When you find yourself living in a cell for more than twenty-three years because you killed a man, and you recently filed a clemency petition looking for mercy, it’s challenging to read a book about a battle between the two opposing ideals that consume you: punishment and forgiveness. But this tension is at the center of Alex Mar’s Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy, which tells the grim saga of the murder, in 1985, of an elderly midwestern Bible teacher named Ruth Pelke by a fifteen-year-old named Paula Cooper, who was subsequently sentenced to death. Bill Pelke, Ruth’s grandson, eventually forgave Paula and made fighting the death penalty his personal crusade. Many others could not forgive.
Mar’s book begins in 1979 with an attempted suicide and maybe an attempted murder. Gloria Cooper gets in her Chevy Vega in the garage attached to her house in Gary, Indiana. Her daughters—Paula, nine, and Rhonda, twelve—are in the back seat. She turns the key in the ignition, sits, and waits. As fumes thicken the air, Gloria moves the drowsy girls back into the house and lays them on the bottom bunk in their room. Then she returns to the car and inhales. Rhonda awakens, sees a suicide note taped to the bedroom door, and calls a neighbor, who runs over, pulls the unconscious woman out of the car, performs CPR with the help of another neighbor, and calls 911. The girls go to stay with their aunt. A week later, Gloria is released from the hospital and takes her daughters back home.
“You have to understand,” Rhonda tells Mar, reflecting on this episode. “We were all supposed to have been dead. That’s what we were expecting, that’s what we were hoping.”
When you try to kill yourself or someone else, you can’t think much of your own life. Those low feelings are so much more intense and incomprehensible when you’re young. When I was twelve, I learned that my father had killed himself. He’d left my mom and me when I was an infant. As I got older, I thought about him, but I was still too young to resent him. I was sad to lose someone I wanted to know, sadder that he never wanted to know me. In adolescence my thoughts became dark. I ran away, sold drugs, did things that made me dislike myself even more. Therapists used to ask me if I was suicidal. I’d say, “I’m homicidal.”
I wonder how the void Gloria must have felt affected her daughters, especially as they entered their teenage years. Rhonda was born right after Gloria finished high school. Rhonda’s father and Gloria split, and she married a mechanic named Herman Cooper. They had Paula. Herman raised Rhonda alongside Paula as his own, first in Chicago and then in Gary. Their marriage was chaotic: drinking, fighting, physical abuse. Herman made Rhonda and Paula strip naked and whipped them with extension cords. When Rhonda turned fourteen, she went to live with her father. Over the next few years, Paula passed through a series of foster homes, shelters, and juvenile detention centers.
Alex Mar writes in a commanding present tense. She speeds us next to the spring of 1985: Ronald Reagan is president, and it’s the beginning of the crack era. Gary, whose population is 70 percent Black after decades of white flight, is a city that “continues to take turns with Detroit as the FBI’s ‘murder capital’ of the country,” Mar writes. “The Prosecutor’s Office is regularly charged with handling home invasions, rapes, ‘dismemberment slayings,’ and gang wars, and it seems that a weekend cannot go by without a homicide.”
Ruth Pelke is a seventy-eight-year-old Baptist church lady who lives alone in a house on Adams Street, one of the few white people still living in the neighborhood. She’d had no kids, but after her cousin Dorothy died in the 1940s she married Dorothy’s husband, Oscar, and raised their three children as her own. By 1985 she has nine grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren, who call her Nana. Oscar had died two years before, and Ruth is keeping more to herself. She’s retired from teaching Sunday school and Bible study, but she is still involved with the neighborhood kids, including the two children who live in a house directly behind hers, across the alley. Ruth brought April and her little brother to church for the first time.
Paula, now fifteen, is friends with April. One Tuesday afternoon, the pair are cutting class with their friend Karen. The girls play video games at the Candyland Arcade. Denise, who is fourteen, tags along. Soon the four, all Black, are sipping Wild Irish Rose on April’s porch.
A few days prior they had robbed a house and taken $90. Now April, who’s seven months pregnant, suggests they rob the old lady who used to take her to church, invite April over for hot meals, and pack her lunch after her mother died (though she doesn’t share that information). Ask Ruth about Bible study, she tells them: that’s how you’ll get in.
