfather.
Speaker 5: They ended up interviewing Bill Pelk, They interviewed Bill Touchet,
Speaker 5: the appellate defender, and they wrote very emotionally charged stories
Speaker 5: that were run. They were teased on the front pages
Speaker 5: of both of their Italian papers, and it just took off.
Speaker 5: Readers responded like crazy, they were offended and incensed, and
Speaker 5: the letters from readers poured in. Eventually people started signing
Speaker 5: petitions that met members of the Catholic Church, different kinds
Speaker 5: of activists organized and you ended up with at first
Speaker 5: tens of thousands of people in Italy signing these petitions
Speaker 5: that they were mailing to the Governor of Indiana. It
Speaker 5: eventually rose to two million signatures, and petitions started coming
Speaker 5: in from Scandinavia and from Germany. You know, it really
Speaker 5: just took off as an issue. The At the same time,
Speaker 5: the case came to the attention of a Franciscan friar
Speaker 5: named Father Vito Bracone, who was based in Rome, and
Speaker 5: he had grown up incredibly poor in a small village
Speaker 5: in the south of Italy. His family had been a
Speaker 5: very loving, big family, but you know, they grew up
Speaker 5: in a couple of rooms, dirt floor. They were only
Speaker 5: able to go to school for a couple of years.
Speaker 5: They helped the family with their vineyard, and you know,
Speaker 5: they had a donkey. You know, it was extremely primitive living.
Speaker 5: And he read that, you know, this girl grew up
Speaker 5: in a very modest home, and and he immediately felt
Speaker 5: some kind of kinship to that, even though their lives
Speaker 5: had been so different. He thought, you know, she doesn't
Speaker 5: have money. Who's going to help her? Her parents have
Speaker 5: abandoned her. You know what, it's going to be me.
Speaker 5: And he flew to Indianapolis wearing the brown friar's robe
Speaker 5: that I think a lot of people think of from
Speaker 5: the movies, you know, with the hooded brown robe with
Speaker 5: the white rope belt. And he shows up to go
Speaker 5: visit her on death row and just says, you know,
Speaker 5: myself and other members of the church were very concerned
Speaker 5: about the news of your case. I came here to
Speaker 5: be your friend. We're going to do whatever we can
Speaker 5: to try to help you. And he starts drumming up
Speaker 5: more attention in the Italian media, and he gives interviews
Speaker 5: whenever he can to the press in Indiana, knowing that
Speaker 5: it's an exotic site. See this man flown in from
Speaker 5: Rome in the friar's robe, so it kind of gives
Speaker 5: him a way into making comments on the case as
Speaker 5: an outsider. Eventually it goes all the way day to
Speaker 5: the Pope. The Pope was coming to visit America to
Speaker 5: see President Reagan and to travel around to multiple cities.
Speaker 5: One of the two Italian journalists I mentioned, Jampaulo Pioli,
Speaker 5: got a handwritten letter from PAULA. Cooper on death row.
Speaker 5: He ended up carrying that letter with him on the
Speaker 5: Pope's plane. He was part of the press junket of
Speaker 5: journalists covering some of this trip and managed to get
Speaker 5: it passed into the hands of Pope John Paul the
Speaker 5: Second himself, and eventually that led to the Pope, through
Speaker 5: a spokesperson, making a statement that the Pope would like
Speaker 5: to see the sentence of this young woman on death
Speaker 5: row in America commuted. And truly, it was truly an
Speaker 5: extraordinary sequence of events that led to that moment.
Speaker 4: Meanwhile, you chronicled that there are extraordinary efforts in the
Speaker 4: US polluting Monica Foster, but also a professional professor of
Speaker 4: criminal law. Victor Streebs comes along with some fascinating research
Speaker 4: and joins this cause. Tell us about what he has
Speaker 4: to offer.
Speaker 5: Yes, Victor stribe he is a really fascinating character as
Speaker 5: someone who does a lot of research for her work
Speaker 5: and is a little nerdy that way. I really related
Speaker 5: to him as sort of a nerdy superhero in this story.
Speaker 5: And I'll explain you know. He was a law school
Speaker 5: professor in Cleveland, originally grown up in Indiana. His family
Speaker 5: had been in Indiana for generations and he had a
Speaker 5: gift with the law. Was the first person in his
Speaker 5: family to have a white collar job like that, and
Speaker 5: he just he lacked a sense of focus. What was
Speaker 5: his field going to be? How could he stand out
Speaker 5: from all the other legal scholars trying to publish papers?
