Paula Cooper: The Executioner Within

This 13-chapter story, told as a real-life novel, raises questions about race, justice, poverty and abuse. But it is also the story about the human capacity for forgiveness and a young woman’s struggle to find peace.

Still shrouded in darkness, she sat alone in her car, parked between night and day, between this world and the next.

Behind her, a family of teddy bears sat strapped in by a seat belt. In the front seat next to her was a digital recorder. And a gun.

She picked up the recorder and clicked it on.

"This is Paula Cooper."

A short introduction, a simple statement. Even though nothing had been simple about being Paula Cooper.

"I believe today is the 26th; 5:15 will be my death."

She saw it clearly now, even in the pre-dawn gloom. She'd spent so much of her life searching for peace. But early on the morning of May 26, 2015, the end was in sight. She would reach it before sunrise.

She just had a few things left to say.

—

"My sister. My queen. My everything."

Every morning she spoke to Rhonda. Why should this morning be different?

—

"My mother, I felt like you didn't love me. You didn't care about me. You cut me off. You judged me. You didn't want me at your church. You hurt me about the man I loved. But I still love you."

Others had forgiven Paula. Yet she never felt it from the woman who mattered most.

—

"To Monica, I'm so sorry. This pain that I feel every day. I walk around. I'm so miserable inside. I can't deal with this reality."

Monica had been like a godmother in the fairy tales — someone to fill the void in the absence of a mother's love.

—

"LeShon, I love you. … You showed me how to love.You showed me how to be a woman."

LeShon looked beyond Paula's past. As if it had never occurred.

—

"Michael, I'm so proud of you. And thank you for apologizing."

Michael was her first love. She wanted a life with him; he wanted something else.

—

"Meshia … you helped me when I was down, but I explained to you better than anybody how I feel."

Meshia knew Paula's pain; she'd just been unable to stop it.

—

These were the people Paula loved most. And to each one she had revealed part of herself, but never the whole. It was a select list from a life populated by characters: Her brutal father and her innocent victim; the judge who condemned her and the man who forgave her. There were friars and a bishop and a pope; jailers and journalists; people who were zealous to save her life and people eager to end it. There were too many to consider, really. And the sun would be up soon. She could wait no longer.

"Forgive me," she said in a recording that would soon become part of a police investigation. "I must go now."

Her coda finished, Paula stepped out of the car and into the shadows. She took a seat against a blighted tree. She felt the breeze in her hair. She felt the gun in her hand.

She was familiar with death. She'd seen it up close. She'd been condemned to it, resigned to it and reprieved from it. She had debated its merits and come to terms with it. Never had she stopped thinking of it.

But the question that would vex those she was leaving behind was maddeningly simple.

Why, after all she had endured and all she had survived, after all she had done and seemed capable of doing, had she chosen to die now?

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The garden spot in the woods — where her father grew vegetables and beat his daughters — was only an occasional venue of torture.

More often, for Paula Cooper, it happened at home.

As a child, Paula went to bed night after night next to her sister, listening to their parents argue, listening to her father make threats to come after them. Sometimes her mother would talk him out of it. Sometimes the man's wrath ebbed and they fell asleep. Sometimes they would be jarred awake at 3 o'clock in the morning, her father standing over them, ready to beat them.

Paula believed there were other kinds of families out there. She watched the people on "The Cosby Show," and they seemed to have such a nice family. But that was television. This was real. This was her family. And it looked as if there was no escaping it.

—

Paula was born in Chicago to Herman and Gloria Cooper on Aug. 25, 1969. Her sister, Rhonda, was three years older. Early on, the family lived in Michigan City, but by the time Paula was old enough for school they had moved to Gary.

The girls attended Bethune Grade School, a stone's throw from home. They went to nearby New Testament Baptist Church, where Paula sang in the choir and helped with the little children's Bible classes.

By the late 1970s, Gary's downward spiral from a midcentury boomtown was picking up speed. Manufacturing jobs were disappearing. White families were fleeing to the suburbs. Crime was rising. Like many black families still in the city, the Coopers were left in the wake of all this.

Gloria worked as a lab tech at a hospital. She had an assortment of health problems, none of them helped by the drugs and booze she added to the mixture.

"One day my mother be nice, the next day she be angry," Paula would tell Woman's Day, years later, when her story was national news. "And the next day she be real strange-acting."

Herman worked for U.S. Steel and worked construction, but his employment was sporadic. He had a girlfriend on the side and would be gone for long stretches. When he returned, chaos followed. Herman and Gloria were a volatile pair, drinking hard and arguing often, creating an atmosphere that was not just unstable, but dangerous.

The result, as Paula would say later, was that the girls had to "fend for themselves." Sometimes, on evenings when Herman was gone and Gloria worked late, Paula took meals with the next-door neighbors, who allowed her to stick around and watch TV. Most of the time the girls had food and nice clothing. But, as Rhonda would say later, "we hardly ever had any love."

Except from each other.

In the middle of all the darkness, Paula and Rhonda clung tightly to each other. They found moments to giggle together, play pranks together and share secrets.

More than just a sister, Rhonda became Paula's caregiver. Yet, through their early years, they were unaware of an important family secret: Rhonda was the child of a different father. It was a secret Gloria took great pains to hide, even though she allowed Rhonda's father, Ronald Williams, to visit occasionally. She said he was her uncle.

Before Herman came along, Ronald and Gloria were engaged. They broke it off, as Williams would later tell a courtroom, because he felt Gloria had a "split personality." In short, he thought she was crazy.

Living with Herman Cooper didn't help.

Herman beat everyone in the house. He beat Gloria in front of the girls. He beat the girls together. He beat them separately, sometimes in front of their mother. Sometimes Gloria seemed to egg on the violence.

"We did everything we was supposed to do, but it just wasn't never good enough for her," Paula told Woman's Day many years later. "… She get mad at us and he'd beat us. 'Be a man,' she'd tell him. 'Take care of it,' she'd say. And he'd take care of it."

The girls grew up unable to remember a time before the abuse. When they were little, Paula would later say, Herman beat them "for the things little kids do." When they were older, Rhonda remembered, he beat them for forgetting to take out the trash, for not doing the dishes and for skipping school.

Herman employed an assortment of tools for punishment, whatever he could get his hands on — shoes, straps, sticks, a broom. Sometimes he used an electrical cord from an air conditioner.

"He'd triple it up and go to work," Paula would say later. "It got to the point I was so used to it I didn't cry anymore."

To heighten the pain, Herman sometimes ordered the girls to remove their clothes before a beating. Questioned later, he denied that he ever abused the girls at all.

—

This stark picture of Paula Cooper's childhood emerges from several sources; the courtroom testimony from Rhonda and her father; testimony from Dr. Frank Brogno, a clinical psychologist who discussed what he learned from examining Paula. Some of the glimpses into the darkness come from now-yellowed news clippings. Others come from anecdotes Paula shared with friends and loved ones and the few journalists she favored. Finally, there's the freshest source of insight into Paula's world — more than 100 personal letters she wrote to a treasured friend that were reviewed by IndyStar.

Taken together, they amount to a catalog of horrors. Her father's beatings, Paula said, left her "close to death so many times." With no apparent means of escape, she seemed to stop fearing death at all. "I just cried," she wrote, "until all my tears were gone away."

—

In 1978, when Paula was 9, the tears were still flowing. Her parents separated, but it was often fuzzy as to when they were back together and when they were apart. Once, when Herman returned home to find the doors locked, he forced his way in. According to testimony Rhonda gave in court, Herman entered their home, beat up their mother and raped her in front of the two girls.

The incident seems to have been a tipping point. Not long after, Gloria began telling her daughters the world had nothing to offer them. Instead, she said, they'd all be better off going to heaven. On this point, Rhonda would say later, Gloria began pressuring her daughters. Eventually, the girls came to believe, like their mother, they had nothing to live for.

Gloria phoned Ronald Williams, Rhonda's father and steady friend. It was late. She'd been drinking and taking pills. She was crying. Herman had been giving her problems, she said, and things weren't good at work.

She was thinking of killing herself.

Williams had heard this kind of talk from Gloria before. Always, he had been able to console her, to talk her back from the precipice. He reminded her that she had Paula and Rhonda to think about. What would happen to them? His question made Gloria think. But only for an hour.

She called Williams back. Between her tears and her wailing, Gloria said: "I finally found out what I'm going to do with the kids."

Williams was alarmed. He demanded to know what she meant.

"I'm going to take them with me," she replied. "I'm going to let you speak to your daughter and Paula for the last time."

The girls took the phone in turns. They were crying, too. Rhonda said they were going to heaven with their mother.

"Don't do nothing drastic," Williams told them. "Let me speak to your mother, OK."

The phone went dead.

Williams panicked. Gloria and the girls had recently moved. She hadn't shared their new address. He didn't know where to find them, how to stop her.

He called the operator and asked for his last call to be traced; it was no good. He called Gary police. Without an address, they could do nothing.

There was nothing anyone could do. Williams waited. For three weeks, he waited. He feared what had become of them.

Had Gloria killed them all?

—

After she hung up the phone, Gloria decided not to act right away; she'd wait until morning. When she awoke, Gloria took the girls out to the car in the garage. She put them in the back seat and started the engine. The garage door remained closed.

From there, accounts differ. Williams testified that a friend told him neighbors noticed something and called the fire department. Rhonda testified that, as the fumes gathered, the girls drifted off to sleep. They thought they were going to heaven; instead, they woke up in bed. How they got there isn't clear. Rhonda said Gloria had changed her mind. When the girls awoke, she said, their mother was coughing on the lawn.

From then on, Williams tried to coax Gloria into letting him have the girls. Rhonda was his daughter, and he was fond of Paula, too. Gloria would have none of it.

"I'd rather see them both dead," she said.

—

The girls survived their first brush with death. But Paula and her sister were being shaped in a world without hope. And now their mother had planted a seed: The ultimate escape was death.

Rhonda looked around at this nihilist world and began seeking a way out. Several times she tried to run. Soon, she began taking Paula with her. "I couldn't take it no more in that house," she would say, "and I didn't want her to, either."

By 1982, when both girls were teenagers, they made an unsuccessful attempt to run and were sent — together — to the Thelma Marshall Children's Home in Gary. Within a short time, they were returned to the Coopers. For Paula, it was the beginning of a cycle — of running and being returned home. For Rhonda, that cycle ended only when she learned Ronald Williams was her biological father. At her first opportunity, she left the Coopers to live with him.

If the move helped Rhonda, it had grievous consequences for Paula, then 13. Her sister had been the most stable person in her home. Now she was gone. Paula came to believe her parents blamed her for Rhonda's departure. Now that her father's anger had one less target, Paula's beatings grew more frequent and more brutal. Even as her parents divorced, Herman never quite left the picture. And his handiwork began to show.

At school, Paula revealed to an administrator a rash of injuries — a bruise on her thigh, a welt on her arm, a rug burn on her elbow.

When a welfare caseworker visited the Cooper home, Herman and Gloria cursed at her. They blamed Paula's problems on interference from the courts, from the school psychologist and from the welfare department itself. When the caseworker recommended family counseling, Gloria said she'd rather go to jail.

At various times, Gloria and Herman seemed to vacillate between wanting Paula and considering her a curse. Paula began running away on her own. After one attempt, welfare officials wanted to send Paula home, but her mother objected. If Paula returned, Gloria vowed to leave.

On another occasion, when Rhonda made a rare visit to spend a weekend with Paula and her mother, arguments ensued and Williams returned for Rhonda. He couldn't find her there, but he found Paula. She was crying so loudly he heard her without going in. Gloria, who stood in front of the house fuming about Paula, simply said: "I'm going to kill that bitch."

Paula emerged and, seeing Williams, ran to him and jumped into his arms. He asked her if her mother would really hurt her.

"Yes."

Williams told her to get in the car. Gloria charged out toward them and began to threaten Paula. "I'm going to kill you and if I don't (Herman) will."

Williams considered it serious business to take Paula. He lived in Illinois and assumed it would be a crime to take a child across the state line without permission of the parents. He took her anyway. Gloria and other family members threatened to phone the police.

At his home, Williams asked Paula what she wanted to do. They talked about the logistics of her staying with him without her mother's permission. It would be impossible for her to go to school. Then there was the trouble Williams might face. With tears, Paula looked at Williams and said, "It's best for me to go home … I don't want to get you in no trouble." Paula's respite lasted only a few hours.

Even though he wasn't keeping Paula, Williams couldn't fathom returning her home. Instead, he just let her walk away. She was young, no more than 13, but Williams believed she was safer on the streets of Chicago than at home. Under scrutiny for making such a choice, Williams later told a courtroom he thought Paula was in danger there. "I would rather see her in the street as a slut than for her mother to blow her brains out."

For several days, Paula survived on her own. Inevitably, she wound up back home.

—

By 1983, when Paula turned 14, she stayed away from home as much as possible. She was smoking cigarettes and drinking. She smoked marijuana almost daily. Tall, but heavy, she took speed to lose weight. She tried cocaine. She skipped school routinely. She was sexually active. Years later, she would warn others against making similar choices. But for the moment, it was her life.

And it was a rootless life. She spent six months at a children's home in Mishawaka and three months in a juvenile detention center. She was removed from one home after only six days after she threatened a staff member and another resident — with a knife.

With each new address, Paula changed schools. She attended four high schools without ever finishing the 10th grade. Her schoolwork, decent at first, nosedived. She called a teacher "crazy," resulting in a suspension. She struggled to keep friends. She developed a reputation as a bully. All the while, Paula struggled to wake up in the mornings. When she was evaluated for the problem, a doctor at a local hospital asked if she ever thought of killing herself.

"Yes," she replied.

For that answer, she was sent to a mental hospital. Released four days later, she returned home.

"I told people I needed help and to talk, but all they did was move me from home to home," Paula would write a few years later. "I didn't care about life or trouble or consequences at all."

—

Perhaps the pinnacle of Paula's abuse came, ironically, after her father visited Gary police seeking advice on how to deal with a wayward child. Paula was 14, and Herman Cooper couldn't keep her reined in. Frustrated, he asked the police what he should do with her. It was a family matter, they said; he should do what he thought was right.

For Herman Cooper, that meant one thing: another beating. But for what he had in mind this time, he'd need some privacy. He took Paula to a woody patch near a spot where he kept a garden. Paula had been there before; so had Rhonda.

"If you scream where I take you," he told Paula, "no one will hear you."

Several times in her life, Paula thought her father was going to beat her to death. This was one of them. "He just kept beating me and beating me," she would tell the clinical psychologist, for what seemed like half an hour. Instead of the cord or a broom or a stick, this time Herman beat her with his bare hands.

When he was done, Herman put Paula in the car to take her home. But as they drove through the darkening streets of Gary, Paula knew she couldn't go back there. Not when the possibility of more punishment lay ahead in the Cooper house of horrors.

As Herman pulled the car up to the house, Paula jumped out and took off running into the night. Running and screaming. Herman gave chase, but porch lights began to click on. Up and down the street, neighbors stepped out to investigate the commotion. The neighbors had seen this show before; it never seemed to end. This time, though, Herman retreated.

Paula ran until she wound up where the night had begun — at the police station. She told officers there about the beating, told them she couldn't go home. At least not while Herman was around. The state pulled her away from the Coopers. It isn't clear from the record where she was placed. But soon, she was sent back home.

—

In the summer of 1984, when Paula turned 15, she felt as lonely as ever.

Adrift, Paula briefly took up with a guy she hoped might offer her a haven. Later, she would tell others he was a rough character who dealt drugs and treated her poorly. The one thing he did for Paula was leave her pregnant.

Many teenage girls would consider pregnancy a tragedy; Paula saw it as a blessing. She had almost forgotten how to care about anyone. She wanted a family, wanted someone to belong to. The child growing inside her represented someone she could love, someone who would love her in return.

And then it was gone.