Advertisement
And so moments later, the three girls (without April, whom Ruth would recognize) are in the house. As Ruth is writing down some information about Bible studies, Paula smashes her head with a glass paperweight. “A key deep inside Paula turns and catches, and she is set in motion,” Mar writes. “She stabs the woman in her chest; she pulls out the knife; she stabs her again. Her hand comes down more than thirty times before she stops, leaving the blade in Mrs. Pelke’s stomach.”
The next day Ruth’s son Bob discovers her body with a towel over her face. The girls are arrested. They promptly confess.
Before Paula speaks to the detective, she asks her sister and mother to look away. Mar, in her telling, leans on such minute, emotional details. How, she seems to be asking, could someone who committed this terrible act feel ashamed so quickly? It’s almost as if Paula’s brain had all the right components but experienced a sensory overload—as if she had suffered too much trauma too soon, and she malfunctioned.
The next significant character we meet is the one tasked with seeking justice. Jack Crawford is the ambitious head prosecutor in Lake County, a Jack Kennedy doppelgänger who went to Notre Dame. Crawford has political aspirations. He knows that if a person commits murder, 66 percent of Americans favor a death sentence.
He also knows how this prosecution could look, considering the girls’ age and race. Crawford consults the Black ministers in the community to gauge their support for the four perpetrators. There is none. So he goes judge shopping—technically forbidden, but prosecutors do it all the time—to make sure the sole Black criminal judge in the county court, James Kimbrough, gets the case. All four girls are charged as adults. Crawford seeks the death penalty for Paula and for Karen.
When 60 Minutes comes to town to cover the story in 1986, Harry Reasoner interviews Crawford in his office. “Well, rehabilitation has never been the sole purpose of sentencing,” Crawford says. “There is an aspect of justice”—and by justice, Mar writes, he means retribution—“that must be injected in any criminal case. So what if these young people, fifteen or twenty years later, could be contributing citizens? That doesn’t compensate for the victim in this case and for what happened to her.”
This is the complication at the heart of the quest for rehabilitation after murder. The victim is not coming back, so it’s hard to root for the offender. But Paula committed this crime when she was only fifteen.
Each girl’s case is handled separately. After Denise is found guilty at trial, she is sentenced to thirty-five years. With good behavior, she’ll serve about half. April, who instigated the crime but wasn’t present during the murder, gets twenty-five years, and she’ll serve about fourteen. Karen, who also shoved the knife into Ruth at Paula’s behest, pleads guilty, hoping the judge will show her mercy. Kimbrough gives her sixty years. With good behavior, she’ll be out in thirty. Paula hopes for the same.
It’s rare for a criminal defendant to confess and plead guilty without a deal in place. The girls and their families don’t know that they have the right to remain silent—or if they do know, they aren’t aware of the significance of silence. In my case, I kept my mouth shut, which gave me leverage. They offered me a plea deal of fifteen to life. I refused, went to trial, got on the stand, and lied. The jury deadlocked. At the second trial, I was convicted, and a judge sentenced me to twenty-five years to life, on top of the three years I was already serving for selling drugs.
Paula, hardly the seasoned criminal I was, tells the truth. She changes her plea to guilty, spares the family a trial, and hopes for mercy. At the sentencing, Bob Pelke, who found his mother’s body, cites Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.” He wants the judge to sentence her to death.
By the time Paula speaks, she’s spent days listening to people describe her as a murderous sociopath. “First of all,” she says, “I never sat up and lied about what I did… and what did I get?… He wants to take my life. Is that nice? Is that just?” Paula asks, gesturing to the prosecutor. “Where is his conscience at? He wants to know where is mine… Where is his?” Paula is now sixteen. Kimbrough sentences her to death.
Advertisement
One of the people in the courtroom that day is Bob’s thirty-nine-year-old son, Bill Pelke. He attended a Baptist college, assuming he’d become a pastor, but he had a weakness for women. Now he’s divorced and broke, helping to raise his girlfriend Judy’s three kids. Their relationship is rocky. He no longer talks to his parents. He thinks about his grandmother. She never judged him.