Speaker 5: And he started doing some work in juvenile court locally
Speaker 5: to try to understand some of the issues facing the
Speaker 5: sentencing of kids. In the process of doing that, he
Speaker 5: met for the first time some kids who were charged
Speaker 5: with violent crimes, and his wheels started turning and he
Speaker 5: began to think about the fact that capital punishment was
Speaker 5: still on the books for kids in America across the
Speaker 5: country a number of states. He also realized that this
Speaker 5: wasn't an issue people were addressing at all. It wasn't
Speaker 5: being debated. So the U. Supreme Court around that same
Speaker 5: time took on a case called Eddings versus Oklahoma. That
Speaker 5: was the very first time in the history of this
Speaker 5: country that the highest court discussed the death penalty for
Speaker 5: juveniles where the justice is actually debated openly, well, how
Speaker 5: can we know what the right minimum age is for deaths?
Speaker 5: And it became clear that they had nothing to base
Speaker 5: their discussion on. Really, there was no precedent, and it's
Speaker 5: really hard to draw a line in the sand and say, Okay,
Speaker 5: a person is mature at this age, immature at that age. Okay,
Speaker 5: then the death sentence applies. Pure followed this case really
Speaker 5: closely and was really inspired. He thought, oh my god,
Speaker 5: the stakes are so high. This is what I'm going
Speaker 5: to specialize on this issue. So, almost single handedly, with
Speaker 5: help from a few others along the way, he really
Speaker 5: was the godfather of this movement of people trying to
Speaker 5: look into and challenge the death penalty for teenagers. And
Speaker 5: because of his research, you know, he went and did
Speaker 5: this very un sexy work of collecting data about this
Speaker 5: relatively unknown phenomenon in this country. He revealed that we
Speaker 5: have executed more than three hundred young people in this country,
Speaker 5: and we've sentenced to death more than two hundred teenagers
Speaker 5: since the seventies. So this is not just some sort
Speaker 5: of you know, colonial times problem. This is an active
Speaker 5: problem in the country. In that moment, he ends up
Speaker 5: being approached by Bill Touchet and asked to join the
Speaker 5: appellate team for PAULA Cooper, which ended up making an
Speaker 5: enormous difference, and so the two of them got to
Speaker 5: team up and join in the oral argument before the
Speaker 5: Indiana Supreme Court, and I learned about how that played
Speaker 5: out from both of them, but also by interviewing repeatedly
Speaker 5: the man who at the time was Chief Justice for
Speaker 5: the Court, Randall Shepherd, which was kind of extraordinary to
Speaker 5: get a sense of the inner workings of that process
Speaker 5: from someone on a state supreme court.
Speaker 4: What was that oral argument other than the constitutionality to question,
Speaker 4: but what was part of their argument, what was it
Speaker 4: based on? What were the issues?
Speaker 5: Well, so at the same time that victor had been
Speaker 5: working on an aware of the Paula Cooper case, he
Speaker 5: was at work on another case that happened to be
Speaker 5: set in Oklahoma, Ail Thompson versus Oklahoma. There was a
Speaker 5: young man whose death penalty appeal was coming before the
Speaker 5: EUO Supreme Court. Victor took part in making that argument
Speaker 5: before the court, and what the court decided was that
Speaker 5: it was what's called a plurality. They didn't have a
Speaker 5: majority decision, but a plurality, which means it's not a
Speaker 5: binding decision, but it's taken as a suggestion by the
Speaker 5: court to lower courts around the country that fifteen was
Speaker 5: too young for the death sentence. Paula Cooper, as we've
Speaker 5: just discussed, was fifteen at the time of her crime.
Speaker 5: So he then goes full bore into Paula Cooper's appeal
Speaker 5: and one of the big things, big statements he's able
Speaker 5: to make before the state Supreme Court in Indiana is well,
Speaker 5: the US Supreme Court just decided with a plurality that
Speaker 5: fifteen is too young. So at the same time we
Speaker 5: have Arline Rodgers, who at the time was a public
Speaker 5: school teacher, as I mentioned, but also unelected official. He
Speaker 5: was pushing to raise the minimum age for death in
Speaker 5: Indiana from ten to her goal was sixteen. She succeeded
Speaker 5: not long before Paula's case reached the State Supreme Court.
