SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN-Alex Mar

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when Paula is sentenced to death. No one decries the impending execution of a tenth grader, but the tide begins to shift when the victim's grandson, Bill forgives the girl against the wishes of his family and campaigns to spare her life. This tragedy in a Midwestern steel town soon reverberates across the United States and around the world, reaching as far away as the Vatican, as newspapers cover the story on their front pages, and millions signed petitions in

support of Paula. As Paula waits on death row, her fate sparks a debate that not only animates legal circles, but raises vital questions about the value of human life. What are we demanding when we call for justice? Is forgiveness an act of desperation or of profound bravery? As Bill and Paula's friendship deepens, and as Bill discovers others who have chosen to forgive other terrible violence, their story asks us to consider what radical acts of empathy we

might be capable of. In seventy Times seven, alex Maher weaves an unforgettable narrative of an act of violence and its aftermath. This is a story about the will to live, to survive, to grow, to change, and about what we are willing to accept as justice. Tirelessly researched and told with intimacy and precision, this book brings a haunting chapter in the history of our criminal justice system to astonishing life.

The book that we're featuring this evening is seventy times seven, a true Story of Murder and Mercy, with my special guest, journalist and author Alex Maher. Welcome to the program and thank you very much for this interview. Alex Maher, thanks so much for having me. First off, just tell us how you came to the title of this book. It has a biblical reference. Tell us about that.

say seven, I say seventy times seven. Right, So this is it's a great moment because it's a challenge to forgive those who harm us potentially a countless number of times, and that is the challenge at the core of this book. It's something that the different characters wrestle with, It's something I wrestled with as the writer, and it's at the heart of this really extraordinary story.

either side of a crime. Do they possibly have something in common that the system isn't allowing them to recognize and explore? So that was a big part of the picture. You know, what are the principles that guide us when we're thrown into an extreme situation like the violent death of a loved one. Do you respond based on the faith you were raised with? Do you respond based on your belief in the life, letter of the law. Do you decide to take a stance that no one around

you agrees with. So that was some tough and challenging stuff that I wrestled with while I worked on this, for it ended up being more than five years.

surprising places. So instead of opening with the crime itself, I actually stepped back in time to nineteen seventy nine, as you say, and I wanted to give the reader a sense of a moment that had a profound impact on young Paula Cooper. So I open the book with a morning, very early morning when this woman Gloria takes her two daughters, the older sister Ronda, the younger sister, Paula. She takes them out to the garage in the morning, closes the garage door, loads the kids into the car.

She rolls down the windows, and she starts the engine. She has decided that they're all going to die that morning, and she allows them all to sit in the car till they pass out. She has a change of heart, thank God, at the last moment, and carries the girls back into the house, puts them in their bedroom, and she leaves them a note. Ronda, the older sister, eventually wakes up totally disoriented. She sees the note from her mom that says that she's gone back outside and she's

going to finish what she started. So in a panic, she runs out. She goes to the neighbor's house. She gets one neighbor, she gets another neighbor. They drag her out of the garage. She sees these different people performing CPR on her mother. The medics come the fire department. At this point, young Paula is standing outside as well, and she's absolutely hysterics seeing these strangers trying to revive

her mother and her mother's still passed out on the ground. Eventually, Gloria the mother, is taken to the hospital and the girls are sent to stay with family. But a week later, their mother checks herself out early she picks up the girls. It's never mentioned again. You know, this is not a scenario where the girls were placed in anyone else's care. Ronda told me personally that she remembered very clearly, no one even took their pulse that day, no one checked

to see how the girls themselves were doing. And she told me that she was so shocked when her sister Paula committed this murder at fifteen years old a few years later, and she never understood exactly the moment when her sister changed enough to be capable of that act. But in the process of us speaking, she said, you know what, I think it has something to do ultimately with you know, the change must have started that morning. And so that's how I opened the book.