Months after he sees Paula get sentenced to death, he’s working at Bethlehem Steel, alone in the cabin of the crane he operates. Bill pictures the cropped family photo, the one the media had used constantly, of his grandmother’s smiling face:
His grandmother’s eyes begin to shine—they are wet—and tears begin a steady, clear runoff down her cheeks. Her face remains still, frozen in that day in the portrait studio, but the photograph is weeping. Ruth Pelke has become like one of the weeping statues of the Virgin Mary…. Ruth hurts from the memory of her death, from the final thirty minutes of her life. But that’s not it. No. It seems to Bill, in this moment, that Ruth’s feelings are passed to him, that they flood his chest. And he believes he understands: she is crying for that girl. For Paula Cooper…. And she would not want this girl to be killed for killing her, to be killed in her name…. His grandmother is calling on him to forgive her.
This story, as Mar frames it, tangles man’s law with God’s law, or at least the Christian version. Her book’s title comes from Bill’s favorite New Testament passage, in the Gospel of Matthew: “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?’” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.” I’m not one to quote Scripture, but in my cell in the mornings I do pray and meditate and sometimes read the Bible. It’s what many of us do in these cells, trying to figure out what to do with what we did.
The first mention of “seventy times seven” appears in Genesis. Lamech, a descendant of Cain, tells his two wives, “I have killed a man who attacked me, a young man who wounded me. If someone who kills Cain is punished seven times, then the one who kills me will be punished seventy-seven times!”
It’s the different interpretations these passages lend themselves to—vengeance versus mercy—that pit people and communities in Mar’s book against one another. Because Paula Cooper is a child when she is sentenced to death, a radical kind of paradox emerges: the killer is a sympathetic character. You could say that justice itself is the antagonist in a world where, not so long ago, Americans were willing to execute kids.
The second act of the book, after the crime and the trial and the sentencing, focuses on Bill Pelke. Bill tells Judy about his spiritual awakening and that he plans to forgive Paula. She tells him he’s nuts. He begins a correspondence with Paula anyway and publishes a letter in the Gary Post-Tribune. “Paula Cooper is seeking a closer relationship with God,” he writes, “and she has God’s love and forgiveness. How about yours. She has mine. Ruth Pelke would want it that way. I am her grandson.”
A series of Italian journalists and priests take up Paula’s cause, protesting in front of the American embassy in Rome and traveling to visit her. “It seems strange to me that so many people in another country care about me and want to help me in spite of what I did,” Paula tells an Italian journalist.
They are among the activists fighting to overturn Paula’s death sentence. There’s also the expert on capital punishment, Victor Streib, who focuses less on the cruelty of the sentence than on the fact that it was unusual: a juvenile girl was last executed in the country in 1912. There are Paula’s lawyers, Monica Foster in particular, who visit her in the women’s prison and try to keep her calm. (Paula would go from bursting into tears to tirades and tantrums.) There is also Earline Rogers, a public school teacher and one of the few Black female legislators in Indiana, who after Paula’s conviction introduces a bill to raise the minimum age for the death penalty in Indiana from ten to sixteen. (It is now eighteen.) Jack Crawford lobbies for the law not to apply to anyone already on death row who was fifteen at the time of their crime. The only person who fits that description is Paula.
In 1988 the US Supreme Court overturns the death sentence of Wayne Thompson, who committed murder at fifteen in Oklahoma. But Paula hears the ruling isn’t binding. I imagine she didn’t fully understand what binding means; in truth, I don’t fully understand what binding means. I am sure that Paula, then seventeen and in solitary confinement because she’d been clashing with guards, was consumed by fear.
In a letter to Bill around this time, Paula sounds desperate. “I don’t know why it has to be like this if they want me dead they should just go ahead & execute me because I don’t deserve all this the same as your grandmother didn’t deserve to go through what she did.”
In July 1989 the Indiana high court hears Paula’s case on appeal. Her lawyers argue that the state has never executed anyone as young as she is. In a 5–0 decision, the court commutes her sentence to sixty years. With good behavior, she could be out in another twenty-five.
When Paula Cooper is released into the general population of the Indiana Women’s Prison, her name is well known, which is both good and bad. Peers befriend and betray her. Guards resent and provoke her. She reacts in kind. At this point, she’s twenty years old.
“In the weeks after Paula’s life was spared,” Mar writes, “Bill is elated, but he also experiences a kind of withdrawal. Paula’s appeal gave him a sense of purpose, and now what?” Bill starts communing with others whose children, parents, and spouses have been murdered; he founds the Indiana chapter of Murder Victim Families for Reconciliation to advocate for a form of justice that does not involve taking an offender’s life in their victim’s name. It’s called Journey of Hope, and with his chapter, “Bill will go on to repeat his story,” Mar writes (a story, I would add, that highlights the worst thing Paula ever did and the most graceful thing he ever did), “before assemblies of strangers, more than 1,000 times over the next thirty years.”