Speaker 5: And so Victor Stribe and Bill Touche, we're also able
Speaker 5: to say, well, look, now we have a new minimum
Speaker 5: age for the death penalty in the state of Indiana.
Speaker 5: Is it fair to say that Paula Cooper will still
Speaker 5: get the death sentence because she was sentenced right before
Speaker 5: this new bill went into effect. Ken that was the
Speaker 5: core of the argument. And ultimately, you know, the state
Speaker 5: Supreme Court had to agree that her sentence had to
Speaker 5: just just thing. And also the only way to follow
Speaker 5: legal logic in this scenario was to commute her sentence.
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Speaker 4: Now, you say the only option left was to commute
Speaker 4: her sentence. What was the sentence commuted to?
Speaker 5: So she was given sixty years. What that effectively means, however,
Speaker 5: in Indiana is if you are on good behavior for
Speaker 5: your time in prison, that can that time can sometimes
Speaker 5: be cut down almost by half. So ultimately it's up
Speaker 5: to you. But if you serve your time, well, there's
Speaker 5: a high incentive to do so. A sixty year sentence
Speaker 5: could mean thirty or it could mean even less. So
Speaker 5: that was factored in at the time, being so young.
Speaker 5: What some of her team discovered is that he felt
Speaker 5: in some ways she'd won. But I think the reality
Speaker 5: was that the weight of that prison sentence then really
Speaker 5: came down on her because what she'd won was not
Speaker 5: her freedom. You know, she won significant amount of her
Speaker 5: adult life in prison rather than the death sentence.
Speaker 4: You write about Bill and his mission other than having
Speaker 4: a relationship and offering this forgiveness, and what else does
Speaker 4: Bill embark on at the same time, as his correspondence.
Speaker 5: It's pretty incredible. While Bill is corresponding with Paula, he's
Speaker 5: also doing everything he can to spread the word about
Speaker 5: his feelings about Paula's death sentence and his anti death
Speaker 5: penalty stance to as many journalists as possible. He was
Speaker 5: actually flown to Italy to speak on Italian television about
Speaker 5: this case and his anti death penalty beliefs at the
Speaker 5: same time. As a result of that, in spite of
Speaker 5: being someone who was not political, did not have any
Speaker 5: relationships with activists or public organizations, and you know, someone
Speaker 5: who really just had a very normal life. As a
Speaker 5: result of all of this speaking out, he ends up
Speaker 5: meeting people who connect him with the ACLU, with Amnesty International.
Speaker 5: He starts going to rallies, he starts marching, you know,
Speaker 5: in demonstrations that are coming up that are against the
Speaker 5: death penalty, and you know, he's surrounded by all these
Speaker 5: college kids and progressive people who are like, you know,
Speaker 5: some of them are kind of hippy ish. He's the
Speaker 5: one showing up in a pressed gray suit. He carries
Speaker 5: a copy of the Bible. People are like, this is
Speaker 5: this guy, like a Republican who's on our side? You
Speaker 5: know there it was really he was taking a risk.
Speaker 5: You know, he was dipping his toes into water that
Speaker 5: was very unfamiliar for him, and in the process of
Speaker 5: doing that, he's really shocked at one event when he
Speaker 5: meets someone who's also a murder victim's family member who
Speaker 5: has started to say publicly that they were against the
Speaker 5: death penalty in their family member's case. And then he
Speaker 5: meets someone else like that, and then they, you know,
Speaker 5: they start to put together a loose kind of collective
Speaker 5: of murder victims family members who don't believe in the
Speaker 5: death sentence, who are based all around the country, and
Speaker 5: that becomes this other storyline that evolves where, you know,
Speaker 5: they become almost like an improvised second family to each other,
Speaker 5: where they're able to understand something really fundamental about each
Speaker 5: other's lives and help each other out and rainstorm together
Speaker 5: about ways that they can have a voice in the.
Speaker 4: System you write about. And Ronda, her sister, is a
Speaker 4: central figure in this story as well. They correspond and
Speaker 4: visit during her time in prison, and then finally it
Speaker 4: comes time for her to be released. But other than that,
Speaker 4: what are some of the important things that she'd like
Speaker 4: to make right in her life.