As the town was built, you saw that all of these immigrants who were coming from Europe, and black workers and families migrating up from the South to get jobs in the mill, they were kind of left to fend for themselves, right, So immediately you had these middle class white executives who lived in a properly cared for part of the city. Everyone else was improvising in shacks at

the edge of town. It really grew into a heavily segregated city to the point where eventually it was a northern industrial town that was as segregated as parts of the Jim Crow South right. And that's relevant background for the story in that by the time you jump ahead to the eighties, the city has experienced economic depression and

white flight into the suburbs further south. So it's a predominantly black city where somehow the black population that has you know, there's a robust black community there, there's a civil rights movement that's burgeoning. There's a lot of positive things going on in Gary, but they just can't get a leg up, and the white population tends to blame black leadership in Gary for messing up, when actually much

larger forces are at play. So when you get to nineteen eighty five, Ruth Pelke's living in what's known as the Glen Park neighborhood, and that neighborhood had remained predominantly white for a long long time. Black families were not welcome there. It had started to integrate by the eighties. But the fact of these four black girls, including Paula, talking their way into this elderly white woman's home, robbing her,

and ultimately killing her, that had another dimension. People saw it as a symbolic crime in terms of how the white locals interpreted the event, some of them in terms of the Cooper family themselves. They lived in Marshalltown, that was not that far away, and that was, you know, a very simple housing development. The two girls were, you know, Paula and Ronda were very close. Their father was rarely

home when he was he was physically abusive. Their mother drank a great deal, worked long hours at a local hospital, They were happiest when they were alone, just the two of them together, because they could just create their own little world. You know, they would have little dance parties. To Jackson five records, the Jackson five were heroes. They grew up not that far away in Garret, and you know,

they would do each other's hair. They were just regular kids who truly just loved each other and Ron that in a way played the part of their real mother. All of that came crashing down with the crime.

been over there. Just go over there and you say you're interested in Bible study lessons and see if she'll let you in. Three of the girls go over there. One of them, Paula, has brought a knife from April's kitchen, and the idea is to scare missus Pelki. The situation escalates quickly, and Paula ends up striking missus Pelk over the head, and ultimately she seems to snap and ends up stabbing missus Pelki thirty three times on her dining

room floor. It's a horrible crime. When they leave, the girls have found ten dollars and the keys to missus Pelki's plymouth, and they drive off. Within just a couple days, all four of them have been arrested and they've confessed, and Paula gave a very explicit confession. So from very early on this was not going to be a case of wrongful conviction. That that is not at play in this story, and it's also part of why I was drawn to it. There's something really challenging about asking the

reader to look at this situation. Here is a fifteen year old girl, Here is this horrible crime. She absolutely did this. Now, what what do you think is the just response in this situation?

They told a social worker, you know, you've got to help us out, they told At one point, paul on her own, went to a police station in the middle of the night and said, you know, you've got to help me. I'm being beaten. And she'd be put in foster care or an emergency shelter, sent right back home. It was always temporary. Denise, the youngest one, was probably the least likely candidate who to have ended up there that day. She just kind of got scooped up socially

that afternoon. Her family was doing all right, and she was the one who ended up getting the lightest sentence, although although the three girls who were sentenced to prison rather than to death did receive relatively long terms. So that's, you know, that's the background there. When all four were arrested. I will say that the Lake County prosecutor at the time,

Jack Crawford, he was extremely pro death penalty. He'd been elected on essentially tough on crime, classic tough on crime platform, had a press conference announced, we've got the suspects, we have confessions. These are four young girls, and I'm going to push for the death penalty for as many of them as I can, which is an incredible statement to

make about people who are so young. And ultimately he pursued the death penalty with Paula and Karen, and Paula because of the depth of her involvement and the heinousness of the crime in a death penalty state, you know, she took her public defender decided she should plead guilty. With no deal on the table. He put up very very minimal defense. Is arguments that are sentencing hearing were very thin, and so in a way, inevitably she was sentenced to death by the judge.

mind blowing. A local representative in Gary named Earlene Rodgers, the day after Paula's death sentence made all these headlines locally, she publicly made a statement, did not miss a beach. She said, you know, the first thing I'm going to do in the next Assembly session is I'm going to introduce a bill that's going to raise the minimum age for the death sentence in the state of Indiana because we may not agree on everything, but I'm pretty sure

we can agree that we shouldn't be killing kids. That was her statement. And she's such an extraordinary figure. There are all these great characters in this book, real life characters. She was a public school teacher, she'd been a public school teacher for about twenty years at that point in her forties, ran for public office and was really proud to be representing Gary. But she had this special perspective, which was, you know, I work with young teenagers every day.