Gloria had been dead set against the pregnancy; she wanted Paula to end it. Paula refused and ran off — perhaps to seek help from a woman she knew in Chicago. Her mother tracked her down and, as Paula would write years later in a letter and tell friends, forced her to have an abortion.

Paula was several months into the pregnancy; the procedure nearly killed her. "She took something that would have completed my life," Paula would write later, "and after that I felt I had no one."

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Ruth Pelke was gentle, an old woman with silvery hair and horn-rimmed glasses. As her stepson Robert and his wife pleaded for her to leave Gary, she listened.

Robert pledged to do everything necessary to make her house ready for sale — the legal stuff, the touch-up jobs, whatever. She listened as they talked to her about how dangerous her neighborhood had become.

But Ruth didn't really need reminding. Her Glen Park neighborhood was still one of the better places to live in Gary, although that wasn't saying much, given the city's downward lurch. There were abandoned houses now. There were burglaries. Her own home had been hit five times in recent years, including when her husband, Oscar, was still alive. Now, at 78, she was widowed and alone, and things were only getting worse. But Ruth had been in Glen Park for 41 years; it was home. She still had some good neighbors. Just as important, she had a mission.

For decades, she'd opened her home and heart to the neighborhood children. She'd taught them the Bible using felt cutouts of Bible characters that she stuck to a flannel board. She'd given the kids candy when they memorized Scripture. She'd driven them to church. She believed these were children who needed hope, and they could find it in Jesus. No, she finally said that night after her stepson's plea — she wouldn't be leaving the home in her neighborhood.

"I'll stay here until I go there," she said.

Ruth Pelke was pointing a finger to heaven.

—

The next day, Tuesday, May 14, 1985, Ruth's doorbell rang.

She answered it and found three teenage girls standing on her porch. She didn't recognize them, but she opened her door. One of the girls said, "My auntie would like to know about Bible classes. When do y'all hold them?"

Ruth wasn't up to teaching anymore, but she wanted to help the girls. "Come back on Saturday," she said. And closed the door.

—

The girls — Karen Corder, Denise Thomas and Paula Cooper — walked back across the alley. Sitting on a porch, April Beverly was waiting.

The foursome — all ninth- and 10th-graders at Lew Wallace High School — left school at lunchtime that afternoon with no intention of going back. The girls walked the 10 blocks or so to an arcade near 45th and Broadway where they spent what little money they had on games and candy. When their money was gone, they headed back to the house where April was staying with her sister.

They were a ragtag bunch.

At 16, Karen Corder — known to her friends as "Pooky" — was the oldest. More than two years earlier, she'd given birth to a baby boy whom she'd delivered in a toilet. She'd managed to keep the pregnancy secret from her parents until the child was born, according to court records.

At 15, April Beverly was seven months pregnant. She was part of a divided family with 11 children, and she bounced between two homes, her father's and her sister's. Her mother was dead, her father had remarried. On occasion, April benefited from the kindness of the old lady across the alley. She'd listened to Ruth Pelke's Bible lessons. And the old woman had brought food over to April and her siblings when she was concerned they might be hungry.

At 14, Denise Thomas was the youngest of the four and the smallest. The others were mature young women — at different places on the spectrum of teen motherhood. Denise still looked very much like a little girl. In the context of this group, some would later describe her as a tag-along.

And, of course, there was Paula Cooper. At 15, she was only months removed from an unwanted abortion that had nearly killed her. She was tall, somewhat heavy and had the bearing of a girl beyond her years. She would be described as the "prime mover" of the quartet — the ringleader. But it was a label she'd never cop to.

—

To date, the sum total of their illicit behavior was strictly small-time. Karen had tried her hand at shoplifting. Paula, Karen and April had pulled off a burglary a few days before that netted them $90. Mostly, the girls were truants. And on this Tuesday afternoon away from school, their immediate priority was to raise some money so they could go back to the arcade.

Their first attempt was a harebrained scheme April cooked up to get some cash from a woman up the street. All four girls had gone to the woman's door. April introduced Denise, the small one, as her daughter. April claimed the woman's husband had taken $20 from Denise and they'd come to collect it. For added zest, April threw in this detail: The woman's husband had been naked when he stepped into the street to take Denise's money.

The woman didn't go for it.

After that failure, April turned her focus to Ruth Pelke. She seemed to recall the lady keeping a jar of $2 bills. She thought the woman might even have some jewelry. The question was how to get to it all.

As they sat on the porch at her sister's house, April asked Paula to come inside — she might know where there was a gun. For the girls, a gun crime would be a considerable step up the criminal ladder. But the gun wasn't where April thought it was; she couldn't find it. Then it occurred to April: Something else might do.

"I have a knife you could scare the lady with," she said.

Soon, April produced a 12-inch butcher knife. It was sharp and had a curving blade that graduated to a fine point. It was a cooking tool, but also a potentially lethal instrument. Paula took the knife and hid it in her light jacket. Out on the porch, she and April explained to the other girls: This was their new weapon of choice. And Karen came up with another approach to getting inside the old lady's home: They would ask her to write down the time and place where the Bible classes would be.

In all this planning, Paula and the other girls would forever swear, the subject of killing the old woman never came up. The most they would admit, according to Corder, was that they'd knock out the woman and rob her. Still, the reality of what they were planning — to con their way into her house, pull a knife and take the old woman's valuables — was fraught with danger.

As their scheme unfolded, April stayed back again, resting on her sister's porch; she didn't want the old woman to recognize her. Karen, Paula and Denise crossed the alley.

They rang the bell, and soon Ruth Pelke appeared at the door. This time, when she answered, Karen said: "My auntie wants to know where the Bible classes are held at. Could you write it down for me?"

Ruth said she no longer taught the classes, but she knew of a lady. "I'll look up her telephone number for you." She invited the girls to come in. And she turned to walk to the desk on the far side of the room.

—

Ruth Pelke looked for all the world like the kindly grandmother drawn up in children's books. She was also a woman whose Christian faith was essential to who she was. She went to church on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays. She visited church members who were too old or too sick to get out. She sang in the choir. She hosted missionaries in her home on their trips back from foreign lands. She took her own missionary journeys, going deeper into the heart of Gary to share her faith with children.

What followed — recorded in statements to police, testified to in court, reported in newspaper accounts and, in brief instances, described in letters Paula would write years later — was a scene that would shock Northwest Indiana and the rest of the state.

As Ruth Pelke crossed her living room to the desk where she kept phone numbers, she felt a pair of arms wrap around her neck.

Paula had put her jacket on the couch and run up on Ruth, grabbing her from behind. For a moment, the teenager and the old woman struggled. Ruth still tended a garden and did a little work outside the house to keep fit, but she was in no shape for a chunky 15-year-old girl who now had her in a headlock.

Paula threw Ruth to the floor.

On a table nearby sat an item some would describe as a vase but others likened more to a triangular snow globe. One of the girls picked it up and hit Ruth Pelke over the head. Prosecutors would allege it was Denise Thomas; Paula took the blame.

Paula demanded to know where Ruth kept her valuables. She threatened to cut her with the knife. "Give me the money, bitch," she said.

Ruth looked up and said simply: "You aren't going to kill me." She began hollering for help. Paula's anger rose now. Then she looked at Ruth's head. Blood was streaming from the place where she'd been hit with the vase. Paula saw the blood and reacted in a way she would struggle to explain for the rest of her life.

To police investigators, she would say she entered "a blackout stage."

To a judge, she would say, "Something clicked in on me."

To a psychologist, she said the sight of the blood altered her perception of whom she was attacking: "I saw somebody else inside of that body."

Several friends and supporters who heard similar explanations from Paula concluded that, in this moment, Paula no longer saw the meek and mild Bible teacher in front of her. They believed Paula saw the woman who watched her suffer so many beatings and did nothing to stop them, the woman who took away the baby she'd wanted to love. They were convinced that, in the defenseless woman pinned to the floor, Paula saw her mother.

Whatever she saw, Paula reached for the knife. She grabbed it by the handle and began slashing. She sliced open the old woman's cheek. She stabbed at her head, without deep penetration. Ruth fell back, flat on the floor. And Paula went to work, cutting her arms and legs.

The other girls stood by in disbelief.

Karen Corder, the oldest, told Paula to stop.

Denise Thomas, the youngest, cried and screamed for Paula to quit. Later, she would claim she yelled, "I'm getting out of here," only to be met with a withering threat from Paula: "Leave and you're dead."

Paula's barrage was relentless. She stabbed the old woman in the belly and, finally, thrust the blade deep into the side of Ruth's chest. With that, Paula stopped; she pulled back from the carnage.

"I can't take it no more," she said.

Paula looked at Denise; she told her to come hold the knife. But Denise refused. She looked at Karen, communicating the same message. Karen knelt beside the wounded woman. The blade remained lodged in her chest. And Karen held it in place.

April Beverly, who concocted the robbery scheme, initially held back. After the others went inside, she had come up to Ruth's porch and acted as lookout. Now she entered the house. The old woman was lying on her back, her dress covered in blood, her arms and legs still moving. Karen, she noticed, held the knife as it protruded from the woman's side. To April, it appeared that Karen wasn't just holding it: She was wiggling the knife back and forth. Out of some morbid curiosity, she would tell police later, Karen pushed the blade farther into the hole to see how deep it would go. At one point, she concluded, "The bitch won't die."

Karen estimated she held the knife in Ruth Pelke's side for upwards of 15 minutes; Paula thought it closer to 30.

Ruth Pelke moaned through most of this. The old woman's torn and tortured face was too much for the girls to bear. One of them went to the bathroom and got a towel to cover Ruth's face — and try to smother the last breaths of life from her. Paula and Denise said it was Karen; Karen said it was Paula.

In her dying moments, Ruth Pelke managed to share a few last words. Denise heard her saying the Lord's Prayer.

"Our Father, which art in heaven …"

Paula had stalked in and out of the room, and the last words she heard from Ruth were something else. Words that would haunt her the rest of her life.

"If you kill me," she heard Ruth say, "you will be sorry."

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Paula and Denise began tearing the house apart, rifling through drawers, ripping items off shelves and upending furniture.

For Paula, it was a mad search for some reward for the awful business she'd just concluded. There had to be some money somewhere. Maybe some jewelry. But as she continued her desperate search, a nervousness began to grow inside her. Whether it was regret for the killing or the chilling final words of her victim, she felt uneasy. And she didn't like it. As they were going through the upstairs rooms, Paula tried to pull herself away. But the only place to go was back downstairs, where the source of her angst lay dead on the floor. She resumed the treasure hunt and soon managed to turn up some cash — all of $10. She came across a key and thought it might start the old woman's Plymouth in the garage. She ran out to give it a try. Nothing.

April joined in the search and quickly turned up another key. This time when Paula tried it, the engine stirred to life. April went inside to fetch the other girls.

By then, Karen and Denise were alone with Ruth Pelke's body. Karen had watched the rise and fall of the old woman's chest until it grew shallower. Finally, it stopped. Maybe April sensed some new panic; she sternly warned the other girls: "If you tell anyone, I'll kill you."

The girls had spent roughly an hour in the old woman's house. They hadn't found a jar of $2 bills. They hadn't found a trove of jewelry. But it was time to go. Someone might come looking. Before they could leave, Karen grabbed one last item.

She knelt down again beside Ruth. The butcher knife was planted firmly in the left side of her chest, just below her breast. Karen grabbed the handle. She pulled it out. As they headed out to the car, Karen carried the knife at her side. She climbed into the back of the car and dropped it to the floor. The blade was still coated in blood.

—

Paula Cooper was 15. She was too young to drive. But with her three accomplices as passengers, she managed to steer Ruth's car out of the neighborhood and onto 45th Avenue. They were just down the street from Lew Wallace High School. School was out now and, almost immediately, they saw a classmate walking along the street. Almost reflexively, they waved to Beverly Byndum. And Beverly waved back.

This was the paradox they now faced. They were teenagers in possession of a car, the apex of adolescence. Yet they had acquired it in the most horrific way imaginable. Years later, Paula would say things just "got out of control." But here she was — a killer. Now that the deed was done, now that they had a few bucks, Paula and the others seemed in no mood to enjoy it.

Before they arrived at the video arcade, Karen asked Paula to let her out of the car; she wanted to go back to April's house. Paula let her go, but not before asking her to perform a little task: Go back to the old lady's house and get the jacket Paula had left inside.

Next, Denise said she wanted to go home. She asked Paula to let her out at a convenience store and she would make her way from there.

When Paula and April pulled up to Candyland Arcade, they were alone. For a few minutes, they just sat there, talking about what they'd done. April hadn't witnessed everything that went on inside the house. It's not clear how many of the missing details Paula shared.

Paula said she needed to use the restroom, and she ventured into the arcade. When she returned, five girls from school were standing around the car. One of them was Beverly Byndum, whom they had passed on the street. Her sister, Latesha, asked where they had come by the car. Paula said it was her sister's.

Within minutes, Karen walked up to the arcade out of breath, as if she had been running to catch up with the crew. Wherever she had been, she hadn't stayed long. Paula pulled her aside and asked if she'd gone back to the house, if she'd picked up the jacket. No, Karen replied. It was probably the last place on Earth she wanted to go. And she didn't hang around long enough to talk further about it. In a few minutes, she caught a bus for home.

Whether Paula remembered it or not, she had left more than her jacket in the house. Inside one of its pockets was a newly filled prescription for birth control pills — her pills. She had picked them up earlier that morning before school. It was just one of the clues she had left for investigators to find.

Paula and April looked around at the girls and asked if anyone wanted a ride home. Eagerly, their friends piled into the Plymouth. Latesha Byndum was among those who jumped into the back. As she did, she felt her foot brush across something on the floor. She reached down to pick it up. It was a knife. And there was blood on it. There was also blood on her shoe. Latesha looked at Paula and April in the front seat and asked, "What you all do? Just kill somebody?"

The girls looked back at Latesha.

No, they replied.

And, in a response that would reverberate across the community, Paula and April laughed.

—

Paula and April dropped off their passengers at various addresses around Gary. But details about where and how they spent their next two days are choppy and imprecise.

Prosecutors would characterize their time in the car as a joy ride. But from this point on, Paula and April seemed to have a different sense of what to do next.

April wanted to go to a park in Hammond; she wanted to see her brother Tony; she wanted to see her boyfriend. When she found $40 in Ruth Pelke's glove box, she wanted to spend it. When they picked up April's boyfriend and he brought some alcohol, she drank it.

Paula wanted to go to a girl's home where she had lived for a time; she wanted to pick up some friends there. But she quickly decided she and April needed some time to focus on what to do next. When April found the money, Paula thought they should save it for gas. While April got drunk, Paula wanted nothing to drink. She was too nervous.

Most symbolic of their division, perhaps, is what happened to the money from Ruth's glove box. The girls wrestled over it, and one of the $20 bills was torn. Paula gave up the fight. April could keep the money and do with it what she wanted.

—

On Wednesday morning, the day after the crime, Robert Pelke phoned Ruth's house to check up on her. She didn't pick up the phone, and he decided to check on her in person. Just three days before, he and a large portion of the extended Pelke family had taken Ruth out for a Mother's Day dinner. Just two days earlier, Robert and his wife had pushed Ruth to think about selling her house and leaving Gary. Robert rang the doorbell, with no idea how prescient that conversation had been.

There was no answer, so Robert opened the mail slot on the door and called inside. There was only silence. But through the mail slot, something caught Robert's eye: The dining room was torn apart. He went to fetch a spare key Ruth kept hidden outside. Looking around the place, he noticed Ruth's car was missing from the garage, and he assumed Ruth must be gone, too.

He found the key, unlocked the door and stepped into the house. The place appeared to have been ransacked. Pictures that had adorned the walls were now scattered about the floor. Cushions from the couch had been pulled up and cast about. And then his eyes turned to the dining room floor.

The cloaked figure of a woman lay there motionless. Her dress was caked in blood. Her arms were slashed. A towel masked her face.

Robert knelt down next to her. He pulled the towel away and called her name. Still, there was no movement. He touched her, and the body was cold. He knew she was dead.