Speaker 5: So as Paula continued to do time, she you know,
Speaker 5: eventually her sister would visit her repeatedly and they were
Speaker 5: in contact over the phone. That connection was really vital
Speaker 5: and really important and a big part of Paula's survival
Speaker 5: throughout her incarceration. Eventually, Ronda was able to convince their
Speaker 5: mother to come and visit Paula as well, and she
Speaker 5: visited a number of times, and Paula began to fantasize
Speaker 5: about them all having a functional, happy family relationship once
Speaker 5: she eventually got out. I think her mother also made
Speaker 5: an effort a number of times to get sober to
Speaker 5: try to mend things with her younger daughter. But my
Speaker 5: understanding is that was always quite short lived. So when
Speaker 5: Paula got out, she was in her mid forties, it
Speaker 5: was already kind of late for her to start her
Speaker 5: own family. She'd always wanted to have a bunch of kids.
Speaker 5: That was really you know, that was ironically, you know,
Speaker 5: having having grown up in such a difficult family situation,
Speaker 5: that was sort of the number one romantic idea she
Speaker 5: had when she was released. I'm going to meet someone,
Speaker 5: I'm going to have I'm going to have all these kids.
Speaker 5: I'm going to make good with my mother. We're all
Speaker 5: going to be this happy family and Rond and I
Speaker 5: and everybody else will have holidays together. And Ronda just
Speaker 5: saw this as a disaster waiting to happen. You know,
Speaker 5: she told her, I've been out here the whole time,
Speaker 5: and this woman is not who you want to believe
Speaker 5: she is. And you know, she had all this support
Speaker 5: from her sister she was so close to, and other
Speaker 5: people in her life. Monica Foster remained a really great
Speaker 5: friend and relationship for her and gave her a great
Speaker 5: job when she got out. But I think we can
Speaker 5: all relate to this. You know, whatever kind of household
Speaker 5: you grew up in, we all have a tie to
Speaker 5: our parents. However they treated us when we were young.
Speaker 5: That's a bond that you cannot fully shake off and
Speaker 5: you can't ever become totally independent of. So she wanted
Speaker 5: her mother's approval, she wanted to find love there, and
Speaker 5: her mother made it very clear at a certain point
Speaker 5: that she was still ashamed of her daughter and she
Speaker 5: did not want to be publicly associated with her. And
Speaker 5: that had a huge impact on Paula. You know, it's
Speaker 5: ironic that her victim's grandson wants to be associated with
Speaker 5: her publicly, but her own mother does not.
Speaker 4: So she is released from prison and as many people
Speaker 4: might have hope for be able to put her life
Speaker 4: back together. But she expressed to her sister, I believe,
Speaker 4: or a dear friend about the pain that she was encountering.
Speaker 4: Tell us about what she felt was this pain that
Speaker 4: wouldn't go away.
Speaker 5: I think that ultimately, you know, anyone who's incarcerated for
Speaker 5: so long, for Paula was twenty seven years of incarceration,
Speaker 5: that is, there's an enormous toll on your mental health.
Speaker 5: I think that really came into play. But also the
Speaker 5: fact that she was able to mature eventually while she
Speaker 5: was still incarcerated. You know, years went by and she
Speaker 5: was able to start doing some kind of work on
Speaker 5: herself to educate herself to She did a lot of
Speaker 5: work for other women in the facilities where she was incarcerated,
Speaker 5: just stuff to help people out, kind of like good deeds.
Speaker 5: You know, if it was someone's birthday and she knew
Speaker 5: they didn't have anyone coming to see them or sending
Speaker 5: them gifts, she would throw a little party for them.
Speaker 5: You know, she would if someone knew entered the prison,
Speaker 5: she would buy a pair of shoes for them, you know,
Speaker 5: things where there was no tit for tat. It was
Speaker 5: really just trying to make the lives of some of
Speaker 5: these other women easy. So she evolved as a person.
Speaker 5: The downside of that, potentially, you know, this is my theory,
Speaker 5: is that it made her someone who was more capable
Speaker 5: of experiencing really profound remorse around the crime she committed
Speaker 5: as a young person. And she was upfront about that
Speaker 5: with a couple people very close to her. And once
Speaker 5: she got out, you know, I took a life and
Speaker 5: I'm never going to be worthy. That was how she felt.
Speaker 5: And you know, it's unclear if anything could have been
Speaker 5: done but to help her, but that was ultimately why
Speaker 5: she chose to take her own life.
