October 30, 2023 • 48 mins
The story of one of America’s youngest death row inmates is tragic and complicated. How did a young woman in 1980s Indiana end up in prison? Alex Mar unfolds her incredible book, Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy. It’s a journey about racism, anger, and forgiveness.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
You have a forty year old white man steel worker
Vietnam VET who's writing very intimate, personal, emotionally raw letters
to the then sixteen year old girl. What connects them
is that she brutally murdered his grandmother.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:56):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold Where
Wicked Presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. The story of one of America's youngest
death Row inmates is tragic and complicated. How did a
(01:20):
young woman in nineteen eighties Indiana end up in prison?
Alex mar unfolds her incredible book Seventy Times Seven, a
true story of murder and mercy. It's a journey about racism, anger,
and forgiveness. Let's start with the setting. We're talking about
nineteen eighty five, Gary, Indiana. And I'll confess the only
(01:43):
thing I know about Gary, Indiana is the Jackson family.
So in eighty five, what is this.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Area like Gary really is? It's an American city that
was hit hard when the steel industry went down, So
in nineteen eighty five, the city's already really feeling the
effects of that. So back in the nineteen oh six
and the years after that, the city was created by
US Steel. So it was essentially a company town. They
(02:11):
bought up a bunch of acreage on the border of
Lake Michigan. There was nothing much there, and they said, look,
you know, we're thirty miles to Chicago. We've got the
waterfront here for shipping purposes. We're going to build the
ultimate steel processing plant right here, and we're going to
make a fortune. You know, that was the idea. So
Gary was actually named after one of the company executives,
(02:34):
and the town that they created was really designed to
provide for the native born, local white corporate executives connected
to the mill. Anyone else who came along and wanted
to get a job there. They were kind of out
of luck because they had to scramble for housing. At
(02:56):
the edges of town. People were living in overcrowded shack
with no plumbing and no paved streets at the edges
of town. And I bring all this up because one
of the important things to know in the background here
is this is a town that from day one was
heavily segregated in the way that it was built, the
way it was organized. You had a lot of black
(03:19):
workers who were migrating up from the South, trying to
get away from Jim Crow America and thinking, you know what,
this is great. I get you a job at a
booming steel town and things are going to be different.
But the reality was that the level of segregation and
racism was comparable to the worst parts of the Jim
Crow South. By the time you get to the eighties,
(03:42):
Gary's had its first black mayor. Richard Hatcher became the
first black mayor when he was elected in sixty nine.
And what happened as a result of that is the
white population kind of panicked and you had extreme white
flight out of Gary and so the white tax base
and the white businesses really abandoned the city and drained
(04:03):
the resources from it. They moved further south and there
were huge malls and suburbs where all the businesses went,
and all of these great, you know, little suburban communities
were developed that were totally white, and you ended up
with a city that had a robust black community and
white community that were separate, but they were both doing well,
(04:24):
and it became a city that was destined to fail economically.
Crime started rising, the steel jobs were declining, right, so
you can you can kind of get a sense of
the level of trouble that's in the air in Gary
at the time. At the same time, it was, you know,
the black community in which Paula Cooper, who's you know,
at the center of the story, was growing up, was vibrant.
(04:47):
You know, there were black churches and stores and restaurants
and record shops, and they had a number of local
papers that were black run. There had been a really
strong civil rights movement in the area. But at this point,
the economic downturn is it's not looking like things are
going to turn around. So most of the households that
(05:07):
had men working in the mills and there were a
lot of households that did, including Paula's. Those were stressed
out households. You know, in the early nineteen eighties there
were people who worked in the mills that didn't know
that within a few years about like two thirds of
them were going to lose their jobs. Wow, it was
really interesting. You know. You brought up the Jackson family,
but I in the course of my research, I ended
(05:27):
up driving by the old Jackson family home and the
Jacksons still still own it. It's a tiny home. I
think it was probably only two or three rooms for
all the kids and the two parents. You know, to
see where Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson grew up, you
really feel a sense of wow, you know how far
they traveled from those beginnings because that neighborhood has seen
(05:51):
some tough times.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Let's talk about crime. We know in the seventies and
the eighties the whole country struggled with rising crime rates.
What specific was happening in Gary, What really was the
thread was that people out of work and you know,
reacting with home invasions or what was happening.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
There was a whole range of problems that won't surprise anyone. Robberies,
home invasions, homicides. At the same time, you know, there
were a lot of sensational crimes taking place in the
white areas further south. I think it's worth just making
note of the fact that a little more hay was
made in the local papers of crimes committed by black locals.
(06:32):
And you know, what I think is important to have
a sense of to get the larger context, is that
Gary is up against the border the southern border of
Lake Michigan, as I mentioned, but it's part of larger
Lake County, right, and so Lake County is right up
against Illinois, and it connects in a way with the Chicago,
(06:52):
the greater Chicago metropolitan area. And Lake County is special
in that it's always been blue, you know, Union blue
in a red, red red state. Indiana is a red state.
You know, as many of your listeners are aware, Lake
County's became kind of infamous for its corruption on the
(07:13):
political scene, you know, beyond any crime that was coming
out of Gary in its immediate vicinity, it was often
compared to Cook County, where Chicago is, and they just said,
you know, the line that people would use is it's
just you know, the crimes just got fewer zeros on it, right,
that's it, but proportion it's the population. Lake County really
(07:33):
gave Chicago a run for their money. And back when
Robert F. Kennedy was Attorney General of the United States,
he had supposedly made this comment that Lake County was
easily one of the most corrupt counties in the nation.
And a lot of people I met in the legal
system in Lake County kind of proudly quoted that line
from RFK. So that's also important to keep in mind.
(07:57):
So there's political ambition, there's political corruption, and then you
also have the incredible tension created by segregation, racism, and
an economic downturn. And the local media really really loved
finding stories that would sell papers. They were also covered
(08:18):
by the Chicago press too, you know, so there was
a lot of room for local crime to be covered
in a sensationalized way at times. At the center of
this book is a crime committed by a fifteen year
old girl, a truly violent crime that took place in
the spring of nineteen eighty five. But actually I chose
to start the book with a moment a little further
(08:41):
back in time, in nineteen seventy nine to give the
readers a better sense of who Paula was and the
kind of childhood she had. So in seventy nine, she
was actually only nine years old and she lived with
her sister Ronda, who was twelve at the time. They
lived in a household that was incredibly unstable, and the
(09:01):
scene that opens the book is a morning in seventy
nine when their mother, Gloria, has kept them up all
night in hysterics and has convinced them to go out
to the garage with her very early in the morning,
and she gets them into the rear passenger seats of
the car. It's an old Chevy Vega. She rolls down
(09:24):
the garage door, she gets in, she pulls down the windows,
and she starts running the engine. And the girls understand
that the intention is that they will not be leaving
the garage. This is it. They're going to end their
lives that morning, and there's something about their mother that
has that kind of power over them, and they're such
(09:44):
young girls. Right at the last minute, Gloria has a
change of heart and carries the girls, who've passed out
at that point back into the house and she puts
them in their bed in their bedroom, Ronda, the older sister,
at some point wakes up and can hard move, and
eventually she regains consciousness and she sees their mother has
left a note on the door saying that she's going
(10:07):
to finish what she started by herself. So Ronda ends
up calling one of their aunts hysterically and the ance says, look,
you've got to go to the neighbors and get help.
And so she's able to get help from the neighbors,
who drag Gloria out of the garage and they start
performing CPR on her. At a certain point, nine year
old Paula has wandered out of the house too and
(10:29):
sees this happening, and eventually medics come and the fire
department and all of these people are taking turns trying
to revive her mother, and she becomes hysterical. Ronda told
me that she'd spend a lot of her life wondering
how Paula could commit the horrible crime she eventually did
when she was fifteen, but that that was the moment
(10:50):
that she thought things finally changed for Paula. You know,
they've been living with a certain amount of abuse, but
it was that morning that she thinks her sister something
in her changed that she truly became a young a
traumatized young person, and no one took the kids out
of the home. You know, it took years before they
were even put into emergency foster care or emergency shelter
(11:13):
and whatnot, And regularly they were returned to their mother's house.
And that is where Paula was living when three weeks later,
right after being returned home three weeks later, she committed
this terrible crime. So I say that it's just a
way to set this up. What happened when she was
fifteen is her sister had had already left home. Her
(11:34):
sister was a few years older and had learned that
her biological father was someone else, and so she had
a way out of this terrible household. Wow, her biological
father turned out to be a stable, loving guy and
they were able to make that work. Paula did not
have any legal kind of custody argument for going with
(11:55):
her sister. She was stuck and one day at school
at Leu Wallace hig Scho School in Gary, during lunch break,
she got together with a couple of friends who were
also ninth and tenth graders. There was a girl, Karen,
who was sixteen, April who was fifteen, and a young
girl named Denise who was just fourteen, and they all
(12:15):
decided to skip school for the rest of the day.
