The horrific legacy of the Paula Cooper case

Years ago, the newspaper I worked for sent me to northern Indiana to do a story about the murder of Ruth Pelke.

Pelke, a widowed grandmother, liked to give high school students in northwest Indiana Bible instruction. She opened her door one day to four teenage girls who said they wanted a lesson.

They robbed her and killed her, slashing her with a knife so many times that her body looked as if wild animals had attacked it.

The girls fled with $10 and Ruth Pelke's car. They were caught. They were tried. They were convicted.

One of them, Paula Cooper, confessed to the murder. She was sentenced to death. She was 15.

Her death sentence sparked an international uproar. At the time, Indiana law said we could put to death anyone 10 or older. We changed that, first to age 16 and now to age 18.

Cooper's sentence also was changed – to 60 years. She became a model prisoner and was released on parole nearly two years ago after spending 28 years behind bars.

My story was about the man who found Ruth Pelke's body after the murder, her step-grandson Bill Pelke.

His grandmother's murder marked a turning point for Bill Pelke. A steel worker and a Vietnam War veteran, he was a man stumbling his way toward a spiritual crisis when he discovered his "Nana's" corpse.

He told me the story of his conversion to becoming one of America's leading opponents of the death penalty. He said he'd had an epiphany while working at the steelyard. He felt lost and adrift, troubled by the lack of direction in his life, wounded by the failure of a relationship and haunted by the killing he'd seen in Vietnam.

He prayed.

Then he had a vision of his grandmother's face streaming with tears of compassion for Paula Cooper and her family. He decided to forgive Paula for killing his grandmother and to fight against putting people to death.

His developing friendship with Paula always received the most attention when Bill Pelke's story was told. Many people dismissed his actions as those of a dreamy-eyed do-gooder.

But it was clear to me in talking with him that his actions weren't selfless. He had absorbed as much pain, grief and tragedy as he could handle and needed a release.

Forgiveness was the only way out.

Forgiving Paula Cooper did give Bill Pelke some relief. For months after he discovered his grandmother's body, he could only see her butchered corpse when he thought of her. When he forgave Paula, he once again could remember her as the warm, smiling Nana she had been to him.

But his relief was not cost-free.

Other members of his family were troubled by his activism and angered by his friendship with Ruth Pelke's murderer. The strong feelings created divisions within the family and, as one of Ruth Pelke's other grandchildren told me, meant the family did not talk much about the grandmother they had lost. The wounds were too deep, the pain too raw.

Paula Cooper's family, too, carried a heavy load of suffering. Horrified at what she'd done, ashamed of being a focus of international attention for being connected to a horrible crime and terrified about what might become of her, they also bore wounds.

A few days ago, nearly two years after she was released from prison, police in Indianapolis found Paula Cooper dead from a gunshot wound outside a home on the city's northwest side. She apparently had killed herself.

She was 45.

Her remorse for her actions, her family said, was unrelenting. Bill Pelke said he was devastated by her death.

When I heard the news, all I could think about was how much grief, how much pain, how much suffering – for the Pelke family, for the Cooper family, for all their friends and acquaintances – followed the decision four teenage girls 30 years ago made to rob an elderly Bible teacher.

We spend a lot of time in this society trying to figure out what to do after horrible crimes. But the reality is that, after a murder, there are no good options. Some things just can't be made right.

Nothing good comes from a killing.

Krull is director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism, host of "No Limits" WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com.