Speaker 4: Along the way, there was a lot of research regarding
Speaker 4: a juvenile and adolescent minds. You include a lot of
Speaker 4: this where it seemed to be that modern science was
Speaker 4: pointing towards origins and understanding the brain, and especially the
Speaker 4: adolescent brain. Tell us a little bit about some of
Speaker 4: the research that was worked on and uncovered as part
Speaker 4: of this case.
Speaker 5: What was so fascinating about looking at the bigger picture
Speaker 5: of the death penalty for juveniles, you know, starting with
Speaker 5: Paula's very personalized situation and going up to the Supreme
Speaker 5: Court case in two thousand and five. You know, along
Speaker 5: the way, you could see changes in the way that
Speaker 5: we were thinking about teenagers in the system and developmentally.
Speaker 5: So at first, the argument against sentencing kids to death
Speaker 5: was essentially a moral one. You know, how can we
Speaker 5: hold kids as responsible as adults? We don't see them
Speaker 5: as adults in other ways, And what does it say
Speaker 5: about us to be executing someone at fifteen, sixteen seventeen. Eventually, however,
Speaker 5: an added component entered the picture, which was the you know,
Speaker 5: neuros science about adolescent brain development. What was discovered is
Speaker 5: that the human brain is not fully developed until you know,
Speaker 5: possibly as late as twenty four, twenty five. So you're
Speaker 5: looking at a situation where if a teenager commits a
Speaker 5: violent crime, their brain is less capable of impulse control,
Speaker 5: of a lot of the kind of thinking that we
Speaker 5: associate with ethical decision making, right, and they're much more
Speaker 5: susceptible to behaving under the influence of peer pressure. So
Speaker 5: in Ruth Pelk's death, you not only had someone who
Speaker 5: was just fifteen years old as the time of the crime,
Speaker 5: who was in this group dynamic of these other girls
Speaker 5: where they were potentially kind of egging each other on
Speaker 5: and things got out of hand. There suddenly was by
Speaker 5: the nineties and the early two thousands science that supported
Speaker 5: this idea. So for the Roper v. Simmons case in
Speaker 5: two thousand and five, it finally ends the death penalty
Speaker 5: for kids four people under eighteen. That was a component
Speaker 5: that the sitting justices found really compelling.
Speaker 4: You also talk about Bill Pelk and what happens afterwards.
Speaker 5: Tell us well, Bill Pelk. So Bill Pelk and this
Speaker 5: collective of other murder victims family members, they end up
Speaker 5: forming a group. At first there's a group called Murder
Speaker 5: Victims Families to Reconciliation, and eventually Bill and this core
Speaker 5: group form something called the Journey, and they end up
Speaker 5: traveling through different states at different moments, tackling different death
Speaker 5: penalty states around the country, basically going on these two
Speaker 5: week long NonStop lecture tours that can drum up a
Speaker 5: lot of press, and they're telling their stories, the story
Speaker 5: of the toughest moments in their lives in front of
Speaker 5: the public. In front of the press in any of
Speaker 5: these death penalty states to just drum up an awareness
Speaker 5: of the fact that the victims' families do not always
Speaker 5: agree with the death sentence. This should not be a given.
Speaker 5: We've got to look at this issue more closely, and
Speaker 5: it creates an extraordinary new wing of the victims' rights movement.
Speaker 5: That was another extension of this incredible story, you know,
Speaker 5: the starting with this one violent event in Gary, Indiana.
Speaker 5: It was incredible to see how it's spurred on so
Speaker 5: many people to do to take action in ways that
Speaker 5: had big ramifications around the country.
Speaker 4: I want to thank you very much Alex mar for
Speaker 4: coming on and talking about Seventy Times seven, A True
Speaker 4: Story of Murder and Mercy for those people that might
Speaker 4: want to take a look at more information about this book.
Speaker 4: Do you have a website and do you do any
Speaker 4: social media?
Speaker 5: Absolutely so. My website is Alexdashmar dot com, and on
Speaker 5: Instagram and Twitter, my handle is underscore Alex underscore Mar
Speaker 5: and you can find me on there way too frequently.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, Alex Maher for coming on and
Speaker 4: talking about your incredible book, Seventy Time seven, A True
Speaker 4: Story of Murder and Mercy, you have a great evening
Speaker 4: and thank you so much for this interview.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Good Night,