They went over to April's house because she lived just
a few blocks away in the Glen Park neighborhood, and
they sat on her back porch and they were just bored.
They didn't have any money left to spend at the
arcade or to do anything, so they thought they would
try to rob someone in the neighborhood. April had taken
(12:37):
Bible lessons from Ruth Pelke, who was a seventy eight
year old woman who lived right across the alleyway from
her in Glenn Park, and she said, you know, she's
home alone a lot. Her husband died a few years ago,
and she has you know, she's always helping people out,
which means that she has more than she needs. You know,
she's probably got extra money and jewelry lying around the house.
(13:00):
I think we should talk our way in there and
see what we can get.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Let me go back a moment, So between nine, when
this terrible thing happens with her mother, in fifteen, she
continues to live with her mother. I'm assuming, right yes,
is the instability the same? Does it get any better
for her?
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Well, So what ends up happening is after Ronda leaves home,
Paula runs away. A number of times she tries to
run away, She's regularly picked up by the police and
returned home. Her father, Herman Cooper, is physically abusive. One night,
she actually runs to the nearest police station and says
(13:36):
to them, you know, you've got to help me out.
You can see the bruises. You've got to do something
for me. And so then she starts getting bounced around
foster care. So you have these brief periods in maybe
a few weeks, it maybe a few months, and maybe
longer than that, but she's always being brought back home,
And anytime she acts out in one of these foster
care scenarios, she's sent to juvenile detention along with kids
(14:02):
who actually have a criminal record and who are in
there for more serious stuff. So you can kind of
see the cycle of trauma and also exposing her to
people who are not going to be a great influence
on her and are not going to be a stabilizing
force in her life, and blaming her for acting out.
I'm not saying that she didn't encounter social workers and
(14:22):
individuals who didn't try to help. Yeah, but all in all,
this was a pretty disastrous scenario. And actually, at one point,
a social worker assigned to her and her sister Ronda,
was asked by Ronda's biological father, you know, isn't there
some way I could make a case to adopt Paula
(14:42):
as well? And he was told, you know what, I'm
retiring in six months. Her mother is crazy and I
just don't want to deal with this. So I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
I mean, that's terrible. And can I assume that these
other three young women, no one's older than sixteen? Is
that in this group who goes on and does this
terrible thing? It sounds like everybody is probably in a
similar situation. Are they all from unstable households also in
the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
So you had a sixteen year old and two fifteen
year olds, including Paula. They were all living in households
where they either had only one parent or the parenting
situation was incredibly unstable and volatile. Two of the other girls, Karen,
the oldest girl, had at that point, already had a baby.
She had gotten pregnant at twelve and had the baby
(15:31):
at thirteen. Her mother had died of cancer. April's mother
had died of cancer, and she was kind of being
bounced around between households. So you really have a scenario
for three out of these four girls where there's no
stability in terms of the adult presences in their lives.
The youngest, Denise, she was someone who just hung out
(15:53):
with the wrong kids at lunch that day. So you
had someone who came from more of a stable family situation,
who had been a pretty good student, and it was
a case of just the worst circumstance to end up
in on that day.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
It seems so like a big jump from being an
unstabled household to then saying let's go rob an old
woman who teaches the Bible to young kids. Is there
an escalation in do they have any petty crimes before then?
Or is this their first big idea with crime.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
There were a couple other scenarios where they found a
way into neighboring homes and grabbed a few things when
someone wasn't home, nothing that went beyond petty delinquent crime.
I think one of the girls had had a shoplifting
incident on her record, but that's a far cry from
(16:49):
violent crime. Right, So this was just an enormous, enormous leap,
And I think it's really important to keep in mind
something that I really rush with in the book because
I wanted to make clear how horrific this crime was,
to also give a sense of Paula's background. I am
not saying that this is an excuse for what she did.
(17:12):
And also her older sister, Ronda, who I did eventually
get to know quite well through the course of researching
this story, she doesn't feel that way either. That no
one involved is trying to say that there is a
legitimate explanation for what happened that afternoon. I think what
readers will hopefully do is they'll put themselves in the
(17:32):
mindset of, Okay, if this happened in my community, in
my neighborhood, what would my response be, because I think that's
the more important question. Right, she's fifteen, she commits murder
in this horrific way that's unjustifiable, but she's still a kid,
and you cannot change that fact. What is the right
(17:52):
response as a community or as the prosecutor in Lake
County for instance, who becomes a pretty big character.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
So We're talking about a spring day in nineteen eighty
five in Gary and Deana, and you have these four girls,
two fifteen year olds, a sixteen year old and a
fourteen year old, and they think that they are going
to go and there's a woman who lives at home,
Ruth Helki, and she's seventy eight, unarmed, and it will
be easy for them to go in and rob her,
(18:21):
nobody had money, and walk out. I have to assume
the intention was not to murder her, is that right.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
What's interesting is the prosecutor, Jack Crawford, and his deputy
who handled the case, they really pushed a narrative that
this was premeditated, This was a pre meditated robbery and murder.
I found that to be total nonsense. It seemed obvious
to me that these girls walked in there to rob
(18:50):
this elderly woman so they could go off and have
some fun. I'm fairly convinced that Paula's actions in the
way in which those escalated came as a shock to
everyone in that house, and the violence ratcheted up from there.
There's research that's been done in much more recent years,
(19:12):
not the kind of research we had in the eighties.
As to how heightened group dynamics can become between juveniles.
When you have a group of teenagers together and one
of them takes part in high risk behavior, the rest
of the group is far more likely to jump on board, right,
and you have a kind of runaway train scenario that
(19:32):
has the possibility for unfolding. Again, this is not an excuse.
It's just trying to understand what might have happened in
that house in May of nineteen eighty five. I spent
five years researching this book, and no one really knows
what happened or why who's still alive.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
So the four of them head over that day in May,
and one of them is.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Armed, right, So what happens is when Paula cares and
in Denise go over to April's house. April takes a
knife out of the kitchen drawer and says, you know,
when you go over there, you can scare missus Pelki
with this. Paula takes the knife and she hides it
under her jean jacket. April, knowing that she already has
(20:17):
a relationship with missus Pelk, who taught her Bible studies,
who was nice to her after her mother died, who
made lunch for her, who took her to church a
couple times. April decides it's less complicated if she stays behind,
because there's that sort of recognition that they can avoid.
The other girls don't actually know about the relationship April
has with missus Pelk already, and I found that to
(20:38):
be really a disturbing part of the background of this crime.
So the three others walk across the alley and they
go up the front steps of missus Pelk's house and
they knock on the door, and eventually they are allowed in.
They say that, you know, we need you to write
down some information about Bible study. My aunt wants to
(21:00):
know when it is and maybe you could write it
down for us, something along those lines. She lets them
in and she says, okay, well, I'm going to just
get some note paper, and they follow her through the
house and into her dining room. She's got a little
secretary desk up against the wall, and as she's turned
around to start writing a note for them, Paula picks
(21:20):
up a paperweight, a glass paperweight, and hits her in
the head and missus Pelkie falls to the floor. Paula
described this moment later that there was this moment where
her hair was so white, and then there was the
red suddenly of the woman starting to bleed on her head.
From the way in which she later described the incident,
(21:41):
it sounds like that was a very deep triggering moment
for Paula, and she went to find the knife in
her jacket, which was somewhere within reach, and she pushed
missus Pelkie down and began stabbing her. And it was
clearly an extremely heightened, irrational moment because she ultimately stabbed
(22:04):
missus Pelki thirty three times. Wow. There was nothing about
this where they were threatening her for her money, and
something went a little too far. It went way beyond that,
and none of the other girls went for help. They
eventually ransacked the house and were only able to find
(22:24):
about ten dollars and the keys to missus Pelki's plymouth,
so they ended up leaving and leaving missus Pelk on
the floor and going for a joy ride in her plymouth.
They were not all brought in until a couple days later.
Paula had a doctor's note with a prescription for birth
control in the pocket of her jacket, and she'd left
(22:46):
that behind at the scene I mean, there were a
number of factors at the scene of the crime that
made clear that these were kids. There were some details
that you know, leaving your jacket with identifying information in
it behind. There was a real box that had been
left open on the counter in the kitchen where clearly
one of them had a snack somewhere in the middle
of all of this. And it's just really terrible, and
(23:09):
they came away with nothing. It was it was a
completely chaotic crime committed by kids.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
How is this discovered? Does one of missus Pelkie's kids
come over or is there a welfare check?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Missus Pelki had a number of grown step kids who
lived in the area, and she was well beloved by
all of them and had become really like a deep
part of her that family's life when she married their father.