I have teenage kids myself. She had a daughter who was Paula's age, and she said, you know, this is wild to be trying to treat kids that age as if they're as culpable as an adult in that situation. The death sentence should not be on the table. And so she jumped into the story. So you have little by little people started responding to this death sentence in passionate ways. So, I mean, I don't know if we should get into Bill Pelke's role.

girlfriend is falling apart. He has had to declare bankruptcy because of some bad decisions. He feels lost and directionless. And he was someone who was a crane operator in a local steel mill. That was his job day and day out for almost twenty years. At that point, he wasn't someone who asked big questions about the world. He didn't think of himself as political or you know, like someone who's going to make a big statement in public

about an issue. But he was up in the crane in the steel mill one night, and you know, the warehouse was dead. He was doing a late shift and he started kind of having a breakdown. He finds himself crying just thinking about the state of his life. And he has a moment where he suddenly pictures Paula Cooper, pictures this kid's face. He'd only seen her one time, it was that day in when she was sentenced to death,

but he pictures her now on death row. You know, he's not sure what it would look like, but it's got to be some terrible small cell kind of roughly the same size as the crane that he's operating, that crane cab. And he thinks, you know, I may feel alone, and I may feel desperate, but there's someone I can think of who's more desperate than me, and I bet

she is full of regret. And he thinks about his grandmother, and he thinks about, my grandmother would not have wanted the death sentence for this girl, to execute this kid in her name as the form of justice. He's totally rocked by this feeling, and he becomes completely convinced that actually his grandmother would like him to extend some kind of compassion towards this girl, and that what he needs to do is to actually try to forgive her and

try to get her off death row. Not that she shouldn't be severely punished, but that death is a step too far. By the time time he gets down out of that crane that night, he is truly a changed man, like a man who suddenly has a purpose. And in the morning he wakes up, he gets some paper and he sits down and he just writes by hand a letter to this girl on death row in Indianapolis who

killed his grandmother. You know, he just tries to come up with something to say, and he puts it in the mail, and he waits and it's the beginning of truly an incredible relationship that starts up between the two of them against all odds. And I had the incredible experience of reading hundreds and hundreds of letters between the two of them that took place over years, and to see this really fraud relationship evolve was for me, it was the stuff of great novels.

But now he does something behind the scenes because he has he feels something about the judgment that he says he was he was coerced into doing, or something about along those lines.

very red state. But to be a Democrat in Lake County is not like being a Democrat in New York, you know, so so a little more conservative to begin with, but he was. He was a liberal, and he knew that he was against the death penalty. Jack Crawford, the prosecutor, wanted the right optics for this case, and so he looked around and he thought, well, we have one black criminal court judge and behind the scenes, and this is

not legal. He had one of his deputies, he told me this in recent years, he had one of his deputies rig it so that the Ruth Pelke murder and the cases of those four girls, they would all take place in the court room of Judge Kimbro, the one black criminal court judge, so that if the death sentence

was handed down, no one could cry racism. That was one of the ideas behind that that was unspoken when Paula's public defender did such a weak job in defending her and you know, pled guilty without a deal, made hardly any any kind of meaningful argument at her sentencing hearing, called very few witnesses or experts. Judge Kimbro felt, you know, he really believed in the letter of the law, and he felt that this is a terrible crime. There were three other girls who did not get death. One of

the other girls he gave sixty years to. So what are we going to do in a situation where this is the girl who committed the worst part of this crime. She actually repeatedly stabbed this woman to death, and he felt that the only option was death. Ultimately, that changed

his life. He never recovered from that decision. That day, when he handed down that sentence in court, he went back to his chambers and he called in one of the appellate defenders who were on the team there, this man Bill Touchet, and privately he said to him, you know, distraught about what took place today, I'm putting you on her appeal. You need to get her off, You need to get her sentence reduced. And Touche said, you know, I'm going to do the best that I can. And

he shared that with me. He hadn't shared that information with anyone. He told me that just a couple of years ago, that the judge had made that extraordinary statement to him that day. And so he and Monica Foster, who you mentioned, they took up Paula's appeal and they took it all the way to the Indiana Supreme Court.