Robert got up and went for the phone. In an age when every phone was a landline, Ruth's had been ripped from its place on the wall. He stepped outside and began going door to door, looking for someone who would let him use their phone. But at house after house, he found nobody. Finally, Robert looked farther up the street and saw a man and a woman getting out of a car. He approached them and asked them to call the police.

His stepmother had been murdered.

—

Robert's son, Bill Pelke, arrived home just after 3 o'clock from his shift at Bethlehem Steel and soon received a phone call. It was one of his uncles. Nana, he said, was dead.

Nana was the term of endearment everyone in the family used for Ruth. Bill had grown up listening to her Bible stories. He'd loved her flannel board tales of the three men in the fiery furnace, of Noah and the ark and his favorite — Joseph and the coat of many colors.

Even as a 37-year-old man, he still loved to go to Nana's house for the holidays, to warm himself beside her fireplace and congregate there with the rest of the family. His grandfather had passed almost two years before, but Nana was still a magnet. She could still bring the family together. And now, suddenly, she was gone.

At such moments of shock, the brain's processor goes into hyperdrive. And some key facts rushed through Bill's head: Nana had been 78; she was the oldest Pelke; she'd had a good life; it must have been her time. But that instant of comfort evaporated quickly. He sensed something else in his uncle's voice that was borne out in his next words: There'd been a break-in at Nana's house. He didn't know if there was a connection.

Bill hung up and turned on the television, wondering if there might be some news about it. Sure enough, his father appeared on camera. He was saying something about it being a terrible murder. For Bill, everything else was a blur; he had to go. He had to be with his family.

As it turned out, Ruth Pelke had been dead for a full day.

—

By that spring of 1985, crime was a painful reality in Gary. Its murder rate was among the highest in the country. It was on its way to becoming the murder capital of the United States.

Gary was a city in decline; poverty was growing like a cancer. But the violence was being spread through an influx of gangs with names such as The Family and the Black Gangster Disciples.

Yet as accustomed to crime as the city had become, the murder of Ruth Pelke shocked and angered people in a whole new way. There was the innocence of Ruth herself — the elderly Bible teacher. As one observer put it, she was a grandma to the neighborhood. The killing's effect also might have been amplified because it happened in Glen Park, which a prosecutor later described as a "last bastion" of the white population in a city from which white residents had disappeared.

On the day after the discovery of Ruth's body, The Post-Tribune in Gary devoted two front-page columns to the story: "Bible teacher, 77, murdered in her home." It had her age wrong, but the dominant image on the page was a picture of Ruth — silver-haired and smiling behind her horn-rimmed glasses from another era.

The newspaper reported that neighborhood children "were visibly upset and shaken by the murder." They spoke of Pelke as "meek and mild," serving cookies during summer Bible classes and giving out boxes of candy to the children who memorized Scripture.

As for who might be responsible, the initial story carried some important nuggets: Police were searching for a 15-year-old girl who'd been seen driving Pelke's blue Plymouth. They weren't releasing her name, but the girl was a student at Lew Wallace High and lived in Gary's Marshalltown neighborhood.

—

Paula Cooper lived in Marshalltown.

As they combed through Ruth's house, police found the jacket with the prescription in the pocket. Eyewitnesses had seen Paula and the other girls in a car that matched the description of Ruth's missing Plymouth. And on the day Ruth's body was discovered, Gloria Cooper phoned police to report her 15-year-old daughter missing; she'd been missing since the day before.

The ink was barely dry on the newspaper stories when Karen Corder, walking around school on Thursday, two days after the crime, began looking for someone on whom she could unload her conscience. She had opted out of the joy ride and gone home and had a couple of restless nights' sleep. She found a gym teacher who'd been nice to her and said they needed to talk; she'd witnessed a murder. Soon, police were at the school. They took Karen and Denise into custody. And Karen was telling her story about the crime.

In the two days since the killing, Paula and April — with April's brother, Tony — had driven aimlessly from Gary to Hammond and to various parts of Chicago's South Side. They'd had no real sense of direction.

Tony pressed on in Ruth's Plymouth until the gas needle dropped well below empty. Then he pushed it some more. Finally, the car died. Their money gone, they found a phone and called April's sister. Thursday night, with the police dragnet closing around them, she took the girls to see the Gary police.

—

Detective William Kennedy Jr. had been looking for Paula Cooper and April Beverly for the better part of two days. When his phone rang around midnight, the news was good: They'd turned themselves in.

In addition to being a cop, Kennedy worked security at Lew Wallace High School. He'd seen Paula Cooper walking the halls. He never knew her name, but they'd exchanged hellos. Now, he was tidying up the loose ends of a case for murder against her.

When he arrived at the station, Paula's parents were waiting. Kennedy asked Herman and Gloria Cooper if Paula could make a formal statement about the crime. Herman, speaking for everyone, declined. They were interested in talking to a lawyer, and he seemed annoyed at the article in the morning paper, which he felt pointed a finger at Paula even if it didn't name her.

The Coopers met briefly with Paula, then returned to the waiting room. Soon, Rhonda arrived at the station. She'd read the papers. She knew Paula was in jail. And she was upset. She wanted to see her sister.

Gloria was OK with that but urged her to persuade Paula to talk about what she'd done. When the police wouldn't let Rhonda see her sister without a parent, Gloria agreed to go with Rhonda.

After so many years of turmoil and strife, Gloria and her two daughters were together again — for a moment alone in a police interrogation room. What they said isn't clear. But when Kennedy, the detective, rejoined them, Gloria gave Paula a nudge.

"Say something," she said.

Paula hesitated. She said she didn't want anyone looking at her. So Kennedy turned 45 degrees and looked at a wall. Paula began to speak. She kept speaking for 15 minutes. She laid out the essential elements of Ruth Pelke's murder, described the girls' desire for money and a car, described how they came up with the Bible class as their way in. She described how she got the knife and stabbed the old woman more times than she could remember. She talked about the aftermath, when they took the car and gave rides to their friends. At one point, according to the account the detective would later make from his "mental notes," Gloria Cooper asked Paula in front of the detective: Were you and Karen basically responsible for the lady's death?

Paula's answer: "Yeah, you could say that."

When Paula was done, Kennedy left the room. Her mother and her sister left, too. As Paula stood alone in the interrogation room, April Beverly was giving a statement in a room nearby. When Kennedy returned to Paula, she was newly animated. She began unloading a rapid-fire addendum to her confession to the detective.

"April is lying. She's lying on me, so I'm going to tell you where the murder weapon is. It's at the McDonald's in Hammond on Calumet Avenue, next to the police station. Her brother threw it out the car right by the drive-thru window side. It was by a tree right there."

For Paula, this was the start of one of the great grievances of her life — her claim that the other girls lied. A few details aside, their stories largely matched up. But in the discrepancies, Paula saw injustice. And correcting the narrative to fit her exact version of the truth would become an obsession.

The legal ramifications of what she'd shared, in her two statements, were that Paula had essentially confessed to the key elements of the murder. She had gift-wrapped a case for the authorities. She also had put herself in the cross hairs of a zealous prosecutor. She had no idea just how precarious her own life had become.

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Jack Crawford — with a swooping, blow-dried haircut that gave him an appearance not unlike the televangelists of the era — came before a bank of reporters with material certain to make a splash.

A rising star in Indiana's Democratic Party, Crawford had swept into the Lake County prosecutor's job years before, having pledged to get tough on crime. Since then, he had pursued the death penalty more than any other prosecutor in the state. In the first five months of 1985, he'd already won four death penalty convictions.

Now, flanked by a pair of cops, Crawford came before the gathered media with an announcement sure to make headlines: For the first time in Lake County, his office was charging four girls with murder. He would seek the death penalty against the oldest — 16-year-old Karen Corder — and if the other girls were moved out of juvenile court, he'd likely seek death for them, too.

"I've been a prosecutor for seven years," Crawford told the media, "and we've never had a case like this before."

As zealous as he was, Crawford privately acknowledged that same day that his chance for death sentences had already taken a big hit. That's because the clerk's office announced that the judge handling the Ruth Pelke cases was Superior Court Judge James C. Kimbrough Jr.

Kimbrough was a former public defender and NAACP lawyer who'd grown up in the civil rights heartland of Selma, Ala. More important than all of that, everyone around the courts — from prosecutors and public defenders to reporters and clerks — knew Kimbrough hated the death penalty. Hated it for its unfairness. Hated it for its inability to deter crime. And in a county where other judges had shown themselves willing to brandish the ultimate weapon, Kimbrough hadn't sent anyone to the electric chair during 12 years on the bench. Only once had he come close: Kimbrough sentenced a man to death who had been convicted of a double murder. Soon, though, the judge reversed himself and gave the man a new trial. Eventually, he was set free.

So, at word of Kimbrough's assignment, Jack Crawford and his team murmured that the path to a death sentence was a steep one. "We certainly thought we had an uphill climb," he would say later.

—

In the Lake County Juvenile Detention Center, Paula Cooper's life behind bars was getting off to a rough start.

She was no stranger to jail, having spent three months in the same detention center two years earlier after she ran away from home. She was a bit weepy then, even tender, the guards remembered. But this 15-year-old version of Paula Cooper was angrier, explosive and cocky. She acted as if she owned the place. She was a handful.

Two weeks after the crime, Paula took a seat next to two of her friends in the jail during "quiet hour." Soon they grew noisy. A guard told them to shut up and disperse; Paula refused. The guard ordered her back to her cell. But as she stepped into the hall, Paula struck the guard across the bridge of the nose. She fought until reinforcements arrived to pull Paula off. As they were dragging her away, Paula issued a warning: They'd better transfer the guard or she would get a knife and come after her.

The dust-up prompted a transfer for the girls — from the juvenile center to the Lake County Jail. It also made the local papers, which didn't help the cause of saving their lives.

By the end of July 1985, the cases against all four girls were formally moved to adult court. Crawford, after sifting through the ample evidence, made his purpose clear: He would seek the death penalty against all four.

The case had pricked the public's consciousness of crime at a new level.

Crawford's decision made news on the Chicago television stations; it made headlines across Indiana. The public defender assigned to represent Paula, Kevin Relphorde, was incredulous. "They must be the youngest females in the country facing the death penalty," he told reporters.

By then, Paula and Karen, sharing a cell in the Lake County Jail, had been locked up two months. They began telling jail staff they were considering suicide. On cards they were given to report health problems, they wrote things such as "Give me the electric chair" and "Give me that shock. I want to die."

As a precaution, jail officers took their personal belongings and stripped them to their underwear; they were on suicide watch.

Paula and Karen responded by banging on the bars and making noise. To calm them, a nurse broke out the oral sedatives. Karen took hers; Paula refused. The guards teamed up to hold down Paula so the nurse could give her a shot. But as they tried to restrain her, Paula jumped up and hit one guard in the shoulder.

"Oh you tough, huh?" the guard replied. "You stabbed an old lady." It was less than professional, but it was a gut reaction.

"Yeah, I stabbed an old lady," Paula replied. "And I'd stab that bitch again. I'd stab your fucking grandmother."

The jail incidents were part of a pattern to be repeated in years to come. Paula didn't respond well to restraints; she bucked authority. In such instances, she could be aggressive and hostile. A psychologist noted her tendencies and something else plain to see: Battered and badgered as a girl, she was now mistrustful and suspicious.

Soon, Paula's interaction with the jail staff would grow more complicated. By August 1985, about the time she turned 16, Paula began receiving a series of private visitors. Two were male corrections officers. Another was a male recreational therapist. They weren't visiting just because of their jobs.

They were coming for sex.

—

Outside the jail, the stories about the angry young prisoners seemed only to add to the public's contempt. And as the details of their crime emerged, they were already easy to hate. Especially the girl who had wielded the knife — Paula Cooper.

Paula had not just killed Ruth Pelke; she had stabbed her 33 times, according to the coroner. Some of the cuts on her arms looked like saw marks, as if the knife had been pulled back and forth. In other instances, the 12-inch knife had been wielded with such ferocity that the tip of the blade went through Ruth's body, pierced the carpet on which she lay and chipped the wood flooring beneath. Worst of all, it appeared Ruth Pelke survived the torturous assault for more than 30 minutes. The Post-Tribune called it "possibly the most brutal killing in Gary history."

If all that wasn't bad enough, two of the girls had bragged about the killing at school. As defendants go, they were about as unsympathetic as they come. With guilt hardly in doubt, letters began appearing in the Gary newspaper debating the punishment. Some asked for mercy; others wanted severe justice. One letter directed at Paula appeared under the headline, "She should pay."

All of it left Kevin Relphorde, Paula's lawyer, searching for a viable strategy to save Paula's life. The evidence was overwhelming, and the prosecutor was determined, which made a plea deal unimaginable. Paula's childhood had been bad, but it didn't seem to add up to an insanity plea. Her youth and relatively clean prior record were assets, but they looked meager compared to the brutality of the crime. Then there was the jury. Any panel drawn from across Lake County would be mostly white. And Paula was a black teenager who had killed an old white woman. All of it added up to a grim outlook.

As best as Relphorde could figure, the only thing Paula had going for her was the judge. Relphorde knew of Kimbrough's opposition to the death penalty. Ultimately, he suggested to Paula a stomach-churning strategy: Plead guilty.

Relphorde was a part-time public defender who'd never handled a death penalty case. But he figured Paula's chances were better in the hands of a liberal judge than with 12 angry jurors.

As risky as it sounded, Relphorde wasn't the only person who sized things up the same way. David Olson, who was Karen Corder's attorney, came to a similar conclusion. He'd had a nightmare about Karen, he told the Post-Tribune in March 1986, and awoke fearful of "losing her." His fears were amplified when he attended the trial of Denise Thomas, the first suspect to answer for the death of Ruth Pelke.

Just before the case against Thomas went to trial, in November 1985, prosecutors withdrew the death penalty charge, concluding she'd been more of a bystander to the crime.

But that didn't stop the jurors from reacting strongly to the horrific details of Pelke's death. They quickly found Denise guilty. Olson didn't want to risk that with death on the line for his client. So in March, 10 months after the crime, Karen went before Kimbrough with a guilty plea. Her sentencing would follow two months later.

How well Paula understood the risks of her plea — and how much say she had in it — is now a matter of dispute. Relphorde said he met with Paula regularly to talk strategy and that the plea was ultimately her decision. Years later, Paula would recall only three brief meetings with her attorney, who she said assured her the judge opposed the death penalty and would be sympathetic to a black girl. If she pleaded guilty, she said she was told, she wouldn't get a death sentence.

On April 21, 1986, Paula appeared in court to plead guilty to murder.

Herman Cooper came to the courtroom that day; so did Paula's sister, Rhonda. But Gloria Cooper, Paula's mother, was nowhere to be found. She had moved to Georgia and stopped answering the calls of Paula's attorney.

When the hearing began, Kimbrough asked Paula more than once if she knew she could be sentenced to death. Each time, Paula answered yes. To the most important question — How do you plead? — she never hesitated: Guilty.

For the record, Paula retold the story of the crime — the scheme to get into the house; what she did to Ruth; how the girls took the car.

"We went to commit a robbery, you know," she told the judge.

Was there any discussion in advance about what you'd do with Mrs. Pelke? he asked.

"No. It wasn't a discussion to go and kill anyone, you know."

Kimbrough accepted the plea. Paula's life was now in his hands. But she would have to wait months for an answer. Relphorde left convinced Paula had made her best play: "We were basically throwing ourselves on the mercy of the court."

Paula's strategy seemed to appear sound when, in May 1986, Kimbrough spared Karen Corder's life, giving her 60 years in prison. In fact, three of the girls had escaped with their lives. Denise Thomas, found guilty at trial, received a 35-year sentence. April Beverly, who conceived the robbery but waited outside during the killing, pleaded guilty in exchange for a 25-year prison term.

Only Paula's fate remained unresolved.