So she had a number of step kids and grandkids
who live nearby, and so her steps on. Bob Pelki
(23:44):
was concerned that she hadn't answered the phone, because they
would regularly talk on the phone, so he stopped over midday.
It was the next day he stopped in midday and
he looked through this opening in the mail slot when
she didn't answer, and he saw sort of like a
mess where selfa cushions and papers had been thrown everywhere. Right,
(24:04):
this was absolutely not you know, she was an extremely
meticulous woman. And immediately he knew something was wrong, and
so he found the extra key and let himself in
and he discovered Ruth. He had to run down the
street knocking on doors. It was the middle of the day.
Most people weren't home, they were at work, until he
could find someone who would be able to call the
(24:25):
police because the girls had also torn the phone out
of the phone jack out of the wall. It's a
terrible crime to have to think about and grapple with.
And there were various moments where I was immersed in
understanding paula situation and how young she was and her background,
and I would make sure to go over occasionally the
(24:47):
details of the crimea. I've seen the crime scene photos.
They're just terrible. I thought it was really important not
to fall under the spell of the prosecutor on the
one hand, but also not to forg get what actually
took place that day, and so how do you maneuver that?
And it makes what happened next even more extraordinary? I
(25:23):
think what is extraordinary about this story and what is
so important to grapple with She was a kid, She
was fifteen years old, which I think makes any assessment
of her culpability a lot more complex, and that was
something that I dove headlong into, just grappling with that question.
(25:49):
What does it mean when a child commits a violent crime?
And what does our response to that crime say about us?
If we are willing to apply the ultimate punishment to
a juvenile, to a teenager, what does that say about
us as a culture society? What does that say about
(26:09):
our true goals in our criminal justice system? Because it
was possible to sentence teenagers to death in nineteen eighty five,
it was possible all the way up until two thousand
and five, which was a lot more recent than I
think a lot of people realize. So within less than
a year, Paula Cooper had been sentenced to death. The
(26:31):
reaction in the local media was very much about the
shock of her crime and sort of the sense that,
you know, what is society coming to that young people
can be involved in such a horrific crime, right? That
was the tenor of the coverage. It was not shock
at the fact that we had just sentenced a kid
(26:53):
to the electric chair, right, That was not part of
the coverage, and it took it took a little while
for the tables to turn. It actually took the European
media becoming aware of the fact that a fifteen year
old girl had just been sentenced to death in the
United States to change the media conversation around the crime
(27:15):
in the United States. So I actually tracked down. It
came down to ultimately two Italian journalists who caught wind
of this through a tiny line item somewhere in the
middle of an issue of USA Today. While they were traveling.
They caught wind of her sentence and convinced their editors
(27:37):
back in Rome and in Florence to fund their travel
to Gary to look into what the situation was. So
they ended up having front page stories in Italy that
were picked up around Europe. It became a sensation as
a story in Italy for the exact opposite reason that
it did in the US and the Midwest. Then the
(27:59):
media here started covering the fact that we were being shamed.
Indiana specifically was being shamed by the European press for
this decision, right, And so it turned the tables on
this issue and made it a much more complex conversation.
Something else that took place within a few months of
(28:20):
Paula's death sentence is I think, possibly the most extraordinary
part of this story. A man named Bill Pelki, who
was the adult grandson of the victim Ruth Pelki, decided
against the wishes of his family, his friends, his congregation,
his coworkers, really truly against the wishes of everyone he knew.
(28:42):
He decided to publicly forgive Paula for killing his grandmother.
He had a revelation that his grandmother would not want
this girl killed in her name, and once that conviction
came to him, he wouldn't let it go. And this
was a guy who didn't have a political bone in
his body. He was not someone who was used to
(29:04):
making waves. He was a crane operator in a steel mill,
Bethlehem Steel in Portage, Indiana, just outside Gary. He'd been
a crane operator there for a couple decades. He just
you know, punched the clock, came home, cashed his check.
He didn't want trouble. And one night up in the crane,
(29:24):
he was there doing a late shift. He'd been called
in and for some reason there was no work, so
he was alone hovering up above this warehouse in the dark,
and he started thinking about everything that had taken place
over the last few months, how he'd been grieving the
death of his grandmother, but also how he felt that
he'd really messed up his own life. He had just
(29:47):
filed for bankruptcy, he was on his way to losing
his living girlfriend, Judy, who he'd fallen so deeply in
love with. He'd gotten divorced to his first wife, you know,
and so he was just feeling, you know, on top
of that, I think I'm about to disappoint my grandmother.
I'm about to let something else terrible happen.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Well, and he's making a series of bad decisions. That's
where he's ending up, is that there's a divorce and
the girlfriend and the bankruptcy. And I'm sure it occurs
to him how easy it is to make bad decisions,
you know. I mean, we're human, That's what happens. Does
he feel any sort of parallel in any way to
the girls or at Paula?
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Was there something interesting? I think sometimes you know, the
human mind, when you're alone, you're in the dark, you're tired,
you're exhausted, you're emotionally depleted. You know, that was the
state he was in. You start to kind of reassociate
in your mind, and he's up there in this crane
cab and he has this image for the first time,
he has this image of Paula Cooper on death row.
(30:52):
He was there in court. He took time off from
work to be there in court the day she was
given the death sentence because there was a rumor that
that's how it was going to go. And he wanted
to be there to see the girl who had killed
his grandmother get death. And this is the first time
really that he'd thought about that, and he thought to himself,
you know, her cell's probably the size of this cab.
(31:12):
She's probably sitting in the dark. She's alone, and she's
far more desperate than I will ever be, regardless of
how I feel about all of the fuck ups in
my life. Right, this is someone who's in a far
wars situation. And then he saw his grandmother the way
she was before her death. There was a family photo
(31:34):
that had been used in a lot of the press
around her murder. It's like one of those studio portrait
kind of Midwestern studio portrait photos, you know, where everyone's
got their hair perfect, and they're done up for the session,
and he pictures his grandmother and he pictures her weeping,
and it's really kind of it reminded me of those
(31:55):
moments where people imagine they've seen the Virgin Mary crying.
This a statue of a Catholic saint crying, right. It
was a spiritual moment for him, and he believed that
this image came to him because his grandmother would have
wept at the idea of this young girl being executed
in her name. He walks away that night, he leaves
(32:18):
the mill feeling for the first time that he actually
has a sense of purpose in his life. He has
a mission. Now. The next thing he's going to do
is he's going to reach out and he's going to
write to this girl on death row and he's going
to figure out what he can do to help her.
And he ends up the next day sitting down writing
a letter and mailing it to the teenage kid who
(32:40):
murdered his grandmother.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
If we take one step back, because I've been curious
about this, how would you describe Paula's demeanor through this
whole thing once she's caught. Is there a sense in
the court or in jail of remorse or understanding, or
is she so hot, hardened based on her background and
(33:02):
now being a fifteen year old in a women's prison,
that there's no way to get through to her.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
I spent some time wrestling with the question of whether
or not Paula had any remorse for her crime. But
I also asked myself how capable a teenager is of remorse,
or at least the kind of remorse that would be
recognizable to an adult. I don't have the answer to that.
(33:30):
I know that at her sentencing hearing she received her
public defender did not do a great job. His performance
was thin at best, and I think that, going by
the court transcripts, I don't think Paula was coached at
all as to how to behave in a courtroom in
the kinds of statements that you should try to make
(33:50):
in that scenario. I think she was angry. I think
she was overwhelmed. The judge ultimately commented on what seemed
like her lack of remorse at the time. I think
it took her a long time to understand what she
had done. She ended up having a relationship with Bill Pelk.
(34:12):
They had a correspondence that was very deep and went
on for years and years and years, and I was
able to read hundreds of letters between them, maybe about
you know, nine months to a year into their correspondence,
I started to feel that she was genuinely trying to
express to him her shock at what she had done
and how terrible it was that she had taken this
(34:34):
special person from his life, you know. And one of
the first things Bill wrote her about is he said,
I want to tell you about my grandmother, you know.
He would just try to describe how much she was
loved and the people in her life and what made
her special to him, And eventually he sent her a
photo of his grandmother, you know. And so part of
(34:55):
the process on Bill's end was trying to get her
to understand what she had done done. He never came
right out and said, you know, I need to know
why you did what you did.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
I'm sure he realized that she probably didn't know that.
