Seventy Times Seven author Alex Mar
-
Scott LaMar
Airdate: March 30, 2023
Paula Cooper was 15 years old in 1985 when she and three other teenagers murdered 78-year-old Ruth Pelke in an attempted robbery of Pelke’s Gary, Indiana home.
Cooper was sentenced to death for her part in the killing. She became the youngest person ever to receive the death penalty in the U.S.
In the years afterwards, something unexpectedly happened – forgiveness toward Paula Cooper from Ruth Pelke’s grandson, Bill Pelke.
The story is chronicled in Alex Mar’s new book Seventy Times Seven – A True Story of Murder and Mercy.
Mar joined us on The Spark Thursday where she described the murder,”Paula and three other girls who went to Lew Wallace High School with her, they were all 14, 15, 16 years old. They decided to skip class one afternoon and they were bored. They wanted money to get up to something. And one of them said, well, you know, there’s an older woman who lives across the way. She’s a Bible teacher. She lives alone. There’s some nice things in her house. I’ve been over there. You should just knock on the door and ask her about Bible study lessons and take this knife from the kitchen, and you can scare her with it. And so three of those girls, they go in there, knock on the door, they talk their way in, the situation escalates and Paula ends up striking Mrs. Pelke over the head and ultimately stabbing her many times to death. They came away with nothing more than $10 and the keys to her Plymouth. And within a couple of days, all four of the girls had been rounded up and arrested. Paula confessed right away. And the county prosecutor, who was extremely pro-death penalty, had a press conference and he said I’m going to go for death here as many of these girls as I can. He eventually brought death penalty charges against two of them. And Paula was the one because she was most actively involved. She was the one who received the death sentence in this case.”
The story takes an unexpected turn when the victim’s loving grandson, Bill Pelke, decides to forgive Cooper,”He’s called in for a late shift one night at the mill. He’s up in his crane. No one else is there. It’s just dead that night. And he’s thinking about his life. His personal life has become a mess. His longtime girlfriend has left him. He’s gone bankrupt for various reasons. He feels he has no direction or sense of purpose. And and he has this moment where he thinks, you know. Maybe the one person I won’t disappoint this time is my grandmother. I think that I can do something for her, and I don’t think she would want the death sentence for this girl. And he actually has a moment of picturing Paula Cooper on death row and how alone and how desperate she must feel. And he starts to cry when he thinks I’ve got to do something. And when he comes down off that shift that evening he knows he wants to reach out to this girl. And the next day he sits down and he writes a letter to the girl who killed his grandmother and he mails it to the address on death row in Indianapolis and just waits to see what’s going to happen. And eventually Paula does write back and they start up a correspondence that ends up lasting for years, hundreds of letters that I was able to read to understand their relationship. And there was something about it, you know, once they started to trust each other. There was a level of honesty I’ve never seen before. And you get to see also this teenager in such a desperate situation, actually finding her own voice through these letters and at some some moments, she’s even offering him advice with his problems. I mean, it’s really quite remarkable. It’s not the dynamic you would necessarily expect. And through making his forgiveness public, because he starts talking to the press about it, he writes a letter to the editor of the local paper. His forgiveness gets picked up by the European press. It helps to keep this story alive and to complicate the debate around the death penalty there.”
Cooper’s death sentence was overturned and eventually she was released from prison and appeared to be doing well. However, she became depressed, ridden with guilt and took her own life. Mar talked about what she wants readers to take away from the book,”I hope that this story lets the reader ask some bigger questions about what we think of as justice and the role that forgiveness might be able to play in our justice system, but also in our own lives. I know it’s not an easy question and it doesn’t have an easy answer, but that is the big the big question to grapple with at the heart of this book. And Bill and Paula’s story is an emotional and challenging one that I hope is is going to inspire people who dive into this book.”
Alex Mar will be appearing at Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg for an author’s event Tuesday, April 4th at 7 p.m.