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her off death row. We haven't spoke about the effects that the story we talked about in the introduction. This story reverberating around the world, but especially in West Germany and particularly in Italy. Tell us about two journalists that again involved in this fight, and how the Pope and the Vatican all in Italy get involved in this story.

She was based in New York City as a foreign correspondent, and she saw just one of those little capsule news headlines, I think it was in USA today, where they used to have rundowns of just news items, you know, a couple pages in and it said that a fifty young girl had been sentenced to death in Indiana for a crime committed at fifteen years old. She thought, is this true? How can this possibly be true? It seemed to her

something that maybe this had been misreported. She made some calls and found out that, you know, yeah, this is this actually just took place. So she called her editor, who teamed her up with another journalist in New York,

Jumpaulo Pioli, who was writing for another Italian paper. They went together, they got some money from their respective papers and were sent to Indiana, and they were the first foreign press to do original reporting on the ground in Gary, knowing nothing about the region, only knowing this one item of news, and they went. They met with Paula's grandfather. They ended up interviewing Bill Pelk, They interviewed Bill Touchet, the appellate defender, and they wrote very emotionally charged stories

that were run. They were teased on the front pages of both of their Italian papers, and it just took off. Readers responded like crazy, they were offended and incensed, and the letters from readers poured in. Eventually people started signing petitions that met members of the Catholic Church, different kinds of activists organized and you ended up with at first tens of thousands of people in Italy signing these petitions

that they were mailing to the Governor of Indiana. It eventually rose to two million signatures, and petitions started coming in from Scandinavia and from Germany. You know, it really just took off as an issue. The At the same time, the case came to the attention of a Franciscan friar named Father Vito Bracone, who was based in Rome, and he had grown up incredibly poor in a small village in the south of Italy. His family had been a very loving, big family, but you know, they grew up

in a couple of rooms, dirt floor. They were only able to go to school for a couple of years. They helped the family with their vineyard, and you know, they had a donkey. You know, it was extremely primitive living. And he read that, you know, this girl grew up in a very modest home, and and he immediately felt some kind of kinship to that, even though their lives had been so different. He thought, you know, she doesn't have money. Who's going to help her? Her parents have

abandoned her. You know what, it's going to be me. And he flew to Indianapolis wearing the brown friar's robe that I think a lot of people think of from the movies, you know, with the hooded brown robe with the white rope belt. And he shows up to go visit her on death row and just says, you know, myself and other members of the church were very concerned about the news of your case. I came here to be your friend. We're going to do whatever we can

to try to help you. And he starts drumming up more attention in the Italian media, and he gives interviews whenever he can to the press in Indiana, knowing that it's an exotic site. See this man flown in from Rome in the friar's robe, so it kind of gives him a way into making comments on the case as an outsider. Eventually it goes all the way day to the Pope. The Pope was coming to visit America to see President Reagan and to travel around to multiple cities.

One of the two Italian journalists I mentioned, Jampaulo Pioli, got a handwritten letter from PAULA. Cooper on death row. He ended up carrying that letter with him on the Pope's plane. He was part of the press junket of journalists covering some of this trip and managed to get it passed into the hands of Pope John Paul the Second himself, and eventually that led to the Pope, through a spokesperson, making a statement that the Pope would like to see the sentence of this young woman on death

row in America commuted. And truly, it was truly an extraordinary sequence of events that led to that moment.