It was just this sort of you know, the background,
it's everything, everything happening in her life. But what role
is Bill playing to Paula? Why answer his letters at
all and then start to show some sort of softening
and real hundreds of letters over the years.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Look, I think, honestly, something that drew me in and
what really really got its hooks into me was, let
me just think about it. You have a forty year
old white man steel worker Vietnam Vett, Yeah, who's writing
very intimate, personal, emotionally raw letters to the then sixteen
(35:48):
year old girl, black girl from Gary, from a community
he has nothing in common with, who's a runaway from
an abusive home. And what connects them is that she
brutally murdered his grandmother. Can you imagine, like, what is
that correspondence? And I was so drawn into that. To me,
(36:10):
that had the psychological complexity of a novel. And there
was a degree to which at first Bill had the
power in a way because he was extending his generous
forgiveness towards this girl in a desperate situation. But there
were moments where Bill would write to Paula and confess
(36:30):
how tough of a time he was having in his
breakup with Judy, and she would write back with friendly advice.
It was unlike any other relationship that either of them
had ever had, and I think that's what opened them
both up. That was something I found totally extraordinary. Another
topic but worth noting. The letters also proved to me
(36:53):
that even though Paula had bounced around nine to nine
or ten schools before her arrest, had skipped classes all
the time, she really had no meaningful education. Within the
first year of writing these letters, she had taught herself
to write. She expressed herself beautifully. She had this raw,
kind of weird sense of humor that came out. She
was very brave. She wrote sassy letters to the ACLU.
(37:17):
This story takes on this incredible scope where she's she
literally wrote a letter directly to Pope John paul the
Second and he received it personally. You know, you see
Paula's voice evolving and her intelligence, and I really felt
the loss of what she could have become under a
(37:39):
different circumstance. After she was sentenced to death, her case
was taken up by an appellate public defender in Lake County,
Bill Touchet, who also brought on board Monica Foster, who
was a young attorney a few years out of law school,
honestly not that many years older than Paula herself, and
(37:59):
both of them worked passionately on Paula's behalf and Monica
when she first went to visit Paula on death row,
was so was honestly frightened. You know. She admitted that
to me that she thought she was going to go
and have a meeting with someone who was almost like
an animal. She couldn't imagine what kind of young person
was capable of committing such a terrible crime. And instead
(38:21):
she met a girl who was overwhelmed, probably clinically depressed,
who could not stop weeping during their meeting, and who
was convinced that because she'd been sentenced to death, she
was going to be carried off to the death house
at any moment. No one had explained to her, and
she was young enough she had no understanding of the system, right,
(38:43):
No one had explained her. No, No, there's a process.
She honestly woke up every day thinking that that might
be the day she was taken to the electric chair,
and Monica had to be the one to sort of
try to walk her through. No, this is how the
system works. It's going to be years. We have a
lot of options, and you have to calm down. I
bring Monica up, because she then took it upon herself
(39:06):
with her very modest kind of green attorney's salary to
pay for an independent therapist, or Paula to pay for
her to have a tutor, to pay for her education
at first. And it was through that relationship that Paula
you can almost almost to the date when she starts
having those conversations with Monica, she starts writing in her
(39:29):
letters to Bill about.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
The future positive role models.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, when I get out, I might become a businesswoman
or you know whatever the fantasy of the week was.
But up until that point, there was there was no
looking ahead. There was only today, twenty three hours in
the same cell. Because also she was, you know, she
was a very very young person being kept in total segregation.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Let's talk about the issue with Bill Helk's family. Is
it too simplistic to say that They all said, Bill,
why are you doing this? This is infuriating us. You
were trampling on, you know, Ruth's memory. How could you
support this killer? How could you write her and you know,
try to be close to her. Was that sort of
(40:14):
their reaction?
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Oh? Absolutely, it was discussed confusion, total alienation, heartache. I
sympathized with them, feeling really seis wiped by this. They
just did not see this decision coming, especially Bill's parents,
and so his father, Bob, remember is the one who
(40:37):
discovered Ruth's body on the carpet in the dining room.
I mean, it was a terrible situation. He testified in
the hearings of all four girls and made very clear
that he was speaking on behalf of the family that
they wanted the ultimate punishment for this terrible crime, and
that was that he spoke as a devout Christian, as
(41:01):
a war veteran, you know this. Our country should not
allow a crime like this to go unpunished. And he
was made to believe, in part by the prosecutor that
if this girl was not sentenced to death, it would
not be sufficient. Life in prison was not what he
was looking for. They wanted to send a message. There
(41:21):
were ultimately some headlines in local papers, sometimes on the
front page, that pitted Robert Pelke versus Bill Pelki, his son,
and they would have pull quotes the answers forgiveness from
Bill and then his father. You know, my son is
of the generation that thinks that people shouldn't have to
pay for what they've done. Ultimately, within several months, Bill
(41:48):
ended up having a conversation in private with a cousin
of his who he loved dearly, and she revealed to him.
You know, I've been reading the coverage in the newspapers,
and I want you to know that I feel the
same way. I don't want this girl's life to be taken,
and I do think that our grandmother would have forgiven her,
(42:08):
you know. And then there was another family member, right,
And so there were people who quietly they didn't want
to hurt the rest of the family, so they had
really not engaged in this discussion, but they reached out
to him personally. Many years later, Bill and his father
reconciled around this. Bill had such strength of conviction around
(42:30):
this that he was willing to take the risk of
breaking apart the rest of his family.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
So they are writing to each other for years. Paula
and Bill, Ultimately, what happens with all of this, and
tell me what happens with the other girls too, because
I don't think we talked about their sentences, But really,
where do we end up over the next twenty thirty
years with this case, the other.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Three girls, Karen, April, and Denise, all received serious prisons
and stances. Death was only on the table ultimately for
Paula Karen had a capital charge, but she was not
sentenced to death. Paula's case ultimately goes up to the
state Supreme Court in Indiana, and because of really risky,
(43:17):
brave actions taken by a number of different characters we
meet along the way, a scenario is set up where
this case is kind of teed up for the Indiana
Supreme Court and they have a way by resting on
the state constitution and also a recent US Supreme Court
decision at the time to commute her sentence. Wow, So
(43:38):
Paula is instead given a very long prison sentence sixty years,
which in Indiana realistically is about half that amount of
time if you have good conduct in.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Prison and time served, right, So she had already been
in for how long at that.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Point, a couple of years. And what's interesting is I
think Paula's reaction to it was in credibly mixed because
she understood that she'd won, so to speak. But at
that point, she was eighteen or nineteen years old. You know,
she'd been on death row for two and a half
three years. To hear that you're going to spend thirty
(44:14):
years in prison sounded to her a little bit like
the rest of her life. I mean, that's not even
the halfway point of the book, I will say, because
the story evolves and becomes more complex. Bill Pelki ends
up taking this kind of self transformation that occurred through
the relationship he had with Paula Cooper. His identity now
(44:37):
has forever changed. He can't just go back to clocking
in at the mill and keeping his head down. He
now wants to change the criminal justice system. He wants
to talk about the death penalty as someone who's a
murder victim's family member, and he begins reaching out and
(44:59):
actually disc one by one other murder victims family members
around the country who also did not want death for
the person who killed their loved one, right And at
the time, these people were unicorns, you know, and this
was not you were not seeing murder victims family members
(45:19):
in the public eye as voices in the justice system.
And part of that was because a lot of you know,
the shame that they felt in their community. They were
pariahs in a lot of cases. But also the prosecutor
handled their case did not want a family member who
was going to come forward and challenge his agenda. For
(45:41):
someone who's personally really fascinated by the many facets of
our criminal justice system. There was, I do want to mention,
there was this other piece of it for me, which
is I'd never really, i'd never really before had the
palpable sense of how tough this kind of work can be.
Someone like Monica Foster who grows to really care about
(46:03):
Paula Cooper and she goes on to represent other people
who are possibly up for death, knowing each time that
you can lose your client, this person you have a
year's long relationship with, and it will be very hard
for you to convince yourself that some part of that
wasn't your fault. That added another human dimension to the
(46:26):
process for me, and also to see members of the media.
You know, I mentioned these two Italian journalists for instance,
who chose to amplify a different side to the headline
and actually ended up making a difference as a result.
You know, there really are these opportunities to change the
course of events for the better. And you see that
(46:49):
in different different moments in this story, where someone chooses
to make an unconventional choice, they choose to forgive in
a scenario in which that's considered reritibly out there they
choose to make an effort to kind of step out
of their lane and jump in the fray with this
incredibly fraught circumstance. Right, ultimately, with all that in mind,
(47:12):
Paula's case, you know, I connect the dots between her
case and all the issues involved with that all the
way up to the end of the death penalty for
juveniles in this country in two thousand and five, because
a number of the players actually are the same. So
that was really remarkable to see how you start with
one crime on one corner in Gary, Indiana, and you
(47:33):
end up impacting the fates of a lot of teenagers
in this country.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate
producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(48:11):
produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook. At tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(48:33):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
You have a forty year old white man steel worker
Vietnam VET who's writing very intimate, personal, emotionally raw letters
to the then sixteen year old girl. What connects them
is that she brutally murdered his grandmother.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:56):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold Where
Wicked Presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. The story of one of America's youngest
death Row inmates is tragic and complicated. How did a
(01:20):
young woman in nineteen eighties Indiana end up in prison?