Meanwhile, though Paula’s day-to-day life improves slightly upon her release from solitary, she is introduced to a new form of punishment: living on top of other unwell people. It’s hard to capture the texture of life inside when you live on the outside, but Mar talks to formerly incarcerated women who served time with Paula. In a letter to Bill, Paula writes that “there can’t be an explanation about how prison life really is because it’s too much to be explained.” She racks up fights and infractions. When she’s twenty-five, she attacks a female guard and is sent to solitary for three more years.
By the early 2000s neurology has grown more sophisticated, and brain scans have revealed that the prefrontal cortex, which affects impulse control, does not fully develop until twenty-five. In 2005 the Supreme Court consequently rules the death penalty unconstitutional for offenders who were under eighteen at the time of their crime. Soon it is also unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life without parole. (Mar reminds us how fragile these advances are, especially with a Supreme Court that is so willing to discard the rulings of previous justices.)
As Paula ages, she calms. It happens to most of us. Sullivan Correctional Facility, the maximum-security prison in New York’s Catskills where I live, houses an older population, including men who once held leadership positions in gangs. Blind men. Deaf men. Men with serious mental illnesses. Amid such a vulnerable population, I observe more tender and selfless moments than violent ones. A prisoner escort guiding a blind man through a metal detector to the yard. A convict sign-language assistant waving his hands and making demonstrative facial expressions, communicating with a deaf prisoner. When Paula is transferred to Rockville, she throws birthday parties and gives hand-me-downs to her less fortunate peers. One time, she sews up a friend’s holey underwear.
Toward the end of the book, Mar returns to Jack Crawford. In 1989, after Paula’s death sentence was commuted, he left the prosecutor’s office and was appointed by the governor, his best friend, as the director of Indiana’s first state lottery. Soon Crawford’s longtime executive secretary, the daughter of a prominent preacher of a Black church, accuses him of sexual harassment and of using his power to manipulate her into continuing their long-term sexual relationship. Crawford resigns during a press conference in his sparsely furnished apartment. Mar writes:
This public weeping—on television, seated on the floor in a sweatshirt and sneakers—had been a spectacle of contrition. He wanted to be forgiven, to be accepted as a complex person who still had a lot to offer. In the days after the living room conference, he told a reporter that he’d never been dealt with in this way. “I was treated like I was nobody, like nobody even knew me, like I was some stranger who was going to become a homicidal maniac.”
Mar dangles this hypocrisy: How could a man so unforgiving expect forgiveness of any kind?
If this were a traditional true crime book, Crawford would be a hero. His fall might not have been included in the story. Mar doesn’t quite render him a villain, but others may read him that way. For years, day after day, he dealt with carnage, the kind Paula and I created. He met with family members of murder victims who begged him for justice. “You have to be sensitive to what you think people want. And people wanted a hard line on crime,” Crawford tells Mar about his time as a prosecutor. “Is my job to represent what people think, or is my job to lead them to what they should think? I don’t know.”
Forgiveness is deeply complex. Should those who want it ask for it? Should those who forgive be celebrated over those who don’t? If they do forgive, should they do so publicly, and constantly? When I think of Bill Pelke speaking to crowds about forgiving Paula for what she did to his grandmother, I wonder if I’m facing a similar dilemma with my writing. I’ve written in detail about how I came to kill a man. It was brutal; I was brutal. His sister, in response to an essay I wrote, requested that I not name her brother in my future writings. So I don’t.
These days, if I do mention my crime in my writing—and I know it’s often what interests editors about my life—I use it as an entry point to relate to my subjects. This kind of writing pushes me to self-discovery, but I’d like to think it also lets society know that people like me have the ability to understand what motivates our actions, both internally and externally, to investigate our warped instincts and desires, and to realize that we caused tremendous damage. I didn’t come to that realization when the judge sentenced me, or when I rationalized with the knockaround guys in the prison yard—I discovered it on the page. Maybe readers can see that there is more to the people who murder. Yet I do think about the sister of the man I killed reading my words. I hate that they may compound her hurt.
Bill Pelke’s public forgiveness brought attention to Paula’s death sentence and probably helped get it overturned. His later advocacy work contributed to the Supreme Court’s abolition of the death penalty for juveniles. His repeated retelling of Paula’s worst deed, however, may have also had some unintended consequences.