he just he lacked a sense of focus. What was his field going to be? How could he stand out from all the other legal scholars trying to publish papers? And he started doing some work in juvenile court locally to try to understand some of the issues facing the

sentencing of kids. In the process of doing that, he met for the first time some kids who were charged with violent crimes, and his wheels started turning and he began to think about the fact that capital punishment was still on the books for kids in America across the country a number of states. He also realized that this wasn't an issue people were addressing at all. It wasn't being debated. So the U. Supreme Court around that same

time took on a case called Eddings versus Oklahoma. That was the very first time in the history of this country that the highest court discussed the death penalty for juveniles where the justice is actually debated openly, well, how can we know what the right minimum age is for deaths? And it became clear that they had nothing to base their discussion on. Really, there was no precedent, and it's really hard to draw a line in the sand and say, Okay,

a person is mature at this age, immature at that age. Okay, then the death sentence applies. Pure followed this case really closely and was really inspired. He thought, oh my god, the stakes are so high. This is what I'm going to specialize on this issue. So, almost single handedly, with help from a few others along the way, he really was the godfather of this movement of people trying to

look into and challenge the death penalty for teenagers. And because of his research, you know, he went and did this very un sexy work of collecting data about this relatively unknown phenomenon in this country. He revealed that we have executed more than three hundred young people in this country, and we've sentenced to death more than two hundred teenagers since the seventies. So this is not just some sort of you know, colonial times problem. This is an active

problem in the country. In that moment, he ends up being approached by Bill Touchet and asked to join the appellate team for PAULA Cooper, which ended up making an enormous difference, and so the two of them got to team up and join in the oral argument before the Indiana Supreme Court, and I learned about how that played out from both of them, but also by interviewing repeatedly the man who at the time was Chief Justice for the Court, Randall Shepherd, which was kind of extraordinary to

get a sense of the inner workings of that process from someone on a state supreme court.

it was what's called a plurality. They didn't have a majority decision, but a plurality, which means it's not a binding decision, but it's taken as a suggestion by the court to lower courts around the country that fifteen was too young for the death sentence. Paula Cooper, as we've just discussed, was fifteen at the time of her crime.

So he then goes full bore into Paula Cooper's appeal and one of the big things, big statements he's able to make before the state Supreme Court in Indiana is well, the US Supreme Court just decided with a plurality that fifteen is too young. So at the same time we have Arline Rodgers, who at the time was a public school teacher, as I mentioned, but also unelected official. He was pushing to raise the minimum age for death in

Indiana from ten to her goal was sixteen. She succeeded not long before Paula's case reached the State Supreme Court. And so Victor Stribe and Bill Touche, we're also able to say, well, look, now we have a new minimum age for the death penalty in the state of Indiana. Is it fair to say that Paula Cooper will still get the death sentence because she was sentenced right before this new bill went into effect. Ken that was the

core of the argument. And ultimately, you know, the state Supreme Court had to agree that her sentence had to just just thing. And also the only way to follow legal logic in this scenario was to commute her sentence.

in some ways she'd won. But I think the reality was that the weight of that prison sentence then really came down on her because what she'd won was not her freedom. You know, she won significant amount of her adult life in prison rather than the death sentence.

same time. As a result of that, in spite of being someone who was not political, did not have any relationships with activists or public organizations, and you know, someone who really just had a very normal life. As a result of all of this speaking out, he ends up meeting people who connect him with the ACLU, with Amnesty International.

He starts going to rallies, he starts marching, you know, in demonstrations that are coming up that are against the death penalty, and you know, he's surrounded by all these college kids and progressive people who are like, you know, some of them are kind of hippy ish. He's the one showing up in a pressed gray suit. He carries a copy of the Bible. People are like, this is this guy, like a Republican who's on our side? You know there it was really he was taking a risk.