Alex mar unfolds her incredible book Seventy Times Seven, a
true story of murder and mercy. It's a journey about racism, anger,
and forgiveness. Let's start with the setting. We're talking about
nineteen eighty five, Gary, Indiana. And I'll confess the only
(01:43):
thing I know about Gary, Indiana is the Jackson family.
So in eighty five, what is this.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Area like Gary really is? It's an American city that
was hit hard when the steel industry went down, So
in nineteen eighty five, the city's already really feeling the
effects of that. So back in the nineteen oh six
and the years after that, the city was created by
US Steel. So it was essentially a company town. They
(02:11):
bought up a bunch of acreage on the border of
Lake Michigan. There was nothing much there, and they said, look,
you know, we're thirty miles to Chicago. We've got the
waterfront here for shipping purposes. We're going to build the
ultimate steel processing plant right here, and we're going to
make a fortune. You know, that was the idea. So
Gary was actually named after one of the company executives,
(02:34):
and the town that they created was really designed to
provide for the native born, local white corporate executives connected
to the mill. Anyone else who came along and wanted
to get a job there. They were kind of out
of luck because they had to scramble for housing. At
(02:56):
the edges of town. People were living in overcrowded shack
with no plumbing and no paved streets at the edges
of town. And I bring all this up because one
of the important things to know in the background here
is this is a town that from day one was
heavily segregated in the way that it was built, the
way it was organized. You had a lot of black
(03:19):
workers who were migrating up from the South, trying to
get away from Jim Crow America and thinking, you know what,
this is great. I get you a job at a
booming steel town and things are going to be different.
But the reality was that the level of segregation and
racism was comparable to the worst parts of the Jim
Crow South. By the time you get to the eighties,
(03:42):
Gary's had its first black mayor. Richard Hatcher became the
first black mayor when he was elected in sixty nine.
And what happened as a result of that is the
white population kind of panicked and you had extreme white
flight out of Gary and so the white tax base
and the white businesses really abandoned the city and drained
(04:03):
the resources from it. They moved further south and there
were huge malls and suburbs where all the businesses went,
and all of these great, you know, little suburban communities
were developed that were totally white, and you ended up
with a city that had a robust black community and
white community that were separate, but they were both doing well,
(04:24):
and it became a city that was destined to fail economically.
Crime started rising, the steel jobs were declining, right, so
you can you can kind of get a sense of
the level of trouble that's in the air in Gary
at the time. At the same time, it was, you know,
the black community in which Paula Cooper, who's you know,
at the center of the story, was growing up, was vibrant.
(04:47):
You know, there were black churches and stores and restaurants
and record shops, and they had a number of local
papers that were black run. There had been a really
strong civil rights movement in the area. But at this point,
the economic downturn is it's not looking like things are
going to turn around. So most of the households that
(05:07):
had men working in the mills and there were a
lot of households that did, including Paula's. Those were stressed
out households. You know, in the early nineteen eighties there
were people who worked in the mills that didn't know
that within a few years about like two thirds of
them were going to lose their jobs. Wow, it was
really interesting. You know. You brought up the Jackson family,
but I in the course of my research, I ended
(05:27):
up driving by the old Jackson family home and the
Jacksons still still own it. It's a tiny home. I
think it was probably only two or three rooms for
all the kids and the two parents. You know, to
see where Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson grew up, you
really feel a sense of wow, you know how far
they traveled from those beginnings because that neighborhood has seen
(05:51):
some tough times.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Let's talk about crime. We know in the seventies and
the eighties the whole country struggled with rising crime rates.
What specific was happening in Gary, What really was the
thread was that people out of work and you know,
reacting with home invasions or what was happening.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
There was a whole range of problems that won't surprise anyone. Robberies,
home invasions, homicides. At the same time, you know, there
were a lot of sensational crimes taking place in the
white areas further south. I think it's worth just making
note of the fact that a little more hay was
made in the local papers of crimes committed by black locals.
(06:32):
And you know, what I think is important to have
a sense of to get the larger context, is that
Gary is up against the border the southern border of
Lake Michigan, as I mentioned, but it's part of larger
Lake County, right, and so Lake County is right up
against Illinois, and it connects in a way with the Chicago,
(06:52):
the greater Chicago metropolitan area. And Lake County is special
in that it's always been blue, you know, Union blue
in a red, red red state. Indiana is a red state.
You know, as many of your listeners are aware, Lake
County's became kind of infamous for its corruption on the
(07:13):
political scene, you know, beyond any crime that was coming
out of Gary in its immediate vicinity, it was often
compared to Cook County, where Chicago is, and they just said,
you know, the line that people would use is it's
just you know, the crimes just got fewer zeros on it, right,
that's it, but proportion it's the population. Lake County really
(07:33):
gave Chicago a run for their money. And back when
Robert F. Kennedy was Attorney General of the United States,
he had supposedly made this comment that Lake County was
easily one of the most corrupt counties in the nation.
And a lot of people I met in the legal
system in Lake County kind of proudly quoted that line
from RFK. So that's also important to keep in mind.
(07:57):
So there's political ambition, there's political corruption, and then you
also have the incredible tension created by segregation, racism, and
an economic downturn. And the local media really really loved
finding stories that would sell papers. They were also covered
(08:18):
by the Chicago press too, you know, so there was
a lot of room for local crime to be covered
in a sensationalized way at times. At the center of
this book is a crime committed by a fifteen year
old girl, a truly violent crime that took place in
the spring of nineteen eighty five. But actually I chose
to start the book with a moment a little further
(08:41):
back in time, in nineteen seventy nine to give the
readers a better sense of who Paula was and the
kind of childhood she had. So in seventy nine, she
was actually only nine years old and she lived with
her sister Ronda, who was twelve at the time. They
lived in a household that was incredibly unstable, and the
(09:01):
scene that opens the book is a morning in seventy
nine when their mother, Gloria, has kept them up all
night in hysterics and has convinced them to go out
to the garage with her very early in the morning,
and she gets them into the rear passenger seats of
the car. It's an old Chevy Vega. She rolls down
(09:24):
the garage door, she gets in, she pulls down the windows,
and she starts running the engine. And the girls understand
that the intention is that they will not be leaving
the garage. This is it. They're going to end their
lives that morning, and there's something about their mother that
has that kind of power over them, and they're such
(09:44):
young girls. Right at the last minute, Gloria has a
change of heart and carries the girls, who've passed out
at that point back into the house and she puts
them in their bed in their bedroom, Ronda, the older sister,
at some point wakes up and can hard move, and
eventually she regains consciousness and she sees their mother has
left a note on the door saying that she's going
(10:07):
to finish what she started by herself. So Ronda ends
up calling one of their aunts hysterically and the ance says, look,
you've got to go to the neighbors and get help.
And so she's able to get help from the neighbors,
who drag Gloria out of the garage and they start
performing CPR on her. At a certain point, nine year
old Paula has wandered out of the house too and
(10:29):
sees this happening, and eventually medics come and the fire
department and all of these people are taking turns trying
to revive her mother, and she becomes hysterical. Ronda told
me that she'd spend a lot of her life wondering
how Paula could commit the horrible crime she eventually did
when she was fifteen, but that that was the moment
(10:50):
that she thought things finally changed for Paula. You know,
they've been living with a certain amount of abuse, but
it was that morning that she thinks her sister something
in her changed that she truly became a young a
traumatized young person, and no one took the kids out
of the home. You know, it took years before they
were even put into emergency foster care or emergency shelter
(11:13):
and whatnot, And regularly they were returned to their mother's house.
And that is where Paula was living when three weeks later,
right after being returned home three weeks later, she committed
this terrible crime. So I say that it's just a
way to set this up. What happened when she was
fifteen is her sister had had already left home. Her
(11:34):
sister was a few years older and had learned that
her biological father was someone else, and so she had
a way out of this terrible household. Wow, her biological
father turned out to be a stable, loving guy and
they were able to make that work. Paula did not
have any legal kind of custody argument for going with
(11:55):
her sister. She was stuck and one day at school
at Leu Wallace hig Scho School in Gary, during lunch break,
she got together with a couple of friends who were
also ninth and tenth graders. There was a girl, Karen,
who was sixteen, April who was fifteen, and a young
girl named Denise who was just fourteen, and they all
(12:15):
decided to skip school for the rest of the day.