Lost in the news of Corder's reprieve, perhaps, was some language the judge used in reference to Paula. It seemed ominous. Kimbrough said it had been "conceded by all that Paula Cooper was the leader of this group of four young ladies. That Paula Cooper was the dominant factor in the crime." He said Corder was "operating under the substantial domination of Paula Cooper." Despite such words, the prevailing view in legal circles was that Kimbrough would spare Paula's life.

—

As her judgment approached, there were hints that Paula Cooper's case was starting to resonate beyond Indiana. Jack Crawford's first clue came when his secretary stepped into his office with an unusual message: "There's a man outside who says he's from the Vatican. He's dressed like a monk and wants to talk to you about Paula Cooper's case."

Crawford took a look. Sure enough, in a brown tunic bound at the waist with a cord, there stood a Franciscan friar. He told Crawford he was from Rome. He offered a letter validating his credentials. And he brought a simple message: Pope John Paul II and the Vatican weren't pleased with Crawford's decision to seek the death penalty.

Crawford was Roman Catholic. He'd gone to Notre Dame. He knew the church's opposition to the death penalty. But, as he explained to the friar, this was a legal decision, not a religious one. The friar left unsatisfied. He would not be the last Franciscan to stand with Paula.

More surprising than the friar's appearance was the visit Crawford received in June 1986 from Paula's attorney, Kevin Relphorde.

It was just weeks before Paula's sentencing, and Relphorde had few cards to play in Paula's defense. This time, though, it appeared he might have a game changer.

"You can't execute Paula Cooper," he said.

"Well, why is that, Kevin?" Crawford asked.

"She's pregnant."

—

The sex scandal at the Lake County Jail erupted in June 1986.

For months, corrections officers Vernard Rouster, 25, and Parmaley Rainge, 27, had been coming to see Paula for sex, officials discovered. So, too, had Michael Dean Lampley, a recreational therapist from a mental health center. Their encounters occurred even as a 40-year-old female corrections officer and a police patrolman were supposed to be maintaining security for the state's highest-profile murder suspect.

—

One of the guards admitted the sex began when Paula was still a week shy of 16 — the age of consent in Indiana. That people working in the jail were having sex with a captive wasn't illegal in Indiana in 1986. After the revelation, the jail workers resigned their jobs and the therapist was fired, but no one was prosecuted. Supervisors on the jail floor were suspended — for 15 days.

For all of its tawdriness, the scandal had the potential to affect Paula's case. State law prohibited the execution of a pregnant woman; punishment would have to wait. And while a death penalty appeal was certain to outlast a pregnancy, the strange episode raised the possibility of a sentencing delay.

Kimbrough ordered a medical exam for Paula. Quickly, the matter was put to rest: She wasn't pregnant. But, in a sign of the times, public discussion about the scandal seemed to focus less on the culpability of the jailers than on the promiscuity of the 16-year-old girl in jail.

James McNew, a deputy in Crawford's office who prosecuted the case, told the Post-Tribune he suspected Paula Cooper tried to get pregnant to stir up sympathy and avoid death.

However it came about, the sex scandal prompted a change in state law: It became a crime for jailers to have sex with their prisoners. Soon, though, the jailhouse sex scandal would become little more than a footnote before a judgment heard around the world.

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Bill Pelke sat on the wrong side of the courtroom.

His grandmother was the murder victim. Unwittingly, Bill took a seat on the side of the murderer. He was unfamiliar with the trappings of the courtroom. And unlike some in the community — in his own family — Bill carried no blood lust into the chamber. He thought people who committed murder should die. And Paula Cooper had killed his beloved Nana. But he wasn't fuming about it.

Bill had stayed away from the previous court hearings, but decided this was one he shouldn't miss. It was July 11, 1986. And for Paula Cooper, it was judgment day.

Courtroom 3 of Lake Superior Court was a small space. The gallery, oriented outside a circle where the business of the court was conducted, had seats for just 43 onlookers. This day, it was packed to overflowing. People stood, straining to hear, just outside the public entrance. Lawyers and other court personnel did the same just outside the doors normally used by the judge and juries. All wanted to know the fate of a 16-year-old girl who faced a potential death sentence.

Into this cauldron, Paula Cooper entered under the escort of a jail matron. She didn't need to look around to see she had few friends in the room. Her sister and her grandfather were there, but neither of her parents was present. Her mother had moved to Georgia, her father to Tennessee. As Paula entered, the matron said something that made the young defendant smile. The gesture surprised Bill Pelke; it struck him as unbefitting for the moment. When this day is done, he thought to himself, she's not going to be smiling.

Deputy Prosecutor James McNew began the proceedings by calling Bill's father to testify. Robert Pelke hadn't missed a hearing — for Paula or any of the other girls. He had been the family spokesman, and he wanted a death sentence for Paula. He described going to Ruth Pelke's home when she hadn't answered the phone, finding her home in disarray and her body on the floor. He described her bloody dress and the towel wrapped around her head. When the attorneys finished questioning him, Robert asked to read a statement to the court.

This, Robert Pelke said, was a crime that deserved the maximum sentence the law would allow. He quoted the Bible about submitting to authorities and God's vengeance and punishing evildoers. He said Paula gave Ruth no second chance, and he saw no reason to give Paula one.

"Paula reveled in her doings and enjoyed it," he said. He spoke of ridding society of those who would prey upon the innocent. "This is a tragedy that should never have happened," he said, "and a tragedy that family and friends will never forget."

Next, one of the girls from Lew Wallace High School testified about seeing Paula and the others on their joy ride and about finding the bloody knife on the floor of the car.

A crime lab technician discussed grisly photos from the scene — pictures of Ruth Pelke, of the knife-torn carpet and the gouge marks in the hardwood floor.

The prosecution introduced into evidence the autopsy report, which expressed the damage done by the 33 stab wounds. There was also an anatomical diagram noting the points where Ruth had been wounded — so many it looked like a star chart.

Jailers who had been attacked and threatened by Paula detailed her bad behavior; they recounted her admission about stabbing "an old lady."

Entering into evidence the grisly details of the crime and the accounts of Paula's callous behavior was part of the prosecution's effort to build a case that the only just punishment was death.

In Paula's defense, only three witnesses spoke.

Rhonda Cooper gave a picture of how she and Paula grew up terrorized in the home of Herman Cooper. She testified to the beatings, to their father's raping their mother in front of them, to their mother's suicide attempt and to their attempts to run away.

Ronald Williams, Rhonda's biological father, testified that he wanted to take Paula away from the misery, but her mother refused. He spoke of Gloria's threats against Paula and of the suicide attempt.

Dr. Frank Brogno, a Gary psychologist who examined Paula, described how Paula's abuse left her angry and confused, depressed and hostile. He said she was prone to confusion and bizarre thinking, even drifting into fantasies. Still, he said, Paula knew right from wrong. There was still hope for her, but also a real danger she could become a sociopath.

McNew, on cross-examination, ripped into the doctor. He pointed out how Brogno had testified in Karen Corder's case that Paula was the "prime mover" in the crime.

—

Relphorde made a plea for Paula's life, saying she had gone to Ruth Pelke's home to rob, not kill. He said the other girls were intensely involved in the crime and their lives had been spared. The death penalty, he said, was applied at the whim of prosecutors. He said Ruth Pelke, a woman of faith, wouldn't want Paula to die. In the end, he said, Paula was the handiwork of an abusive home and a system that failed her.

"I don't think Paula was born violent," he said. "I think Paula was a product of what was done to her."

McNew, closing the prosecution's case, checked all the boxes needed for a death sentence: Paula wasn't crazy. She wasn't doing someone else's bidding. She'd struck the death blows. She had a criminal record, as far as a juvenile goes, for skipping school and running away from home. And Paula's abusive childhood? To use that for an excuse, McNew said, was to insult everyone who has endured similar treatment and found a way to overcome the horrors. Giving Paula the death penalty, McNew said, would have a sobering effect on others who might be considering crime. But McNew said there was one reason, above all, for a death sentence.

"I am not seeking a deterrence to crime when I ask the death penalty on Paula Cooper. I seek justice for the family of Ruth Pelke."

—

With the attorneys done, Kimbrough asked Paula if she had anything to say. And Paula did not shrink from the moment.

She hadn't wanted a trial, Paula began; she only wanted to tell the truth. "Now my family life, it hasn't really been good. … Nobody understand how I feel."

"This man," she said, pointing to the prosecutor, "sit here and say he want to take my life. Is that right? I didn't go to Mrs. Pelke's house to kill her. It wasn't planned. I didn't go there to take somebody's life. It happened. It just happened. Something. It wasn't planned. We didn't sit up and say we was going to go and kill this innocent old lady. I didn't even know the lady. But everybody put the blame on me."

She said Jack Crawford had described her in the newspaper as the ringleader. "I wasn't the ringleader. I didn't make those girls go," she said. "They went on their own."

Looking around at the people in the courtroom, Paula seemed disgusted. "Well, where was all these people at right here when I needed somebody? Where was they at? They turned their backs on me and took me through all this. All I can say is now, look where I am now, facing a possible death sentence."

She pointed at the Pelke family and repeated her plea that killing wasn't her intention. "I hope you all could find some happiness in your hearts to forgive me. And I know your mother was a Christian lady, and she is in heaven right now. I read my Bible. How do you think I feel? I can't sit here and tell you I understand how you feel because I don't."

She acknowledged that "sorry" would never be good enough.

Paula looked to Judge Kimbrough. But, as Bill Dolan would report in the Post-Tribune the next day, the judge "didn't return her gaze." "I don't know what the decision is going to be today, or whenever you make your decision. I know justice must be done. And whatever the circumstances, or whatever your decision is, I will accept it, even if it is death." She acknowledged she couldn't change what happened: She hoped to get out one day and start life over, maybe even finish school.

"Will I have a chance?" she asked. "Will I get a chance?"

For a couple of minutes, Paula rambled. She repeated that she hadn't forced the other girls to act; she felt it important everyone know she wasn't a gang member. Then she reined it back in for one final thought: "I am sorry for what I did. And I know my involvement in this case is very deep. But all I can ask you is not to take my life. That is all I can ask you. That is all I can ask is to spare my life."

Suddenly, a commotion broke out in the courtroom. There was shouting in the gallery. "My grandbaby, my grandbaby."

Bill Pelke looked at the wailing man near him and saw the tears run down his cheeks; the visage burned into Bill's memory. He watched the man as the bailiff escorted him out of the courtroom.

It was Paula's grandfather, making one final plea on Paula's behalf.

Now it was up to the judge.

—

Judge James C. Kimbrough had been wading through the sordid details of Ruth Pelke's murder for more than a year. He'd parsed the depressing narrative, and people had speculated whether he had a death penalty in him, especially for a girl. Now they were about to get their answer.

There was no doubt about Paula Cooper's guilt. Kimbrough dispatched that with his first breath. The murder had been disturbing: Paula had inflicted the 33 stab wounds in the body of 78-year-old Ruth Pelke.

Those were the strikes against her.

But the defendant had no prior criminal history, and she was 15 at the time of the crime.

Those were factors to consider on her behalf.

The other requirements for the death penalty, Kimbrough said, didn't work in the defendant's favor. She acted of her own free will. She wasn't under the influence of drugs. Her mental problems didn't rise to the level of incompetence. But all those things, Kimbrough said, were legalities. Ultimately, he said, death penalty cases boil down to a "political utterance."

"This case has received an unusual amount of publicity," Kimbrough said. "There is worldwide interest in the outcome of these proceedings today. And the court is certainly aware of that interest."

When he left law school in 1959, Kimbrough said, he had been "totally against" the death penalty — and most of the country shared the view.

Nearly 30 years later, he said, public sentiment had changed, perhaps because of the violent activities of people such as Paula Cooper. Now, the vast majority of the public favors the death penalty, Kimbrough said, Normally, he wrote out his sentences in advance. But this case had challenged him to the point he'd been unable to do so.

Kimbrough praised the deputy prosecutor for speaking "eloquently" — he said McNew brought the matters into focus "better than all of the turmoil that I have been through in the last several months."

He criticized state law for being too general when it came to giving minors the death penalty. It left him unsure what to do on that fundamental question. "I don't know what the right political answer to that question is."

Then Kimbrough, in a moment of vulnerability judges don't always reveal, showed some insight into his restless mind. "I don't believe I am ever going to be quite the same after these four cases. They have had a very profound effect on me. They have made me come to grips with the question of whether or not a judge can hold personal beliefs which are inconsistent at all with the law as they were sworn to uphold. And for those of you who have no appreciation of it, it is not a simple question. It is not a simple question for me."

Kimbrough interrupted his confessional to take issue with something Robert Pelke said: "I do not believe the failure to impose the death penalty today would be unbiblical. … I don't profess to be an expert in religion. But I know the Bible has passages which are merciful, and do not demand or mandate an eye for an eye."

Returning to his inner turmoil, Kimbrough said he'd concluded that a judge must decide a case based on facts, regardless of whether it satisfies him. "I will tell you, very frankly now, on the record, that I do not believe in the death penalty."

This seemed to launch Kimbrough on a rant. "Maybe in 20 years, after we have had our fill of executions, we will swing back the other way and think they are unconstitutional. Maybe."

At about this point, Jack Crawford, sitting at the prosecutor's table, was ready to give up hope for a death penalty. He turned to McNew, he remembered later, and whispered into his ear.

"He's not going to give it."

Then Kimbrough directed his eyes to the girl awaiting his judgment.

"Stand up, Paula."

She had stabbed Ruth Pelke 33 times, he said. He was concerned about her background. She had been "born into a household where your father abused you, and your mother either participated or allowed it to happen. And those seem to be explanations or some indication of why you may be this type of personality that you are."

"They are not excuses, however."

However.

That word caught Crawford's attention. So did the fact that Kimbrough's shoulders seemed to slump, as if the weight of the moment was getting to the judge. Crawford leaned in and whispered again to McNew.

"I think he's going to give it. I think he's going to give it."

Kimbrough continued.

"You committed the act, and you must pay the penalty," Kimbrough said. Briefly, he trailed into some legalese about the charge. Then he gathered himself for the final judgment.

"The law requires me, and I do now impose, the death penalty."

—

The courtroom erupted.

"What did he say?"

Paula Cooper looked at Kevin Relphorde for help; amid the chaos, she wasn't sure what had just happened. She looked back for the judge; he had already left the bench. She asked Relphorde what had happened. He delivered the verdict again: He gave you the death penalty.

The smile Paula wore into the courtroom was gone, indeed. Bill Pelke took note of that. Instead, he saw a river of tears streaming down her cheeks. As she was led from the courtroom, the tears soaked the top of her blouse.

Just like that, Paula Cooper — at 16 years, 10 months and 16 days — became the youngest person ever sentenced to death in Indiana; she was now the youngest female on death row anywhere in the United States. In this age before the cellphone, news reporters from national outlets raced out of the courtroom to the nearest bank of pay telephones. It took a few hours, but the verdict soon circled the globe.

In the hallway outside the courtroom, Rhonda Cooper yelled in anguish at members of the Pelke family and the prosecutors nearby.

"Are you satisfied now?"

They seemed satisfied.

Strangely, one of the most unsatisfied people in the building was the source of the commotion: Judge Kimbrough.

After delivering the verdict, he darted out of the courtroom and into the hallway leading to his chambers. There, between the two rooms, he spotted William Touchette, a public defender who handled appeals. Kimbrough told Touchette to follow him.

Touchette (pronounced TOO-shay) had been among those outside the courtroom straining to hear the proceedings. Like so many local lawyers, he was friendly with the judge; they'd socialized outside of work. He followed Kimbrough into his chambers.

The judge was angry. As angry as Touchette had ever seen him. Angry that the defense hadn't given him enough to spare Paula Cooper's life. Then Kimbrough uttered seven words Touchette would never again hear from a judge.

"I want you to get me reversed."

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Paula Cooper's death sentence was one of Indiana's biggest news stories in 1986. It garnered network television news coverage. Once it hit the international news wires, it was picked up by newspapers in Europe, where it inspired protests.