You know, he was dipping his toes into water that was very unfamiliar for him, and in the process of doing that, he's really shocked at one event when he meets someone who's also a murder victim's family member who has started to say publicly that they were against the

death penalty in their family member's case. And then he meets someone else like that, and then they, you know, they start to put together a loose kind of collective of murder victims family members who don't believe in the death sentence, who are based all around the country, and that becomes this other storyline that evolves where, you know, they become almost like an improvised second family to each other, where they're able to understand something really fundamental about each

other's lives and help each other out and rainstorm together about ways that they can have a voice in the.

she eventually got out. I think her mother also made an effort a number of times to get sober to try to mend things with her younger daughter. But my understanding is that was always quite short lived. So when Paula got out, she was in her mid forties, it was already kind of late for her to start her own family. She'd always wanted to have a bunch of kids.

That was really you know, that was ironically, you know, having having grown up in such a difficult family situation, that was sort of the number one romantic idea she had when she was released. I'm going to meet someone, I'm going to have I'm going to have all these kids. I'm going to make good with my mother. We're all going to be this happy family and Rond and I and everybody else will have holidays together. And Ronda just

saw this as a disaster waiting to happen. You know, she told her, I've been out here the whole time, and this woman is not who you want to believe she is. And you know, she had all this support from her sister she was so close to, and other people in her life. Monica Foster remained a really great friend and relationship for her and gave her a great job when she got out. But I think we can all relate to this. You know, whatever kind of household you grew up in, we all have a tie to

our parents. However they treated us when we were young. That's a bond that you cannot fully shake off and you can't ever become totally independent of. So she wanted her mother's approval, she wanted to find love there, and her mother made it very clear at a certain point that she was still ashamed of her daughter and she did not want to be publicly associated with her. And

that had a huge impact on Paula. You know, it's ironic that her victim's grandson wants to be associated with her publicly, but her own mother does not.

was still incarcerated. You know, years went by and she was able to start doing some kind of work on herself to educate herself to She did a lot of work for other women in the facilities where she was incarcerated, just stuff to help people out, kind of like good deeds. You know, if it was someone's birthday and she knew they didn't have anyone coming to see them or sending them gifts, she would throw a little party for them.

You know, she would if someone knew entered the prison, she would buy a pair of shoes for them, you know, things where there was no tit for tat. It was really just trying to make the lives of some of these other women easy. So she evolved as a person. The downside of that, potentially, you know, this is my theory, is that it made her someone who was more capable of experiencing really profound remorse around the crime she committed as a young person. And she was upfront about that

with a couple people very close to her. And once she got out, you know, I took a life and I'm never going to be worthy. That was how she felt. And you know, it's unclear if anything could have been done but to help her, but that was ultimately why she chose to take her own life.

hold kids as responsible as adults? We don't see them as adults in other ways, And what does it say about us to be executing someone at fifteen, sixteen seventeen. Eventually, however, an added component entered the picture, which was the you know, neuros science about adolescent brain development. What was discovered is that the human brain is not fully developed until you know,

possibly as late as twenty four, twenty five. So you're looking at a situation where if a teenager commits a violent crime, their brain is less capable of impulse control, of a lot of the kind of thinking that we associate with ethical decision making, right, and they're much more

susceptible to behaving under the influence of peer pressure. So in Ruth Pelk's death, you not only had someone who was just fifteen years old as the time of the crime, who was in this group dynamic of these other girls where they were potentially kind of egging each other on and things got out of hand. There suddenly was by the nineties and the early two thousands science that supported this idea. So for the Roper v. Simmons case in two thousand and five, it finally ends the death penalty

for kids four people under eighteen. That was a component that the sitting justices found really compelling.

forming a group. At first there's a group called Murder Victims Families to Reconciliation, and eventually Bill and this core group form something called the Journey, and they end up traveling through different states at different moments, tackling different death penalty states around the country, basically going on these two week long NonStop lecture tours that can drum up a lot of press, and they're telling their stories, the story of the toughest moments in their lives in front of

the public. In front of the press in any of these death penalty states to just drum up an awareness of the fact that the victims' families do not always agree with the death sentence. This should not be a given. We've got to look at this issue more closely, and it creates an extraordinary new wing of the victims' rights movement. That was another extension of this incredible story, you know, the starting with this one violent event in Gary, Indiana.

It was incredible to see how it's spurred on so many people to do to take action in ways that had big ramifications around the country.