They went over to April's house because she lived just
a few blocks away in the Glen Park neighborhood, and
they sat on her back porch and they were just bored.
They didn't have any money left to spend at the
arcade or to do anything, so they thought they would
try to rob someone in the neighborhood. April had taken
(12:37):
Bible lessons from Ruth Pelke, who was a seventy eight
year old woman who lived right across the alleyway from
her in Glenn Park, and she said, you know, she's
home alone a lot. Her husband died a few years ago,
and she has you know, she's always helping people out,
which means that she has more than she needs. You know,
she's probably got extra money and jewelry lying around the house.
(13:00):
I think we should talk our way in there and
see what we can get.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Let me go back a moment, So between nine, when
this terrible thing happens with her mother, in fifteen, she
continues to live with her mother. I'm assuming, right yes,
is the instability the same? Does it get any better
for her?
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Well, So what ends up happening is after Ronda leaves home,
Paula runs away. A number of times she tries to
run away, She's regularly picked up by the police and
returned home. Her father, Herman Cooper, is physically abusive. One night,
she actually runs to the nearest police station and says
(13:36):
to them, you know, you've got to help me out.
You can see the bruises. You've got to do something
for me. And so then she starts getting bounced around
foster care. So you have these brief periods in maybe
a few weeks, it maybe a few months, and maybe
longer than that, but she's always being brought back home,
And anytime she acts out in one of these foster
care scenarios, she's sent to juvenile detention along with kids
(14:02):
who actually have a criminal record and who are in
there for more serious stuff. So you can kind of
see the cycle of trauma and also exposing her to
people who are not going to be a great influence
on her and are not going to be a stabilizing
force in her life, and blaming her for acting out.
I'm not saying that she didn't encounter social workers and
(14:22):
individuals who didn't try to help. Yeah, but all in all,
this was a pretty disastrous scenario. And actually, at one point,
a social worker assigned to her and her sister Ronda,
was asked by Ronda's biological father, you know, isn't there
some way I could make a case to adopt Paula
(14:42):
as well? And he was told, you know what, I'm
retiring in six months. Her mother is crazy and I
just don't want to deal with this. So I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
I mean, that's terrible. And can I assume that these
other three young women, no one's older than sixteen? Is
that in this group who goes on and does this
terrible thing? It sounds like everybody is probably in a
similar situation. Are they all from unstable households also in
the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
So you had a sixteen year old and two fifteen
year olds, including Paula. They were all living in households
where they either had only one parent or the parenting
situation was incredibly unstable and volatile. Two of the other girls, Karen,
the oldest girl, had at that point, already had a baby.
She had gotten pregnant at twelve and had the baby
(15:31):
at thirteen. Her mother had died of cancer. April's mother
had died of cancer, and she was kind of being
bounced around between households. So you really have a scenario
for three out of these four girls where there's no
stability in terms of the adult presences in their lives.
The youngest, Denise, she was someone who just hung out
(15:53):
with the wrong kids at lunch that day. So you
had someone who came from more of a stable family situation,
who had been a pretty good student, and it was
a case of just the worst circumstance to end up
in on that day.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
It seems so like a big jump from being an
unstabled household to then saying let's go rob an old
woman who teaches the Bible to young kids. Is there
an escalation in do they have any petty crimes before then?
Or is this their first big idea with crime.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
There were a couple other scenarios where they found a
way into neighboring homes and grabbed a few things when
someone wasn't home, nothing that went beyond petty delinquent crime.
I think one of the girls had had a shoplifting
incident on her record, but that's a far cry from
(16:49):
violent crime. Right, So this was just an enormous, enormous leap,
And I think it's really important to keep in mind
something that I really rush with in the book because
I wanted to make clear how horrific this crime was,
to also give a sense of Paula's background. I am
not saying that this is an excuse for what she did.
(17:12):
And also her older sister, Ronda, who I did eventually
get to know quite well through the course of researching
this story, she doesn't feel that way either. That no
one involved is trying to say that there is a
legitimate explanation for what happened that afternoon. I think what
readers will hopefully do is they'll put themselves in the
(17:32):
mindset of, Okay, if this happened in my community, in
my neighborhood, what would my response be, because I think that's
the more important question. Right, she's fifteen, she commits murder
in this horrific way that's unjustifiable, but she's still a kid,
and you cannot change that fact. What is the right
(17:52):
response as a community or as the prosecutor in Lake
County for instance, who becomes a pretty big character.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
So We're talking about a spring day in nineteen eighty
five in Gary and Deana, and you have these four girls,
two fifteen year olds, a sixteen year old and a
fourteen year old, and they think that they are going
to go and there's a woman who lives at home,
Ruth Helki, and she's seventy eight, unarmed, and it will
be easy for them to go in and rob her,
(18:21):
nobody had money, and walk out. I have to assume
the intention was not to murder her, is that right.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
What's interesting is the prosecutor, Jack Crawford, and his deputy
who handled the case, they really pushed a narrative that
this was premeditated, This was a pre meditated robbery and murder.
I found that to be total nonsense. It seemed obvious
to me that these girls walked in there to rob
(18:50):
this elderly woman so they could go off and have
some fun. I'm fairly convinced that Paula's actions in the
way in which those escalated came as a shock to
everyone in that house, and the violence ratcheted up from there.
There's research that's been done in much more recent years,
(19:12):
not the kind of research we had in the eighties.
As to how heightened group dynamics can become between juveniles.
When you have a group of teenagers together and one
of them takes part in high risk behavior, the rest
of the group is far more likely to jump on board, right,
and you have a kind of runaway train scenario that
(19:32):
has the possibility for unfolding. Again, this is not an excuse.
It's just trying to understand what might have happened in
that house in May of nineteen eighty five. I spent
five years researching this book, and no one really knows
what happened or why who's still alive.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
So the four of them head over that day in May,
and one of them is.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Armed, right, So what happens is when Paula cares and
in Denise go over to April's house. April takes a
knife out of the kitchen drawer and says, you know,
when you go over there, you can scare missus Pelki
with this. Paula takes the knife and she hides it
under her jean jacket. April, knowing that she already has
(20:17):
a relationship with missus Pelk, who taught her Bible studies,
who was nice to her after her mother died, who
made lunch for her, who took her to church a
couple times. April decides it's less complicated if she stays behind,
because there's that sort of recognition that they can avoid.
The other girls don't actually know about the relationship April
has with missus Pelk already, and I found that to
(20:38):
be really a disturbing part of the background of this crime.
So the three others walk across the alley and they
go up the front steps of missus Pelk's house and
they knock on the door, and eventually they are allowed in.
They say that, you know, we need you to write
down some information about Bible study. My aunt wants to
(21:00):
know when it is and maybe you could write it
down for us, something along those lines. She lets them
in and she says, okay, well, I'm going to just
get some note paper, and they follow her through the
house and into her dining room. She's got a little
secretary desk up against the wall, and as she's turned
around to start writing a note for them, Paula picks
(21:20):
up a paperweight, a glass paperweight, and hits her in
the head and missus Pelkie falls to the floor. Paula
described this moment later that there was this moment where
her hair was so white, and then there was the
red suddenly of the woman starting to bleed on her head.
From the way in which she later described the incident,
(21:41):
it sounds like that was a very deep triggering moment
for Paula, and she went to find the knife in
her jacket, which was somewhere within reach, and she pushed
missus Pelkie down and began stabbing her. And it was
clearly an extremely heightened, irrational moment because she ultimately stabbed
(22:04):
missus Pelki thirty three times. Wow. There was nothing about
this where they were threatening her for her money, and
something went a little too far. It went way beyond that,
and none of the other girls went for help. They
eventually ransacked the house and were only able to find
(22:24):
about ten dollars and the keys to missus Pelki's plymouth,
so they ended up leaving and leaving missus Pelk on
the floor and going for a joy ride in her plymouth.
They were not all brought in until a couple days later.
Paula had a doctor's note with a prescription for birth
control in the pocket of her jacket, and she'd left
(22:46):
that behind at the scene I mean, there were a
number of factors at the scene of the crime that
made clear that these were kids. There were some details
that you know, leaving your jacket with identifying information in
it behind. There was a real box that had been
left open on the counter in the kitchen where clearly
one of them had a snack somewhere in the middle
of all of this. And it's just really terrible, and
(23:09):
they came away with nothing. It was it was a
completely chaotic crime committed by kids.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
How is this discovered? Does one of missus Pelkie's kids
come over or is there a welfare check?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Missus Pelki had a number of grown step kids who
lived in the area, and she was well beloved by
all of them and had become really like a deep
part of her that family's life when she married their father.