But Monica Foster, working for a nonprofit death penalty defense group in Downtown Indianapolis, somehow missed all that. To her, it was as if the Paula Cooper case had never happened.

It wasn't that Foster was uninterested in current events or that she was dull. In fact, Foster was a wunderkind. She'd graduated from high school at 16, college at 19 and law school at 22. She'd come to work for the Indiana Public Defender Council, researching and offering advice to lawyers with death penalty cases, even before finishing her law degree. But at 27, she had a tendency to get absorbed in her work. And when that happened, the outside world ceased to exist.

So when William Touchette, the Lake County attorney preparing Paula Cooper's appeal, called the council looking for some help, Foster knew nothing of the case. Without hesitation, Foster agreed to be Touchette's local connection to Paula, who was being held at the Indiana Women's Prison on the city's east side. Foster even said she'd donate her time, seeing the client on evenings and weekends, as a sideline.

Foster didn't realize she'd just signed on to the case that would become the most noteworthy of her career.

When the case file arrived in her office, Foster began reading about Paula Cooper. Right away, she was puzzled.

Here was a black girl from Gary who had been sentenced to death by a black judge whom even Foster knew to be one of the most liberal, anti-death penalty jurists in the state. The girl had brutally murdered an elderly woman during a robbery, but Foster told the people in her office that to get a death sentence from this judge Paula Cooper had to be some kind of rabid animal.

"She must be frothing at the mouth."

Foster decided to go to the prison and see Paula Cooper for herself.

—

Paula had arrived at the Indiana Women's Prison — America's oldest women's prison — five days after her sentencing.

Established shortly after the Civil War, it was originally in the countryside east of Indianapolis. Over time, brick storefronts and wood-frame houses sprang up around the prison's series of boxy brick buildings — situated around a grassy courtyard — and now the prison was landlocked in the middle of an urban neighborhood.

Awaiting Paula was a cell tucked away on the second floor of the segregation unit. It was stark: block walls and tile floor; aluminum sink and toilet; a desk and a chair; all of it packaged in a space slightly bigger than a walk-in closet.

She had one window to the outside world. Depending on which side of the hallway she was assigned at the time, it featured either a view of the courtyard or, just beyond a fence topped by razor wire, the backside of a row of decaying houses.

Paula's cell had two metal doors. One was made of bars, the other was solid. Most of the time, the solid door remained open, allowing her to talk through the bars to passing guards and nearby prisoners. But when the solid door was closed, it was as if she was locked in a vault. Worse, the prison had no air conditioning. As summer temperatures outside climbed into the 90s, the only air moving through the wing was pushed by a floor fan at the end of the hall. Most of the time, the place felt like the inside of a cook stove.

Here, Paula Cooper spent 23 hours a day. In the remaining hour, she had 30 minutes to shower and 30 minutes for recreation, which meant a short walk to a larger room where she could play Ping-Pong or cards with other prisoners. Meals were delivered to her cell.

She was 16 years old and, in the grand scheme of things, set apart from the rest of the human race.

The treatment was harsher than what Paula's three co-defendants in the murder of Ruth Pelke faced. They were housed elsewhere in the prison, with the general population. They had greater freedom of movement, time outdoors and an ongoing interaction with other people. Paula was allotted 10 hours of visits per month, but she wasn't sure who would fill the time. Her sister had moved to Minnesota. Her mother had moved to Georgia. Her father had moved to Tennessee. Paula was as alone as she could be.

Yet she faced a struggle greater than isolation and heat. She lived in fear that the executioner was coming for her any minute. Whatever she'd been told about the appeals process hadn't registered. She thought she was about to be taken away and killed. She existed moment to moment, in dread the guards were about to drag her away to the electric chair. In letters, she would describe her situation in the bleakest of terms — "a mental hell." Paula needed hope. She needed a friend. But who?

—

Monica Foster entered the security checkpoint at the Indiana Women's Prison and was shown to the glass-walled consultation room. In short order, she watched as a guard escorted her client in to meet her.

Paula Cooper was nothing like she expected. Monica came looking for the heartless killer who had murdered an old woman in cold blood, fought the guards at the county jail and been given a ticket to the chair by the most liberal judge in Lake County.

Instead, Foster found a girl, sobbing uncontrollably, who had been on suicide watch. Foster tried to calm her. After some questioning, she gathered the reason for the emotional meltdown: Paula thought they were coming any time now. To kill her.

Foster's blood boiled. She realized that, since the sentencing, no one had explained to Paula the years of appeals; the good chance for a reprieve; and, should all else fail, the notice she would receive well ahead of an execution. Foster felt sorry for Paula. She explained the process. Above all, she told Paula she'd never be ambushed by the executioner.

Paula went back to her cell in a little better shape, but Foster left the prison rattled. She couldn't believe how she had misjudged her client. She realized that her role in this case was about more than legal counsel. She would need to offer her client a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen.

Foster began going to the prison on weekends, sitting and talking with Paula for hours. She listened to Paula talk about being depressed, and she tried to buck her up. She listened to Paula's troubles with the prison administration and offered advice on ways to get along. She listened to Paula describe the abuses of her childhood, and Foster shared some of the tougher aspects of her own. The conversation wasn't always heavy. Sometimes they talked about places they dreamed of going and about men Foster was dating. Paula, in particular, was quick with a jab about Foster's romantic failures. Even in a maximum security prison, with one of them facing death, they spent a good deal of time laughing. And Foster found Paula's laugh to be infectious. That she could laugh at all impressed Foster. The girl seemed to have some kind of resiliency. After a while, Foster could deny it no longer: She liked Paula Cooper.

—

Bill Pelke felt no such affection.

In the 18 months since Paula Cooper killed his grandmother, Bill had lost the ability to think of Ruth Pelke as the sweet person she'd been; he could only see the murder victim. He couldn't remember the warmth of Ruth's home; he could only think of it as a crime scene. When Paula Cooper received her sentence, Pelke felt justice had been served. His father, Robert Pelke, warned him that the justice wouldn't last. On a trip to Florida they took to get away from it all, Robert Pelke said Paula would probably never see the electric chair. "Some do-gooder will probably come along and help get her off death row," he'd said. Bill struggled to imagine it; he just tried to get on with his life.

But moving on wasn't easy. And at 39, Bill already had other things on his mind that bothered him. He'd dropped out of college and wound up in Vietnam during the height of the war. As a radio operator, he was supposed to take cover during the fighting and call in air support. But he still carried shrapnel in his side from the wounds he suffered. Worse than that, he carried memories of the Army buddies who'd never come back. The experience left him sick of death. When he returned home, he'd married and started a family, but his marriage failed. So many things in his life hadn't gone as he'd planned. One afternoon in November 1986, all of this seemed to coalesce in Bill's mind.

Bill worked in a steel mill as a crane operator. He sat 50 feet above the manufacturing floor in the cab of his crane, moving heavy loads as the need arose. But on this Sunday night shift, things were slow; his mind began to drift. He wondered why life was so hard, why God had allowed Ruth to suffer such a horrendous death. He wondered why his family — his good family — was made to suffer in the wake of the crime. It was an unlikely perch for prayer, but Bill closed his eyes and began seeing images in his mind. He saw the courtroom where Paula had been sentenced to death. He remembered the outburst of her grandfather and the tears streaming down the man's face. He remembered Paula's reaction and the tears streaming down hers, how they soaked her blouse.

A hard realization hit Bill: Ruth wouldn't have wanted these things. She had invited Paula and the girls into her home to help them find faith. It occurred to Bill that Ruth would be more interested in Paula's salvation than her execution. He was certain, too, that Ruth would have hated seeing Paula's grandfather in anguish.

Bill thought of the Bible stories Ruth had taught and the lessons he'd learned from a lifetime in church. He remembered Jesus taught that you shouldn't forgive someone just seven times, but 70 times seven — in other words, forgiveness should be a habit. He remembered being taught that the measure of forgiveness we show others is the measure by which we shall be judged. He remembered hearing about Jesus on the cross, offering salvation to the man dying next to him, offering grace to those who sought his death. "Forgive them," Jesus had said, "for they know not what they do."

And then Bill realized something: Paula hadn't known what she was doing. Nobody in their right mind would take a 12-inch butcher knife and stab someone 33 times. It was crazy. Senseless.

In his mind, Bill began to see a new image: It was the picture of Ruth, the one published countless times since her death — silver hair, horn-rimmed glasses, sweet smile. Except now, he saw her face in the picture with tears running down her cheeks. Bill felt certain Ruth wanted someone from her family to show love to Paula and hers. Bill wasn't capable of it right then, but he thought he should try. He was a blue collar guy — a steelworker — and now he was at work crying a river of his own tears. From his seat in the cab of the crane, Bill prayed: "God, give me love and compassion for Paula Cooper and her family." In return, he promised God two things. First, Bill would give credit to God for giving him the ability to forgive Paula whenever success came his way. Second, he'd walk through whatever door opened as a result of forgiving Paula.

Eventually, the sweet memories of Ruth would come back to Bill. He would be able to put aside the horror story. First, though, he felt he had to take a greater leap of faith. He had to get in touch with his grandmother's killer. He had to reach out to Paula Cooper.

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The next day, Bill phoned Paula's attorney. He wanted her prison address, and he was willing to do whatever it took to help save Paula's life. Kevin Relphorde's response wasn't encouraging: "It's kind of late for that."

Undeterred, Bill took the address and sat down at a desk in his Portage home to write perhaps the most intense letter of his life. He told Paula he had forgiven her; he wanted to visit her; there were Bible verses his grandmother would want him to share. He also wanted to meet her grandfather, he of the tearful courtroom outburst.

Bill dropped the letter in his mailbox and, at some level, thought that would be the end of it. But in the days following, he found himself checking his mailbox almost daily. Ten days after he sent his letter, an envelope showed up. The return address said: "Ms. Paula Cooper."

The envelope was thick. Inside, he found a letter dated Nov. 10, 1986, six pages of a teenage girl's loopy cursive, written in pencil, on pink stationery. The contents were far from a schoolgirl's bubble gum dreams. It was a snapshot of Paula's mind on death row. Her thoughts darted back and forth — between apologies and self-pity, between empathy for those who hated her and preachiness about why they should forgive her. Much of the letter was frenetic. Sentences ran on and on like the transcriptions of a nervous talker. Her misspellings and limited punctuation seemed to reflect the erratic schooling of someone who'd been on the run since eighth grade. But it also bore the hallmarks of a mind in overdrive, overloaded with conflicting emotions. Here are some excerpts. Periods have been added for clarity.

Bill 11/10/86

Hello how are you? fine I truly hope. me I'll survive, I received your letter today & it was nice of you to write me. one of Ms Pelkes friends wrote me also, I answered it back also. Im not the mean type of person your family thinks I am but I can except that. I really do. your cousin Robert was something else & what he said about not knowing if Ms Pelke would forgiving me. Ive read my bible & I know it says the way you judge others the Lord will judge you the same way. Ive prayed for your family. a lady in a wheel chair use to visit me at the jail. she said God would be pleased if I prayed for all of you, I am doing fine. They treat me ok & I am always isolated 23 hrs a day. thats how it is on death row, it is a mental hell because no one cares except for themselves. I am thankful to the Lord for them letting the others have a little time, because I've had hell all my life. so it really doesnt matter if I live or die because Im ready any time they come …

In his initial letter, Bill expressed a desire to save Paula from her death sentence. But in her reply, Paula told Bill he need not write, travel or speak on her behalf; she just wanted his forgiveness. She seemed proud of her performance in court — how she looked his family in the face and apologized. She seemed to excuse her parents for missing her sentencing. Although they had beaten and neglected her, Paula said, her actions affected them, too.

At various times, her words ranged from fatalistic to self-pitying:

I cant stay here like this & I don't want to be here, I deserve a chance one that Ive never had before. but one day Ill be free even if its when Im dead…

I cry every time I think of your grand mom. the others think it's a joke because you all let them be free. Im not an evil person, or what ever you think of me to be, Im just some one who is real angry, angry with life & all the people around me …

Ive never done anything wrong before except ask for help, I was turned away & introduced into a life of drugs, sex & crime, but now its too late for help. Im dying inside because of this but I only hope for the best for others.

In closing, she made it clear she wanted more interaction with Bill, even if she was passive about it. She would put him on her list of allowable prison visitors; she would write him whenever he wrote her; she offered her grandfather's phone number and address. In a dark world, it was as if she had seen a flicker of light.

Well, Ill go now, Ill continue to pray for all of you.

Take care

Paula

Their first exchange was the start of a surprising correspondence that would span years and delve into the core themes of Paula's life — searching for forgiveness; grappling with remorse; her closeness with death; her search for peace.

The letters also chart the course of a relationship that many people would struggle to understand, especially Bill Pelke's father.

—

After a second exchange of letters with Paula, Bill felt compelled to share with his parents the news of his surprising correspondence: His father had once warned of a do-gooder who would get Paula off death row. Now it appeared Bill wanted to be that do-gooder.

At first, his parents were speechless. "We don't understand why you are doing this," his mother, Lola, said. Surprisingly, his father acquiesced.

"Do what you got to do," Robert said.

Bill wrote Clarence Trigg, the superintendent of the Indiana Women's Prison, a letter that spent most of a page describing Ruth Pelke's faith and her commitment to sharing it. He concluded with a request:

Clarence, if Ruth Pelke could speak with you right now, I am sure she would say, "Please let Billy see Paula."

Thank you for your consideration

In the name of Jesus and His Love

William R. Pelke

But the prison doors weren't about to open to Bill anytime soon. Corrections officials didn't know what to make of his request — a murder victim's grandson seeking an audience with her killer. They suspected he had another motive, such as revenge.

—

The aftermath of Paula's case was confounding in other ways. Since giving Paula a death sentence, Judge James C. Kimbrough had been very public about his discomfort with his own ruling. Based on the law and the case in court, he said Paula qualified for the death penalty. But he hadn't been able to square it with his own opposition to capital punishment. The decision was costing him sleep. In an interview with the (Gary) Post-Tribune, published Aug. 4, 1986, a reporter noted the judge's nervous appearance.

He fidgeted in his chair. His gaze varied — at times less steady and slanted toward the desktop. He removed his glasses, toying with them.

Friends who knew Kimbrough said the judge was different than he'd been before the Paula Cooper sentencing. The man they knew as friendly and jovial, even gregarious, was more reclusive, less outgoing. "It weighed heavily on his mind," said Earline Rogers, a state legislator and a friend. "That was something he felt legally he had to do but, personally, he would not have taken that path."

Some in the legal community began to think there was a good chance Paula's death sentence would be overturned. But Kimbrough wouldn't live to find out.

On April 30, 1987, less than a year after his judgment of Paula, Kimbrough drove his car into the back of a semi and was killed. He had been drinking. The tragedy cast a pall over the Lake County courts, but it also landed hard at the Indiana Women's Prison. When Monica Foster told Paula her judge was dead, Paula was inconsolable. Days later, in a letter to Bill Pelke, she shared her thoughts about the judge.

"all I could do was cry, even though Kimbrough sentenced me to die. I felt a closeness to him as if he were my father. I have been sentenced to die many times by a lot of people and it's only words. We are all on Death Row and the last day of April his death sentence was completed & it should teach a lot of people we all have a date that is already planned & the way it will happen."

Paula's own father had been cruel; at least Kimbrough had agonized over the punishment he gave.

The letter about Kimbrough was the 20th she'd written to Bill Pelke in less than six months. She was surprising herself at her output: "I didn't even know I had a good handwriting or a great vocabulary until I was locked up."

By then, she was 17 and a condemned killer with hours to contemplate her past, present and future. Several themes recurred in her writing.

Life on death row. She struggled to sleep, to breathe, to deal with the noise. "To be on death row is worst than when I was in a mental hospital. At least it was quiet." She had ailments from toothaches to a bad back. Mostly, she was confused and on edge. Life on the row made her feel like "a walking time bomb."