How can we weigh the importance of telling a crime story against its potential for added harm? It can feel wrong to read good writing, like Mar’s, about awful violence. But most of the book is about what happens after the murder. Mar’s nuanced exploration of justice, forgiveness, and mercy make this telling worthy.
In 2013, leading up to her release, two “major stories about Paula’s case and her ‘second chance’—front page, banner headlines—ran in The Times [of Northwest Indiana] that summer,” Mar writes. “Her name and her face were out in the public again, paired with the story of the killing of the ‘perfect grandmother,’ the ‘elderly Bible teacher,’ that phrase repeated again and again like a mantra.” And Bill Pelke goes on Chicago TV to talk about her case and his forgiveness. Paula hears that a reporter called the prison requesting her current mug shot. Racist death threats against Paula pop up online.
Paula is planning to move back with her mother, Gloria, who becomes upset about the fresh wave of coverage. In a letter to Bill, Paula explains her mother’s anger and asks why he keeps making media appearances. “I wonder if you have fully forgiven me,” she writes him. Then she decides she doesn’t want to see him any longer and removes him from her visiting list.
I can tell from Mar’s rendering that Bill was a good man and that he became more than a subject. (He was a real friend, she writes in the acknowledgments; alas, he died of a heart attack in the fall of 2020, before he could read Mar’s book.) Still I’m not sure if Bill could quite understand how decades of prison shape a person. There’s an added layer of difficulty when the media constantly reminds the world of what you did. It complicates your reintegration into society.
I imagine Paula didn’t want to be known as the girl who Indiana tried to execute or the girl who was given grace by the grandson of the elderly lady she killed. From fifteen to twenty years old, she lived knowing that so many people felt she deserved to die, and she survived that reality, in solitary, expecting to be executed.
These are some of the circumstances we know about. But what went on in her mind we do not. I understand why Paula didn’t want to get out and join Bill on his speaking circuit. She didn’t want to feel like Bill, or the Italian priests, were lording their forgiveness over her. She did her time.
Paula does not wind up going back to live with Gloria in Gary. She paroles to a halfway house in Indianapolis. She begins to go by her middle name, Renae. After a few months, she is adjusting well, or seems to be. She rents a one-bedroom apartment and keeps her “kitchen cabinets packed to bursting with canned food and snacks.” (This is a thing some of us do in here; we’re always expecting to be deprived of something, so we hoard everything.)
In Indianapolis, she meets a man named LeShon. They discuss that they both have drawn strength from Psalm 27:10: “Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.” They get engaged. LeShon is twice divorced, with six kids and ten grandchildren; like Ruth Pelke, Mar points out, Paula is “poised to inherit a bevy of adult stepkids through this midlife relationship; as with Ruth, the family embraced her.”
Paula reconnects with Monica, one of her old lawyers, who now runs the Indiana Federal Community Defenders. Monica offers Paula a job as a receptionist and asks if she wants to go by Renae. Paula insists she’ll use her first name. Monica considers the adult Paula “a person with an excess of empathy and a mysterious confidence for someone who’d lived her life,” Mar writes. “She thought she must have pulled that up from deep inside her.”
On Memorial Day, 2015, Paula attends a barbecue with family and friends. She smiles and eats and hugs her sister, Rhonda. “Everything is beautiful,” she tells Rhonda. That evening, she stays over at a friend’s house. At Paula’s request, they stop at a Walmart. Paula buys a new outfit, and new underwear, too.
The next morning, a Tuesday, she puts on her new clothes. Then she leaves four letters on her friend’s stove, drives to a nearby park, and sits under a tree. She points a gun to the side of her head and shoots herself. In the letter to LeShon, she writes, “I have taken a life and never felt worthy.” The next day the Chicago Tribune front-page headline reads, “WOMAN ONCE YOUNGEST ON DEATH ROW FOUND DEAD.” The Times of Munster’s reads, “KILLER COMMITS SUICIDE.”
As for the other girls, April, the one who knew Ruth, served almost fourteen years before getting out. A few years later, she was killed by an abusive boyfriend. Karen, who participated in the killing but avoided the death penalty, died in prison, after twenty-two years, from heart complications. Denise served about eighteen years. She has never spoken to the press. She’s the only one who is still alive.