So she had a number of step kids and grandkids
who live nearby, and so her steps on. Bob Pelki
(23:44):
was concerned that she hadn't answered the phone, because they
would regularly talk on the phone, so he stopped over midday.
It was the next day he stopped in midday and
he looked through this opening in the mail slot when
she didn't answer, and he saw sort of like a
mess where selfa cushions and papers had been thrown everywhere. Right,
(24:04):
this was absolutely not you know, she was an extremely
meticulous woman. And immediately he knew something was wrong, and
so he found the extra key and let himself in
and he discovered Ruth. He had to run down the
street knocking on doors. It was the middle of the day.
Most people weren't home, they were at work, until he
could find someone who would be able to call the
(24:25):
police because the girls had also torn the phone out
of the phone jack out of the wall. It's a
terrible crime to have to think about and grapple with.
And there were various moments where I was immersed in
understanding paula situation and how young she was and her background,
and I would make sure to go over occasionally the
(24:47):
details of the crimea. I've seen the crime scene photos.
They're just terrible. I thought it was really important not
to fall under the spell of the prosecutor on the
one hand, but also not to forg get what actually
took place that day, and so how do you maneuver that?
And it makes what happened next even more extraordinary? I
(25:23):
think what is extraordinary about this story and what is
so important to grapple with She was a kid, She
was fifteen years old, which I think makes any assessment
of her culpability a lot more complex, and that was
something that I dove headlong into, just grappling with that question.
(25:49):
What does it mean when a child commits a violent crime?
And what does our response to that crime say about us?
If we are willing to apply the ultimate punishment to
a juvenile, to a teenager, what does that say about
us as a culture society? What does that say about
(26:09):
our true goals in our criminal justice system? Because it
was possible to sentence teenagers to death in nineteen eighty five,
it was possible all the way up until two thousand
and five, which was a lot more recent than I
think a lot of people realize. So within less than
a year, Paula Cooper had been sentenced to death. The
(26:31):
reaction in the local media was very much about the
shock of her crime and sort of the sense that,
you know, what is society coming to that young people
can be involved in such a horrific crime, right? That
was the tenor of the coverage. It was not shock
at the fact that we had just sentenced a kid
(26:53):
to the electric chair, right, That was not part of
the coverage, and it took it took a little while
for the tables to turn. It actually took the European
media becoming aware of the fact that a fifteen year
old girl had just been sentenced to death in the
United States to change the media conversation around the crime
(27:15):
in the United States. So I actually tracked down. It
came down to ultimately two Italian journalists who caught wind
of this through a tiny line item somewhere in the
middle of an issue of USA Today. While they were traveling.
They caught wind of her sentence and convinced their editors
(27:37):
back in Rome and in Florence to fund their travel
to Gary to look into what the situation was. So
they ended up having front page stories in Italy that
were picked up around Europe. It became a sensation as
a story in Italy for the exact opposite reason that
it did in the US and the Midwest. Then the
(27:59):
media here started covering the fact that we were being shamed.
Indiana specifically was being shamed by the European press for
this decision, right, And so it turned the tables on
this issue and made it a much more complex conversation.
Something else that took place within a few months of
(28:20):
Paula's death sentence is I think, possibly the most extraordinary
part of this story. A man named Bill Pelki, who
was the adult grandson of the victim Ruth Pelki, decided
against the wishes of his family, his friends, his congregation,
his coworkers, really truly against the wishes of everyone he knew.
(28:42):
He decided to publicly forgive Paula for killing his grandmother.
He had a revelation that his grandmother would not want
this girl killed in her name, and once that conviction
came to him, he wouldn't let it go. And this
was a guy who didn't have a political bone in
his body. He was not someone who was used to
(29:04):
making waves. He was a crane operator in a steel mill,
Bethlehem Steel in Portage, Indiana, just outside Gary. He'd been
a crane operator there for a couple decades. He just
you know, punched the clock, came home, cashed his check.
He didn't want trouble. And one night up in the crane,
(29:24):
he was there doing a late shift. He'd been called
in and for some reason there was no work, so
he was alone hovering up above this warehouse in the dark,
and he started thinking about everything that had taken place
over the last few months, how he'd been grieving the
death of his grandmother, but also how he felt that
he'd really messed up his own life. He had just
(29:47):
filed for bankruptcy, he was on his way to losing
his living girlfriend, Judy, who he'd fallen so deeply in
love with. He'd gotten divorced to his first wife, you know,
and so he was just feeling, you know, on top
of that, I think I'm about to disappoint my grandmother.
I'm about to let something else terrible happen.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Well, and he's making a series of bad decisions. That's
where he's ending up, is that there's a divorce and
the girlfriend and the bankruptcy. And I'm sure it occurs
to him how easy it is to make bad decisions,
you know. I mean, we're human, That's what happens. Does
he feel any sort of parallel in any way to
the girls or at Paula?
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Was there something interesting? I think sometimes you know, the
human mind, when you're alone, you're in the dark, you're tired,
you're exhausted, you're emotionally depleted. You know, that was the
state he was in. You start to kind of reassociate
in your mind, and he's up there in this crane
cab and he has this image for the first time,
he has this image of Paula Cooper on death row.
(30:52):
He was there in court. He took time off from
work to be there in court the day she was
given the death sentence because there was a rumor that
that's how it was going to go. And he wanted
to be there to see the girl who had killed
his grandmother get death. And this is the first time
really that he'd thought about that, and he thought to himself,
you know, her cell's probably the size of this cab.
(31:12):
She's probably sitting in the dark. She's alone, and she's
far more desperate than I will ever be, regardless of
how I feel about all of the fuck ups in
my life. Right, this is someone who's in a far
wars situation. And then he saw his grandmother the way
she was before her death. There was a family photo
(31:34):
that had been used in a lot of the press
around her murder. It's like one of those studio portrait
kind of Midwestern studio portrait photos, you know, where everyone's
got their hair perfect, and they're done up for the session,
and he pictures his grandmother and he pictures her weeping,
and it's really kind of it reminded me of those
(31:55):
moments where people imagine they've seen the Virgin Mary crying.
This a statue of a Catholic saint crying, right. It
was a spiritual moment for him, and he believed that
this image came to him because his grandmother would have
wept at the idea of this young girl being executed
in her name. He walks away that night, he leaves
(32:18):
the mill feeling for the first time that he actually
has a sense of purpose in his life. He has
a mission. Now. The next thing he's going to do
is he's going to reach out and he's going to
write to this girl on death row and he's going
to figure out what he can do to help her.
And he ends up the next day sitting down writing
a letter and mailing it to the teenage kid who
(32:40):
murdered his grandmother.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
If we take one step back, because I've been curious
about this, how would you describe Paula's demeanor through this
whole thing once she's caught. Is there a sense in
the court or in jail of remorse or understanding, or
is she so hot, hardened based on her background and
(33:02):
now being a fifteen year old in a women's prison,
that there's no way to get through to her.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
I spent some time wrestling with the question of whether
or not Paula had any remorse for her crime. But
I also asked myself how capable a teenager is of remorse,
or at least the kind of remorse that would be
recognizable to an adult. I don't have the answer to that.
(33:30):
I know that at her sentencing hearing she received her
public defender did not do a great job. His performance
was thin at best, and I think that, going by
the court transcripts, I don't think Paula was coached at
all as to how to behave in a courtroom in
the kinds of statements that you should try to make
(33:50):
in that scenario. I think she was angry. I think
she was overwhelmed. The judge ultimately commented on what seemed
like her lack of remorse at the time. I think
it took her a long time to understand what she
had done. She ended up having a relationship with Bill Pelk.
(34:12):
They had a correspondence that was very deep and went
on for years and years and years, and I was
able to read hundreds of letters between them, maybe about
you know, nine months to a year into their correspondence,
I started to feel that she was genuinely trying to
express to him her shock at what she had done
and how terrible it was that she had taken this
(34:34):
special person from his life, you know. And one of
the first things Bill wrote her about is he said,
I want to tell you about my grandmother, you know.
He would just try to describe how much she was
loved and the people in her life and what made
her special to him, And eventually he sent her a
photo of his grandmother, you know. And so part of
(34:55):
the process on Bill's end was trying to get her
to understand what she had done done. He never came
right out and said, you know, I need to know
why you did what you did.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
I'm sure he realized that she probably didn't know that.