Memories of the murder. Her thoughts were plagued by it. She described what she did to Ruth Pelke as "awful." She wished she could erase it. "Every day," she said, "I see my nightmare."

Death. It was constantly on her mind, whether by execution or by her own hand. She alternated between dread of the electric chair — "I hope it never happens to me" ­— and anticipation of it — "sometimes I wish they would just go ahead & do it. They continue to put this death threat on my life and I'm tired of it."

Suicide. She seemed to ponder the merits of killing herself. She wasn't sure what it would solve but, in words that seemed to echo from her mother, she said, "there isn't anything here for me." She talked about hanging herself but acknowledged she couldn't follow through. "I know that if I do that I might go to hell (and) I don't want that to happen."

Meanwhile, people from across the country wrote her. Some, including a death row inmate in North Carolina, wanted a romantic relationship. Some wanted answers to the plague of juvenile crime. Others sent her Bibles and tried to save her soul. Yet her faith — another frequent topic — had grown cold. As a child, she read her Bible often, she said, but "my faith started to shatter because of a lot of feelings, hopes and unanswered prayers. I love the Lord but we aren't real close anymore."

Evident, too, was Paula's embrace of her new pen pal, Bill. In her first letters, she claimed he didn't understand her, that nobody did. She didn't understand his motives in writing her. She signed her own with a somewhat distant: "Take care, Paula."

Six months later, Paula told Bill she knew "you really care and you're concerned about me." She said, "Maybe you see the real me and not the person they say I am." She began signing the letters: "Lots of love and god bless you."

In Bill, Paula had a new friend. Being 20 years older, he might even have been another father figure. In that same vein, Paula came to see her young legal team — William Touchette and Monica Foster — as more than lawyers. They were people going to the mat for her. In one of her letters, she wrote, they even treated her "like their little sister."

As such, Paula began watching over the family. She took note when the others were too busy to call or visit. She missed them when they went on vacations. She gossiped and counseled about their relationships. She even grew concerned about what Bill's advocacy for her was doing to his family. By Christmas 1987, the girl who constantly ran from her abusive parents in Gary, who described her childhood as without love, was feeling the warm embrace of her new circle of intimates. Monica, Bill and William were devoting big chunks of their lives to saving her. That level of devotion was something she'd never felt before. It was a circle she seemed intent on protecting. At one point, when she heard about the lawyers bickering over strategy, she told Bill: "I have to be the one to pull our little family back together."

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If the Paula Cooper case had generated "an unusual amount of publicity" before her sentencing, as the judge noted, then interest exploded after she was sent off to death row.

Reporters from England and The Netherlands, Italy and West Germany, even as far away as Australia, called the players in the case in Gary for follow-up stories.

In Italy, there were protests outside the American Embassy in Rome, where demonstrators waved signs reading: "Death penalty equals barbarity" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

Eventually, the movement to save Paula Cooper would reach into fjord towns in Scandinavia and the deserts of North Africa. It would include protest marches through ancient streets of Europe, millions of signatures on petitions and thousands of letters flooding into Indiana, most of them with the same message: Spare Paula Cooper's life.

In a pre-internet world, Paula's story went viral.

Before it was over, folk singer Joan Baez would lift her voice for Paula; Pope John Paul II would seek mercy on her behalf; actress Susan Sarandon would incorporate Paula's story into her anti-death penalty activism. And some would suggest that Paula's fate could hurt America's standing in the great existential struggle of the 1980s — the Cold War.

Beyond that, Paula Cooper's name and youthful face began to appear in story after story about the stark reality that America still was putting teenagers on death row. CBS's "60 Minutes" did a segment on her. So did NBC's "Today." She was the central figure of a piece in USA TODAY. As much as she was a teenage murderer from Gary, Paula quickly became the face of a national debate on how America punishes our most violent juveniles.

Those nearest to Paula quickly found themselves in a tempest they never saw coming. Monica Foster, who hadn't recognized her defendant's name at first and offered her services at no charge, now discovered she was in the middle of something she could barely comprehend: "There was really no other word to describe it but surreal."

—

The essential element for why the story spread was that, at a basic level, it seemed too outlandish to believe. And some of the international press who pursued it faced skepticism that an American judge would sentence a 16-year-old girl to death.

Anna Guaita, a New York-based writer for one of Rome's largest newspapers, first came across the story in USA TODAY. Although she was new to journalism and to America, Guaita recognized right away how big this story would be with readers at home.

Italy had come early to the movement to abolish the death penalty, ending it in 1889. But Mussolini and the Fascists, who rose to power in the 1920s, brought back executions to quash political opposition. When the Fascists were defeated in World War II, the death penalty died, too. In Italy, capital punishment would forever be associated with cruel dictators.

So the notion that America ­— which liberated Europe from tyranny — would execute a teenager was hard to grasp. It took some time for Guaita and her New York bureau chief to convince their editors at Il Messaggero that the story was real. "It was our word that this kid had been sentenced to death in Indiana," she recalled. Eventually, they prevailed.

But when a paper in Florence considered picking up the story, editors there were not so easily persuaded. They went to Guaita's aunt, Maria Luigia Guaita, whose role in resisting the Fascists was well known, and asked her to vouch for Anna. Only then did they accept the story. Soon, Guaita's editors wanted more about Paula Cooper. Guaita had never ventured outside New York on assignment, but now she was being told to head for an exotic new American dateline — Gary, Ind.

—

Weeks after Paula Cooper's sentence, the aftershocks of the case were still being felt in Gary. In the pages of the Post-Tribune, there was a lively debate in letters, editorials and news stories about the death penalty for someone so young. There were stories about the judge gnashing his teeth over his sentence. And there was interest — in Gary and elsewhere — in the effort by state Rep. Earline Rogers to correct the embarrassing fact Paula's case had revealed: Indiana law allowed for the execution of children as young as 10. Rogers wanted to raise the age to 18.

But nowhere in Indiana — not even in Gary — were there petition drives, protest marches or letter campaigns for Paula as there had been in Europe.

Although there had been some discussion about racial aspects of the case — whether a white teenager charged with killing a black woman would have been given the same sentence — the noise was muted. Some said it was because the sentencing judge was black. Others gave a different explanation. "The media painted this crime so hideously," Gary's NAACP Branch President Henry Bennett would tell Ebony magazine, "that people who may want to speak out against the sentence are afraid to do so because it may look like they are in favor of crime."

In a larger sense, Indiana seemed to have quickly digested the Paula Cooper case and moved on. Beyond Gary, most of the follow-up news coverage centered on the protests in Europe and the growing campaign they had sparked. The attorneys handling Paula's appeal — William Touchette and Monica Foster — were stunned by the Roman protests and the interest of the foreign press. They decided it was in Paula's interest to fan the flames. They accepted requests from foreign reporters who wanted to interview Paula by phone or in person. And soon the Indiana Women's Prison, which wasn't used to such traffic, was a conveyor belt of visiting reporters.

Dana Blank, an administrator at the prison, said she thought Paula's horrific crime shouldn't be the cause of someone's celebrity. And she thought Paula was playing up the harshness of her confinement, which the press corps seemed to be eating up. "She was very bright," Blank said. "She was very savvy." There was another word that came to her mind as well: "Manipulative."

When Anna Guaita and her friend from another Italian paper, Giampaolo Pioli, arrived in Gary in February 1987, they felt like "two white fish out of water." They went to Gary first and were awed by its landscape of decay — the shuttered factories, the abandoned homes and the businesses operating under the protection of bulletproof glass. In one story, they described Gary as a "dead city."

They also described Paula's world — her abusive childhood, her crime and her life in prison. Guaita spent four hours talking to Bill Pelke. They looked through his scrapbook about the case. By the end, Guaita was in tears. When she eventually met Paula in prison, it was a struggle to maintain her objectivity. Something about Paula triggered her motherly instincts.

"I had to keep reminding me that she killed a person and in a very, very cruel way. Heartless. I had to keep telling myself that because I felt such pity for her. Even as a journalist, I had to keep telling me, 'Anna, she's also a murderer. She's not just a little kid.'"

Eventually, Guaita came to terms with the fact Paula was both: "She was someone who had killed, and she was also a lost little kid."

The newspaper dispatches in Il Messaggero and La Nazione tried to strike a note of balance between the child and the murderer. But the plight of the hopeless girl came through louder, particularly with pictures of Paula under headlines such as: "Help me to live"; "The drama of Paula Cooper"; and "Help me or I'll go crazy." In some cases, the Italian articles concluded with instructions on where to send letters to Indiana Gov. Robert Orr. In one, Italian readers were urged to take part in a "Mobilization in Italy" and write their own president on Paula's behalf. The most impactful headline might have been the one on the front page of Il Il Messaggero, the Roman daily, on Feb. 20, 1987:

Paula Cooper al Papa: "Salvami tu"

Paula Cooper to the Pope: "Save me"

Pope John Paul II had been outspoken against the execution of other juveniles. And when the Italian journalists came to Indiana, Touchette asked if they thought he might intervene for Paula. The journalists were unsure but agreed to publish Touchette's letter to the pope.

In effect, Touchette had now placed Paula's case before the one person in the world sensitive to the situation in Italy, influential in America and at the head of the most powerful anti-death penalty organization in the world — the Roman Catholic Church.

Whether the pope saw the letter is unclear. But Paula's case was becoming a matter of national interest in Italy. In Florence, 10,000 high school students signed petitions for Paula. La Nazione, the Florentine newspaper, reported gathering 40,000 signatures. In Rome, a television station wanted Touchette to come to Italy for an interview. He flew over and appeared on its program and held a news conference to promote Paula's cause. He also thanked the Italians for their support.

By May 1987, the same Roman television station wanted Bill Pelke to tell his aspect of the Paula Cooper story. But when he arrived, the city's television photojournalists were engaged in a strike. The TV station offered to send Pelke home, but he opted to stay for a while. Over 19 days, he went on a speaking tour of high schools and college campuses within a 150-mile radius of Rome. At every stop, people signed petitions for Paula. Although Pelke was a Baptist from Middle America, he suddenly found himself speaking on Vatican radio, where he told his story of faith and forgiveness. Eventually, the cameraman's strike ended and Pelke appeared on "Domenica In," a popular six-hour Sunday television show that featured everything from entertainment to news. The show was broadcast in several European countries and North Africa. By then, an Italian priest announced his anti-death penalty group had collected 500,000 signatures for Paula.

—

Back at the Indiana Women's Prison, Paula began getting cards and letters from Italy. Much of it, in Italian, was indecipherable to her. But she began to realize that people out there cared about her case. She also recognized she had become a symbol for the movement to abolish the death penalty. Only five countries around the world still executed juveniles, and the United States was one of them. At that time, 32 juveniles were on death rows.

Indirectly, Paula was responsible for helping anti-death penalty activists score a victory. In the spring of 1987, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law sponsored by Earline Rogers that raised the minimum age for executions to 16 at the time of the crime. The new law wasn't retroactive, so it couldn't save Paula. But it would spare other young juveniles her ordeal. And as Paula's case headed toward appeal, it showed where the legislature now stood in its thinking on juvenile executions. It also showed that the national landscape was tilting against state-sanctioned killing of the young. Increasingly, states were eliminating juvenile death sentences, and fewer judges were ordering them.

In the pages of USA TODAY, Victor Streib, a scholar and leading death penalty opponent, wrote: "We shrink from the image of the state killing its children to demonstrate that killing is wrong."

Ironically, among those still ambivalent about the death penalty was Paula Cooper herself. In a letter to Pelke, she said she could see the other side of the debate.

"I think that I should be on death row & eve die because I hurt your family a lot … I don't think that I deserve to live & I really don't have but a few things to live for any way … I don't think I'm too young to die."

Much to her annoyance, Paula's service to the cause meant granting interviews to the journalists now marching into the prison to see her. She was less than enthusiastic.

In a letter to Bill Pelke in May 1987, Paula wrote that she didn't like reporters and didn't like answering their questions. In July, she was critical of a lengthy story about her, calling it "one-sided, negative and false." She told Pelke they needed to be "real picky with the reporters we are going to use."

In August, when she spent part of her 18th birthday giving Anna Guaita an interview, she described it to Pelke as "the best she's ever had." And in November, she gave an interview to a reporter who hugged her at the end. "I think that more & more of them realize I am some body," she wrote Pelke, "& not some animal you can just throw away."

As she matured into a young woman, Paula seemed to take special concern about her appearance during these interviews. In some of the photographs of her at 19 — young and lean, stylish clothes, her hair meticulously coifed — she looks more like a fashion model than a condemned killer.

Most often, though, the media machine left her feeling exploited by people out to make money from her story. Being subjected to the interviews was, to her, another part of life over which she had no control.

These and other frustrations were evident in Paula's behavior. In her first 16 months in prison, guards wrote up Paula for rules violations seven times. She assaulted guards and threatened to stab one's eye out with a pencil — all from the strict scrutiny and frequent shackling of death row. "Like so many teenagers," said Dana Blank, the prison administrator, "she was very headstrong."

Some of Paula's advocates believed the guards were goading her because of her celebrity, or because of the unflattering stories of prison life she was telling. Monica Foster was skeptical of the prison staff, but she also knew Paula.

"She was a terrible inmate," Foster said.

The situation illustrates the two schools of thought on Paula Cooper's life in prison. One held that she was a master manipulator, an operator who used her access to the media and her profile to get special treatment. The other held that prison life was especially harsh for Paula, either because of resentment of the guards and the prison administrators, or because of the trouble Paula brought upon herself.

—

For all of her struggles in prison, the outside efforts to save Paula were beginning to pay off.

Indiana Gov. Robert Orr, who held the power to commute Paula's sentence, received more than 1,000 letters on her behalf in the spring of 1987. Most came from Italy; most asked for a more lenient sentence.

By June, a Franciscan friar from Italy, Vito Bracone, showed up at the governor's office in his brown tunic tied with a rope at the waist. He brought with him 800,000 signatures seeking a reprieve for Paula. The friar left the Statehouse and visited Paula in prison. She asked him to hold hands with her and pray. They prayed, talked and drank sodas over the course of two hours. "He was asking me about keeping a positive attitude & making a difference in life," she said in a letter to Pelke.

For his part, Orr did everything he could to seek shelter from the Paula Cooper storm. His standard reply to the media, to letter writers, to anyone was that it was inappropriate for him to weigh in on a case while it was on appeal. But that line was getting harder to maintain.

Before Orr went to Europe on a trade mission in September 1987, his office heard he might be confronted by Paula Cooper advocates. Orr's press secretary, Dollyne Pettingill Sherman, would later say "nothing happened." But an Italian member of the European Economic Commission, Carlo Ripa di Meana, issued a news release stating he tried to corner the Indiana governor in Amsterdam. Orr, he said, "dodged" him.

The pope would prove harder to avoid.

While Orr was in Europe, Pope John Paul II was flying to America for a 10-day visit. On the plane, he told reporters he might mention Paula Cooper's case to President Ronald Reagan. People began urging Monica to capitalize on the pope's interest, and she was eager to do so. But the young lawyer realized something: She wasn't sure how to do that.

Touchette came up with the idea for Paula to write a letter pleading for the pope's help. She wrote it, and Touchette gave it to Italian reporters for delivery to the Vatican press secretary. It was three pages long. She asked the pope's help, even if he could only pray for her. "I have suffered now for 18 years," she wrote, "and I really only want peace."

Paula expressed hope she might one day contribute more to society than just prison time. She said she struggled with remorse, even as she recognized others might doubt her sincerity. "Remorse comes in," she wrote, "when you have to live with yourself every day and deal with crime you have committed and only you will know if you have remorse."

The letter seemed to hit its target. The Vatican announced it used "confidential channels" to request clemency from the governor for Paula. Orr, so adamant about avoiding the fray, now faced questions asking for reaction to the pope's inquiry. The answer from his office: What communique? His staff said it never heard from the pope.

The pope's intervention drew criticism from some corners of Indiana, particularly Gary, as meddling. But it raised the profile of the case — and the pressure on Indiana officials to save her life.

—

On the streets of Gary, Paula had been just another wayward girl fending for herself. Now she found she was gaining supporters from places she'd never heard of.

In Norway, an 11-year-old girl read a newspaper story with a headline that roughly translates "A child in a death cell" and launched a letter-writing campaign to save Paula.

In Sweden, a newspaper featured a photo of Paula — her hair in a bun looking every bit the schoolgirl — under the headline: "You can plead mercy for Paula Cooper." Conveniently, the story offered Orr's address.

In Rome, hundreds of people participated in a candlelight procession from the Pantheon to the Spanish Steps. Joan Baez, on tour in Europe, participated in the event and said, "Paula Cooper is the symbol of the struggle for human rights."

A tide of 14,000 letters rolled into Orr's office from Australia, Chile and countries across Europe. Notes were scribbled on prayer cards featuring the Virgin Mary and postcards of cartoon sunbathers. Children wrote letters on notebook paper, graph paper and drawing paper that boldly proclaimed: "Let Paula live! Do not kill her!" Some included crayon drawings of a black person in a chair connected to wires. There were letters quoting Robert Frost and John Lennon. There were pleas from professors and United Nations officials. Some of the headlines in the foreign newspaper clippings simply referred to her as "Paula."

The vast majority of the mail — probably 95 percent — came from Europeans seeking clemency. The remaining letters — from Indiana and elsewhere in the United States — were more evenly split between those wanting to spare Paula Cooper's life and those wanting to end it.

Some asserted that Paula Cooper's importance went beyond the death penalty. "Ronald Reagan has recently been to the Soviet Union and spoken of human rights," one European observer wrote the governor, "meantime you sentence children to death. Surely, life itself is a human right!" But an ex-Army officer in Canada wrote to tell the governor not to listen to the media's "tear-jerker" stories. The death penalty must remain, he said, lest the country fall into the "Communist way of life."

Paula Cooper's name was now known across the Western world. It was reviled by detractors, the subject of prayerful devotion from supporters. For all the noise, Paula was essentially a scared young woman who had committed an egregious crime. And whose fate was, again, about to be decided in a courtroom.

—

By 1989, Paula had been behind bars for 3½ years, most of that in isolation. In her letters to Pelke, the confinement and the cloud over her head seemed to be wearing her down. She complained of a bad back and an upset stomach, about having difficulty breathing and about her nerves. Her moods swung wildly. She complained about the prison's decision to prevent Bill from seeing her. At other times, she expressed doubts about Bill's motives in entertaining offers to write a book or do a movie. Sometimes she cried in her bed; other times she was OK. She was troubled by suicidal thoughts. "Maybe one day," she said, "I'll just die and find peace."

One of her coping tools was writing. In addition to Bill, she became pen pals with a girl in Italy. She wrote a college student in Florida who sent her a ring and told reporters they were engaged. The correspondence gave her a glimpse of the outside world, and friends beyond the prison gate. She now saw two sides to herself — the person she felt she was now, the murderer she had been nearly four years earlier.

"I hate it," she wrote, "because I can't take it back & I can't change all that."

—

On the morning of March 1, 1989, the Indiana Supreme Court convened to hear arguments in Paula's case. In Italy, 400 death penalty opponents fasted that day on Paula's behalf. Outside the Roman office of the United Nations, a torch was lit. And at the Indiana Women's Prison, Paula was an emotional wreck.

Monica Foster sat with her client, now 19, and tried to comfort her. But it was no use. At the Statehouse, more than 120 people filed into the Supreme Court, with its richly paneled wood, to witness the arguments. Among them were Bill Pelke, who had forgiven his grandmother's killer, and Father Vito Bracone, Paula's guardian angel.

Bracone sat as one of six members of an Italian group called Thou Shalt Not Kill, which had gathered 2 million petition signatures calling for mercy for Paula. The sight of the friars caught the eye of Chief Justice Randall Shepard as he and the other justices filed into their seats.

For an hour, the lawyers argued over Paula's fate. Speaking for Paula were Touchette and death penalty expert Victor Streib, who had written a piece for USA TODAY more than a year earlier. Touchette and Streib argued that the United States Supreme Court had, a year earlier, set aside the death penalty for an Oklahoma boy who was 15 at the time of his crime. They pointed out that, since Paula was condemned, the Indiana General Assembly had raised the minimum age for executions to 16. They also argued that the sentencing judge gave too little weight to Paula's troubled childhood.

Indiana Deputy Attorney General Gary Secrest spoke for the state, arguing that the Oklahoma case set no minimum age for executions and that the Indiana legislature had gone out of its way to exclude Paula from its new law. Kimbrough, he argued, was aware of Paula's childhood abuse but found it less important than the horror of her crime.

Supreme Court Justice Brent Dickson asked pointedly if Paula Cooper was being discriminated against by being subjected to an age standard for executions that no longer existed in the law.

When the hearing concluded, the five justices left the bench, hung up their black robes, took their seats around a 100-year-old conference table and began their deliberations.

On contentious cases, the discussion could go on for more than an hour before it became clear where the majority was headed. From there, the justices would trade drafts of opinions, and sometimes votes might shift in the process.

But, as Shepard remembers it, the deliberations in the appeal of Paula R. Cooper v. State of Indiana didn't take long. Within minutes of closing the door, the justices knew Paula's fate. But it would take some time to compose and polish their opinion. And, in the meantime, Paula Cooper and the rest of the world would have to wait.

—

Whatever the decision, it was clear Paula's case would be historic. Indiana had executed only three people for juvenile crimes, and none in almost 70 years. None had been younger than 17 at the time of their crime. If her sentence stood, Paula Cooper would be the first person to die in Indiana for a crime committed at 15. With the new minimum age law, she would also be the last.

Across the United States, the number of juvenile offenders on death row had dwindled to 27, as states revised their standards. Paula was the youngest woman; she was only days older than the youngest man.

As she awaited the decision, Paula's nerves were shredded. She told Pelke she was being medicated, but the drugs made her "crazy." She had trouble sleeping. She would sometimes eat lunch, then vomit. She was convinced the case was lost. "I live on edge," she wrote, "but I have to go on with my life."

On July 4, Paula seemed to come to terms with herself and her crime — her own personal Independence Day. "For the first time in my life I know what I've done to another person," she wrote Pelke. "Taking someone's life isn't funny. It's sick for real. I realized I couldn't change it & that makes me feel sick. I deserve every moment of this & that's one reason Im doing it & am not going to kill my self. I deserve to suffer & as long as I have to do this I will."

The summer was hot. Paula had been allowed outside only twice. She'd spent the rest of the time broiling on death row. She'd lost 50 pounds, and her list of health complaints was longer than ever. Finally, on the morning of July 13, 1989, as she was taking a math test as part of a college correspondence course, someone interrupted class.

The warden needed to see Paula Cooper.

Paula was annoyed at being pulled from class. But she got up and went to the office of prison Superintendent Clarence E. Trigg. When she arrived, Trigg had news: The Indiana Supreme Court had ruled in her case.

Her life had been spared.

As he later told The Indianapolis News, Paula began screaming and yelling and jumping for joy. Then she began crying.

The court's ruling was straightforward. It spared Paula's life after the General Assembly decided — following her case — that no one 15 or younger at the time of their crime could be executed. Then there was the United States Supreme Court ruling in the Oklahoma case, setting aside the death sentence of a boy who had been 15 at the time of his crime.

For Paula, the legal details were less important than the result. Foster arrived at the prison to share the moment, and they cried together. They phoned Touchette, who'd spent a full day fielding calls from reporters. At first, he and Paula played nonchalant on the phone.

"What's happenin'?" Touchette asked.

"Oh, not much," she replied. "What's happenin' with you?"

They burst into laughter.

Paula would never see the electric chair. Soon, she would leave death row. She would be able to regularly see the sky and breathe fresh air.

The Supreme Court hadn't freed her; it had merely converted her death sentence to a 60-year prison term. In Indiana's system, she'd likely get out in half the time, minus what she'd already served. That likely meant an additional 27 years in prison. It was a long time, but it wasn't the electric chair. The Lord had answered her prayers. And for one of those brief moments in her life, it was good to be Paula Cooper.

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When his grandmother was alive, Bill Pelke always knew where his family would be on Thanksgiving — around his Nana's table.

Ruth Pelke, as the world outside his family knew her, had been the glue that held everyone together, her home the default setting for special occasions. In the nine years since her death, the gatherings had ceased, the family dispersed.

Yet Bill awoke on Thanksgiving Day 1994 with his grandmother on his mind. Not from a sense of nostalgia, but what awaited him.

He was going to see Nana's killer.

Already, Bill had made the astounding gesture of reaching out to Paula Cooper with forgiveness. He had exchanged letters with Paula. And he had been a crucial voice in the campaign to save Paula's life, even though it angered the two-thirds of the family who wanted Paula dead. But this was different: He was going to meet Paula face to face.

Bill and Paula had been trying to meet almost as long as they'd been writing. But the Indiana Department of Correction and the staff at the Indiana Women's Prison had taken turns rejecting the idea.

Corrections spokesman Vaughn Overstreet once laid out the reasons in an interview with the Post-Tribune in Gary. Pelke, he said, was pursuing the relationship to further his interests, and he pointed to the media-paid trips Bill had taken to Italy. He implied that Bill might be a safety risk, raising the specter of an emotionally unstable person who might be a threat to the prisoner. Lastly, he said, other members of the Pelke clan objected to it.

To Paula, the denials just made the visit that much more important. "We really need to talk + we need to really make peace with each other," she'd told Bill in a letter once. "I'm not afraid of you + I want to be able to look you in the eye + know I'm sincere."

Paula had little trust in prison officials. To her, their stance screamed some kind of conspiracy. Yet even some of her own family members were skeptical about Bill. They kept waiting for him to turn on Paula. They thought this meeting might be the chance he'd been waiting for to gain some revenge. They warned her to be careful.

As confounding as Bill's actions had been to others, they were almost as puzzling to Paula. Bill forgave her — and asked nothing in return. He'd zealously campaigned for Paula's life and written her faithfully. But trusting others didn't come easily to Paula. She had doubted Bill's grace, tested it and finally come to accept it. But a small part of her was still nervous about the meeting. Paula had seen pictures of Bill; to her he was a big scary white guy with thick eyebrows. Yet she needed to look him in the eye, to gauge his sincerity.

The doors began to open after a film crew came to the prison to interview Paula for a documentary called "From Fury to Forgiveness," about peacemaking between criminals and crime victims. The film director approached prison officials to ask why Bill had been denied a visit. Perhaps they felt the danger had passed or they'd simply forgotten the reasons, but they said Bill could visit Paula when he was ready.

In the course of his activism, Pelke traveled in a circle that included people such as Marietta Jaeger, who showed compassion to the man who had raped and killed her daughter, and who prayed with his mother. Jaeger had been praying, recently, about Pelke's meeting with Paula. Having stayed as a guest in Pelke's Portage home the night before the meeting, she rose on Thanksgiving almost giddy over what Bill was about to do.

Bill's own enthusiasm was more internalized, his prevailing view caution. As he drove through the colorless November landscape along I-65, Bill prayed he would say the right things. Mostly, he gave thanks this day had come.

—

Bill and Paula couldn't have been more different.

Bill was white; Paula was black. At 47, Bill had two children Paula's age. At 25, Paula's family was badly frayed, her vision of fatherhood sadly warped. Bill was a steelworker who had served in Vietnam. Paula had never worked; she'd only served time.

Theirs had been a friendship on paper, based on his faith, desperation and a common cause. Now it was going to get real. And the moment raised some fundamental questions: Could a man look his grandmother's killer in the eye and not feel anger? Could he suppress the desire to demand an answer, to know why she'd been killed? After all his noise about forgiveness, how would Bill react if Paula became defensive or said something insensitive?

Bill arrived at the prison on Nov. 24, 1994. He passed through security and was shown to a large room where other offenders were already paired with their own visitors. Waiting for him in the middle of it all was Paula Cooper.

The prison visitation rules allowed for physical contact between visitors and prisoners at the beginning and the end of visits. Bill gave Paula a hug. Then he took a step back. He looked Paula in the eye and tried to deliver what she had said in the film that she was looking for.

"I love you," he said. "And I forgive you."

In the movies, a gusher of tears would have followed such a moment. Music would have risen. The reality was much less dramatic. Bill had shed his tears years ago on the pages of his letters. And despite his spiritual sensitivities, he carried the quiet bearing of a blue collar guy. Paula had written scores of letters dripping with anguish. After years of coping with Ruth's murder in their own ways, maybe there were just no tears left.

Bill bought some potato chips from a vending machine, and they sat and talked. For an hour.

They talked of people they both knew — the Italian friar Vito Bracone, the Italian journalist Anna Guaita. They talked of Paula's grandfather, whom Bill had met on his reconciliation tour. They spoke of Bill's travels to Italy. One thing they didn't speak of — what Bill would never ask her about — was the murder. Bill had resolved to leave it to Paula to open that subject. From this place of forgiveness — ground that few but Bill understood — it was a line not to be crossed.

Their meeting concluded with another hug, and a goodbye.

Bill's emotions finally welled up as, alone, he drove north toward home. The deepest spiritual experience of his life had been his steel mill epiphany — the moment eight years earlier when he'd decided to forgive Paula. This meeting with Paula was next in line. The meeting went off as well as he could have hoped. Bill could have looked at Paula with hatred, but he had felt only love. Forever after, Bill would tell people this grace didn't come from him; it came from God. As he drove, one word kept coming to his mind: Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. That's how he felt. That's what he thought of God.

And on that Thanksgiving, he was truly thankful.

—

Bill left in wonder, but Paula walked back into the cold reality of prison. She'd done nine years in jail; she looked to have 20 to go.

Twenty years to think about the father who'd beaten her. And about the mother who had stood by and had tried to kill Paula and her sister. She hated her parents, and yet she ached for family. There was much with which to grapple.

Twenty years to think about what she'd done to Ruth Pelke. For all her bitter complaints about the other girls involved, there was no escaping what Paula had done. It was what she woke up thinking about in the morning; it was what she tried to forget at night.

Twenty years of asking herself why. Why had she killed a defenseless old woman? Why had she exploded like that? Why had she ended one life and destroyed so many others? She'd been asking herself these questions since the crime. She was no closer to the answers.

Would 20 years be long enough to sort them out? Until she did, there would be no end to the noise in her head.

"Maybe someday," she'd once told Bill, "I'll find peace."

—

Paula had begun her search in the prison church. Quakers had built the big brick chapel in hopes the women might find faith. Set apart from the other prison buildings, with its high ceilings and huge windows, the church felt less like a jail than anyplace else in the prison. The words of the visiting preachers stirred Paula's dormant faith. She claimed to be seeing the world in a different light. But she was fighting too many demons.

When the guards put their hands on her — to redirect her or reel her in — she erupted in anger. Maybe it was the memory of her father's hands, but it was a button that couldn't be pushed. In her first nine years at the Indiana Women's Prison, Paula racked up 35 rules violations, including at least 15 altercations with guards. The worst came on June 28, 1995.

—

Melissa Benton heard yelling. One of the prison's newest arrivals, she stood and looked out her cell window for the source. On the sidewalk, she saw a guard pinned to the ground and an inmate sitting on top of her, unloading a series of punches. The guard was struggling to reach her radio, which began crackling with her screams. The prisoner, it seemed to Benton, had lost control. Soon, guards came running from across the courtyard; it took two of them to pull away the inmate. The incident lasted less than a minute, and the guard's injuries didn't appear serious. But for Benton, it was a jarring introduction to prison.

Benton had been sent to prison for manslaughter after killing her mother during a dispute. But at 19 she wasn't a hardened child of the prison system. This was new to her, and the viciousness of the attack frightened her. At her next opportunity, Benton called her grandparents and pleaded for help, asking, "Can you get me into another prison?"