It was just this sort of you know, the background,
it's everything, everything happening in her life. But what role
is Bill playing to Paula? Why answer his letters at
all and then start to show some sort of softening
and real hundreds of letters over the years.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Look, I think, honestly, something that drew me in and
what really really got its hooks into me was, let
me just think about it. You have a forty year
old white man steel worker Vietnam Vett, Yeah, who's writing
very intimate, personal, emotionally raw letters to the then sixteen
(35:48):
year old girl, black girl from Gary, from a community
he has nothing in common with, who's a runaway from
an abusive home. And what connects them is that she
brutally murdered his grandmother. Can you imagine, like, what is
that correspondence? And I was so drawn into that. To me,
(36:10):
that had the psychological complexity of a novel. And there
was a degree to which at first Bill had the
power in a way because he was extending his generous
forgiveness towards this girl in a desperate situation. But there
were moments where Bill would write to Paula and confess
(36:30):
how tough of a time he was having in his
breakup with Judy, and she would write back with friendly advice.
It was unlike any other relationship that either of them
had ever had, and I think that's what opened them
both up. That was something I found totally extraordinary. Another
topic but worth noting. The letters also proved to me
(36:53):
that even though Paula had bounced around nine to nine
or ten schools before her arrest, had skipped classes all
the time, she really had no meaningful education. Within the
first year of writing these letters, she had taught herself
to write. She expressed herself beautifully. She had this raw,
kind of weird sense of humor that came out. She
was very brave. She wrote sassy letters to the ACLU.
(37:17):
This story takes on this incredible scope where she's she
literally wrote a letter directly to Pope John paul the
Second and he received it personally. You know, you see
Paula's voice evolving and her intelligence, and I really felt
the loss of what she could have become under a
(37:39):
different circumstance. After she was sentenced to death, her case
was taken up by an appellate public defender in Lake County,
Bill Touchet, who also brought on board Monica Foster, who
was a young attorney a few years out of law school,
honestly not that many years older than Paula herself, and
(37:59):
both of them worked passionately on Paula's behalf and Monica
when she first went to visit Paula on death row,
was so was honestly frightened. You know. She admitted that
to me that she thought she was going to go
and have a meeting with someone who was almost like
an animal. She couldn't imagine what kind of young person
was capable of committing such a terrible crime. And instead
(38:21):
she met a girl who was overwhelmed, probably clinically depressed,
who could not stop weeping during their meeting, and who
was convinced that because she'd been sentenced to death, she
was going to be carried off to the death house
at any moment. No one had explained to her, and
she was young enough she had no understanding of the system, right,
(38:43):
No one had explained her. No, No, there's a process.
She honestly woke up every day thinking that that might
be the day she was taken to the electric chair,
and Monica had to be the one to sort of
try to walk her through. No, this is how the
system works. It's going to be years. We have a
lot of options, and you have to calm down. I
bring Monica up, because she then took it upon herself
(39:06):
with her very modest kind of green attorney's salary to
pay for an independent therapist, or Paula to pay for
her to have a tutor, to pay for her education
at first. And it was through that relationship that Paula
you can almost almost to the date when she starts
having those conversations with Monica, she starts writing in her
(39:29):
letters to Bill about.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
The future positive role models.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, when I get out, I might become a businesswoman
or you know whatever the fantasy of the week was.
But up until that point, there was there was no
looking ahead. There was only today, twenty three hours in
the same cell. Because also she was, you know, she
was a very very young person being kept in total segregation.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Let's talk about the issue with Bill Helk's family. Is
it too simplistic to say that They all said, Bill,
why are you doing this? This is infuriating us. You
were trampling on, you know, Ruth's memory. How could you
support this killer? How could you write her and you know,
try to be close to her. Was that sort of
(40:14):
their reaction?
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Oh? Absolutely, it was discussed confusion, total alienation, heartache. I
sympathized with them, feeling really seis wiped by this. They
just did not see this decision coming, especially Bill's parents,
and so his father, Bob, remember is the one who
(40:37):
discovered Ruth's body on the carpet in the dining room.
I mean, it was a terrible situation. He testified in
the hearings of all four girls and made very clear
that he was speaking on behalf of the family that
they wanted the ultimate punishment for this terrible crime, and
that was that he spoke as a devout Christian, as
(41:01):
a war veteran, you know this. Our country should not
allow a crime like this to go unpunished. And he
was made to believe, in part by the prosecutor that
if this girl was not sentenced to death, it would
not be sufficient. Life in prison was not what he
was looking for. They wanted to send a message. There
(41:21):
were ultimately some headlines in local papers, sometimes on the
front page, that pitted Robert Pelke versus Bill Pelki, his son,
and they would have pull quotes the answers forgiveness from
Bill and then his father. You know, my son is
of the generation that thinks that people shouldn't have to
pay for what they've done. Ultimately, within several months, Bill
(41:48):
ended up having a conversation in private with a cousin
of his who he loved dearly, and she revealed to him.
You know, I've been reading the coverage in the newspapers,
and I want you to know that I feel the
same way. I don't want this girl's life to be taken,
and I do think that our grandmother would have forgiven her,
(42:08):
you know. And then there was another family member, right,
And so there were people who quietly they didn't want
to hurt the rest of the family, so they had
really not engaged in this discussion, but they reached out
to him personally. Many years later, Bill and his father
reconciled around this. Bill had such strength of conviction around
(42:30):
this that he was willing to take the risk of
breaking apart the rest of his family.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
So they are writing to each other for years. Paula
and Bill, Ultimately, what happens with all of this, and
tell me what happens with the other girls too, because
I don't think we talked about their sentences, But really,
where do we end up over the next twenty thirty
years with this case, the other.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Three girls, Karen, April, and Denise, all received serious prisons
and stances. Death was only on the table ultimately for
Paula Karen had a capital charge, but she was not
sentenced to death. Paula's case ultimately goes up to the
state Supreme Court in Indiana, and because of really risky,
(43:17):
brave actions taken by a number of different characters we
meet along the way, a scenario is set up where
this case is kind of teed up for the Indiana
Supreme Court and they have a way by resting on
the state constitution and also a recent US Supreme Court
decision at the time to commute her sentence. Wow, So
(43:38):
Paula is instead given a very long prison sentence sixty years,
which in Indiana realistically is about half that amount of
time if you have good conduct in.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Prison and time served, right, So she had already been
in for how long at that.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Point, a couple of years. And what's interesting is I
think Paula's reaction to it was in credibly mixed because
she understood that she'd won, so to speak. But at
that point, she was eighteen or nineteen years old. You know,
she'd been on death row for two and a half
three years. To hear that you're going to spend thirty
(44:14):
years in prison sounded to her a little bit like
the rest of her life. I mean, that's not even
the halfway point of the book, I will say, because
the story evolves and becomes more complex. Bill Pelki ends
up taking this kind of self transformation that occurred through
the relationship he had with Paula Cooper. His identity now
(44:37):
has forever changed. He can't just go back to clocking
in at the mill and keeping his head down. He
now wants to change the criminal justice system. He wants
to talk about the death penalty as someone who's a
murder victim's family member, and he begins reaching out and
(44:59):
actually disc one by one other murder victims family members
around the country who also did not want death for
the person who killed their loved one, right And at
the time, these people were unicorns, you know, and this
was not you were not seeing murder victims family members
(45:19):
in the public eye as voices in the justice system.
And part of that was because a lot of you know,
the shame that they felt in their community. They were
pariahs in a lot of cases. But also the prosecutor
handled their case did not want a family member who
was going to come forward and challenge his agenda. For
(45:41):
someone who's personally really fascinated by the many facets of
our criminal justice system. There was, I do want to mention,
there was this other piece of it for me, which
is I'd never really, i'd never really before had the
palpable sense of how tough this kind of work can be.
Someone like Monica Foster who grows to really care about
(46:03):
Paula Cooper and she goes on to represent other people
who are possibly up for death, knowing each time that
you can lose your client, this person you have a
year's long relationship with, and it will be very hard
for you to convince yourself that some part of that
wasn't your fault. That added another human dimension to the
(46:26):
process for me, and also to see members of the media.
You know, I mentioned these two Italian journalists for instance,
who chose to amplify a different side to the headline
and actually ended up making a difference as a result.
You know, there really are these opportunities to change the
course of events for the better. And you see that
(46:49):
in different different moments in this story, where someone chooses
to make an unconventional choice, they choose to forgive in
a scenario in which that's considered reritibly out there they
choose to make an effort to kind of step out
of their lane and jump in the fray with this
incredibly fraught circumstance. Right, ultimately, with all that in mind,
(47:12):
Paula's case, you know, I connect the dots between her
case and all the issues involved with that all the
way up to the end of the death penalty for
juveniles in this country in two thousand and five, because
a number of the players actually are the same. So
that was really remarkable to see how you start with
one crime on one corner in Gary, Indiana, and you
(47:33):
end up impacting the fates of a lot of teenagers
in this country.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate
producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(48:11):
produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook. At tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(48:33):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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