Benton didn't recognize the attacker. When a girl from Gary was facing a death sentence years before, she'd been too young to notice the noise on the news. But word quickly spread: The attacker was Paula Cooper.

Prison officials said Paula became upset with the guard when one of her friends was moved to another housing unit. In prison, where so much is beyond an inmate's control, even small things can take on importance. But Paula's friends said this wasn't just any inmate getting moved; it was Paula's girlfriend.

The attack was particularly troubling because of Paula's method. She grabbed the guard from behind and threw her to the ground. She climbed on top of her and unleashed a furious assault. She'd lost control. It was all eerily similar to what she'd done to Ruth Pelke 10 years earlier.

Prison officials came down hard on guard assaults. They gave Paula the maximum punishment — three years in segregation. For Paula, it meant a trip back to the unit where she'd spent three years on death row. She no longer faced execution, but it would be hard time just the same.

Three stifling summers.

One thousand days of strict confinement.

Twenty-three million breaths of stale air.

—

It was late summer when Paula moved back to segregation. Outside, temperatures regularly topped 90 degrees. Inside, the prison was once again stifling, the segregation unit still suffocating. Again, the only relief came from the floor fans at each end, which pushed a faint draft up the hallway past the cell doors. Some of it drifted through gaps in the bars. The problem for Paula was that she and another inmate quickly ran afoul of the rules and now faced even harsher punishment: The guards shut the solid outer door to their cells. Already in a broiling prison, Paula was now closed up in a box. Her only source of air was a dusty vent at the bottom of her door. In a letter to Bill, she described the conditions as "inhumane." It was her own personal hell.

Paula remained bottled up like that for two weeks, until she leaked word out to an aunt, who shared it with the press. The steel doors opened until the weather cooled. IndyStar columnist James Patterson wrote about the episode almost a year later, in 1996. An incredulous corrections official responded to the columnist's description of the "treatment" of Paula Cooper and complained that Patterson didn't know what type of inmate the prison was dealing with.

"Cooper rejects the opportunities offered to her and continues her anti-social, violent behavior," wrote Indiana Department of Correction Commissioner H. Christian DeBruyn. "She has, by her actions, certainly earned the status of Indiana's most violent female inmate."

It was another superlative in Paula's illustrious prison career. But she couldn't let it stand unchallenged. She wrote a response to IndyStar, taking issue with several points. But not all. She didn't dispute that she attacked the guard — just the part that it was an attack from behind. She didn't dispute that she had 35 rules violations or that she had 15 attacks on prison personnel — just the part about attacking six prisoners; she didn't attack prisoners. She would file a federal lawsuit claiming her rights had been violated by the treatment, but it did no good. She had to serve out her time in segregation. All three years of it.

—

Paula had spent three years on death row and three years in segregation — six years in relative isolation, confined to her cell for 23 hours a day.

When she emerged in 1998 from her latest stint, she'd been secluded so long she was practically a myth — someone talked about but rarely seen. To prisoners passing in the courtyard, she was the figure waving from behind a second-floor window. "There was a certain air of mystery around her," Benton said. "She had the reputation that she was somebody you don't mess around with."

But Benton, like several other prisoners who met Paula, was surprised to learn the real person didn't match the reputation.

They shared the same housing unit, and Benton witnessed Paula's habit of offering gifts to new arrivals. They engaged in conversations about college classes they were taking. Paula was fond of history. She was eager to discuss books she'd read. "I think Paula was a lot smarter than people ever gave her credit for," Benton concluded.

Paula's life fell into a steadier rhythm. In the mornings, she took classes. In the afternoons, she went outside, walked the track or spent time in the rec room, playing cards or watching television. Like the other prisoners, she had to stop what she was doing up to six times a day — to sit on her bed and be counted.

To make her long sentence seem less formidable, Paula began to think of her time in five-year blocks. "Every time a block ended," she would tell an interviewer, "I felt I had made a small step."

She welcomed the regular visits of her nephew, who spent time with her playing games and watching movies in the prison's children's center, where inmates could stay connected with the kids in their lives.

Then there was one of the few perks of being a long-term inmate at the Indiana Women's Prison — her annual picnic. These were big productions, usually around her birthday in August. Her guests could bring her favorite foods — as long as they were preapproved — and spend the day with her in an outdoor area just off the courtyard. Paula loved the fresh air. And the picnics drew an eclectic group of people she'd met in her bid for survival. They also brought together members of her family, where the relationships were most complicated. She was close to Rhonda and Rhonda's family. But Paula would later say her mother, Gloria Cooper, had gone 10 years without visiting her in prison. Prison officials would not release visitation records, but Paula's friends said Gloria eventually made some visits. Strangely, the person Paula began reconnecting with was the father who had beaten her — Herman Cooper.

Paula had always described her father as an alcoholic; his abuse had been something akin to torture. About the most flattering thing she said of him publicly was that he was "a country man." Yet Herman surprised her when he showed up at the prison in 2001 for her college graduation. He had cleaned himself up; he was dressed sharply. Despite everything, Paula was pleased.

She was also pleased with herself. Through a prison program run by Martin University, Paula had earned a bachelor's degree in humanities. It not only meant a diploma, but it cut two years from her sentence.

Dana Blank, the prison superintendent whom Paula sometimes saw as her nemesis, looked at the graduates and said, "Hold your heads up and be proud. You have a lot of power, and the door is open to you."

Paula, now 31, declined to speak to the media on hand. Herman paused, however, to answer a few questions from an IndyStar reporter. He said Paula's graduation was a turning point.

"It means a lot to us."

But this bright moment also showed how polarizing Paula remained. Indiana University law professor Henry Karlson told IndyStar he didn't think Paula was capable of rehabilitation. He suggested she was manipulating the system to get what she wanted. Her problem isn't ignorance, Karlson said. "It's a lack of conscience."

But one of Paula's professors, Warren Lewis, told IndyStar that Paula was a "brilliant girl" who had written a paper for him on eating disorders.

Lewis said Paula had endured a prison system focused more on punishment than rehabilitation. Until his class, he said, no one had asked Paula why she'd killed Ruth Pelke. "Paula was living the unexamined life," he said. "There's no engaging these people by their souls."

Paula's life at the Indiana Women's Prison was coming to an end. She had viewed the place as something to be survived. Soon, she'd be reassigned to a prison where she'd be forced to examine her life, and to prepare for life after jail.

—

The Rockville Correctional Facility, about 60 miles west of Indianapolis, had been an Air Force radar base in the 1950s. In the 1970s, it was a juvenile prison for boys. By 1992, it had become the largest women's prison in Indiana.

Situated atop one of the highest knolls in Parke County, the place in summer is an island in a sea of cornfields, in winter, a wind-whipped outpost set apart from civilization.

The prison's constellation of buildings is situated mostly in a circle, connected by concrete paths that cut like bicycle spokes across a vast lawn. Just off the circle, in one of the most conspicuous parts of the prison, is a golden bell.

Prison lore has it that when the place was a juvenile center, boys were allowed to ring the bell on their last day before leaving. In the years since the facility became a women's prison, the tradition had morphed. Only prison staff could ring the bell, as they were about to call it a career.

Paula Cooper passed the bell for the first time in the summer of 2002. At 32 years old, she had spent more of her life locked up than she'd been free. And she still had more than a decade to go. She'd earned a college degree and she began to speak of her anger as if it were an element of her past. But two years into life at Rockville, Paula attacked another inmate. The infraction earned her three months in segregation.

That aside, Paula found life at Rockville to be less oppressive than it had been at the Indiana Women's Prison. With more than 1,100 prisoners, its population was more than twice as large as the Indiana Women's Prison. Paula was still a big fish, but in a larger pond.

There was more freedom of movement, there were more opportunities to work. She tried her hand in a service dog training program and fell in love with a golden retriever named Maddy. Like Paula, the dog had come from an abusive home, and they seemed to form a bond. But because of her abuse, Maddy couldn't handle being around men. It was an insurmountable flaw for a service dog, and Maddy was pulled from the program. It broke Paula's heart, and she asked to leave the program, too.

Paula had more success elsewhere. She completed a horticulture program, picking up the skills needed to work in a greenhouse. She pestered her way into an honor's job — one for well-behaved inmates that offered real-world wages (minus room and board). The supervisor was reluctant, at first, to hire the notorious Paula Cooper, but she relented, and Paula started making prison uniforms. Ormeshia Linton, a friend who knew Paula at both prisons, said: "She ended up being the best damn worker they ever had."

While she seemed to be settling in at Rockville, Paula also was settling into a new relationship with a man on the outside.

Michael Johnson was an ex-offender who'd done 15 years on drug charges. When he left prison in 2003, he decided to reach out to someone in prison and become a pen pal as others had done for him. It was his way of giving back, he would say. But Johnson was only interested in writing a woman, and the first one who came to mind was among the most famous female inmates in Indiana — Paula Cooper.

They began exchanging letters and, eventually, Johnson began visiting her at Rockville. Ostensibly, they were friends. But they also posed for snapshots together, arm in arm, with Paula displaying as bright a smile as she'd ever flashed in her life.

At 37, she seemed to be closer to finding peace than at any time in her life. With 20 years of prison behind her, she was a veteran of the system — with more time inside than most of the women around her. She still felt an obligation to be a one-woman welcoming committee. Even from her earliest days in the general population at the Indiana Women's Prison, Paula had prepared little gift bags for new inmates — prison essentials such as soap or toothpaste, even instant noodles. She would present them in person or leave them anonymously. Now at Rockville, she wanted to offer more than gift bags.

When Mary Rainey was struggling to get her GED, Paula began tutoring her in math. When new arrival Luciana Yzaguirre struggled being away from her children, Paula gave her pep talks. She urged her to talk to others as a means of coping.

What was becoming more and more clear to people at Rockville was that the once incorrigible Paula Cooper had turned a corner. That younger version of herself had seemed hellbent on staying in trouble, determined to show everyone she was a badass, as put by Sylvia Keyes, who did time with Paula in both prisons. At Rockville, Keyes said, Paula grew out of that.

Paula would later tell her friend and former attorney Monica Foster: "I came to understand that I was the common denominator in all of the trouble, and these people (at Rockville) were treating me like a human, and I wanted to treat them like a human."

The change in Paula became evident to Julie Stout, the superintendent at Rockville from 2007 onward. "I think maybe, at that point, she might have realized that she needed to improve herself," Stout said. "And I think she wanted, honestly, just to be a better person."

Important in her transition, Paula said later, was that Stout and her staff saw her as more than a prison number. They were tough but evenhanded.

Paula's greatest success at Rockville came in the kitchen. She entered a culinary arts program and found she had a knack for cooking. She started reading recipe books and serving up her creations in the prison kitchen. She was so good that some prison staff based their lunchtime decisions on whether Paula was in the kitchen. "I love to do it," she would tell Pelke in a letter, "and I like the fact that people love my food." After completing the program, she became a teacher.

—

For all her progress, Paula still had unfinished business in prison: Dealing with the past that haunted her.

More than 20 years after her crime, Paula still woke each day to the memory of it. "I remember only parts of that terrible day," she told Anna Guaita, her favorite Italian journalist, in 2007. "I wish I could forget everything, but I know it would not be fair."

As her time in prison wound down, Paula still hadn't been able to answer the great question of her life — why. Why had she killed Ruth Pelke that day? In a 2010 letter to Bill, Paula wrote: "I am not sure what initiated me to hurt another fellow human being. Maybe it was all the beatings but after almost 30 years ... no one has ever tried to help figure it out."

To a reporter from the Times of Northwest Indiana in 2012, Paula described her crime as a "robbery gone bad" — one where "everything just started happening."

In an email to Bill Pelke in 2013, she wrote: "I know I did a bad thing and to be honest there are times that I don't understand what really happened myself. There are times that I think about what happened and know that I will never understand."

Paula tried telling herself she had paid her debt, that God wanted her to be happy. But as the countdown quickened to her June release, her anxieties only grew.

She worried about re-offending and winding up back in prison, as she'd seen so many others do. "I hope that you know I have done all I can to get my life right," she wrote Bill. "I am not perfect but I am really working on myself."

She worried about her job prospects, especially given her notoriety. "I don't want to wait until I get out of here to make all these plans like everyone wants me to do," she told Pelke. "That is some thing (sic) that will over whelm (sic) me."

She worried about being able to write checks and pay bills in a world she'd left as a child. She asked to go through an eight-week re-entry program a year ahead of her release. And, for good measure, she took it a second time.

She worried about where she would live.

Her dad had been dead for nearly three years. Her mother, whose name changed to Gloria Reese after a second marriage, was in Hammond, but Paula had deep reservations about going there.

She talked with Michael about possibly living with him in Indianapolis, even getting married. But for reasons he'd yet to explain, Michael was resistant to moving too fast. He chalked it up to wanting her to readjust to life on the outside before taking on a husband.

In her anxiety, Paula turned for help to her oldest pen pal, Bill Pelke, to whom she was now sending emails instead of letters. She told him living with her mother might not be the best solution; she asked him to look into something in Indianapolis. And she grew hopeful when a Christian-based halfway house agreed to take her — at least until the publicity began.

A month before Paula's release date, Bill spoke to a Chicago television reporter, who subsequently called the prison looking for a "mug shot" of Paula. That term sent Paula and her mother into a tailspin. To them, it seemed to connote the criminal she'd once been rather than the person she was now. "My mother is extremely upset that whatever was said on this T.V. show will affect my chances of getting a job and the help that I need once I get out of here and she is really sensitive about things," Paula said in an email to Bill. Her mother had doubts, Paula said, about whether Bill had Paula's best interests at heart.

Those doubts were strong enough that Paula soon removed Bill from her prison visitors list. He had campaigned to save her life, had written her for 27 years and had visited her 14 times — even when her mother had been absent — but Paula was now cutting ties. Her old struggle to trust had returned to the point where she questioned Bill's greatest gift to her.

"I wonder," she wrote, "if you have fully forgiven me."

Bill was crushed.

Paula's post-prison plan still called for her to return to her mother's home in Hammond. And she told Bill she couldn't go against the woman providing the home "where I have to lay my head after all these years."

Ronica Starks, one of her friends in prison, watched Paula's angst grow in those final days. Paula had "so many people in her ear," Starks said. The stress was great enough, Starks said, that Paula, then 43, was rocking herself in her bed to go to sleep at night.

—

Bill Pelke knew that Paula was gripped with anxiety. He'd seen it in March, during his last visit. He'd read it in her letters. He took the cues and reached out — through some contacts he'd made — to the Rev. Joseph Tobin, then the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Indianapolis.

"Everybody seemed to be very concerned that she was going to be released and then sent back to Hammond," Tobin said.

Tobin spoke to Catholic Charities, which began working with other organizations to make new arrangements for Paula. He spoke to people in state government about the situation.

Now in her final hours at Rockville, things were suddenly up in the air. Paula was due for release on Monday, June 17, 2013. But two days before that, it wasn't clear where she would land. People inside and outside the prison were scrambling to make something happen, but sending Paula home to her mother no longer seemed a good option.

Paula had spent more than 28 years behind bars, but she signed a waiver that essentially said until there was a place to go she'd be willing to stay a few days more.

Stout worked through the weekend and found a halfway house in Indianapolis that would accept Paula. At first, Paula took the news hard. She worried about how her mother would react to the change of plan. Stout saw the anguish in a crying Paula, who gathered herself and said: "I'll be OK. I'll just have to be sure that my mom is."

With her lodgings settled, a new challenge arose on her last day. News crews from Indianapolis had picked up word of Paula's pending release. And they were on their way to Rockville to capture the moment.

As far as Stout was concerned, publicity was the last thing Paula needed. She improvised a plan for Paula's escape from Rockville. Most prisoners leave through the front door, but Stout arranged for Paula to leave Rockville through the back, in an unmarked van. In their final frenetic moments, Stout offered Paula a piece of advice: "I wouldn't do any interviews until you are well-established on parole. There's going to be a lot of media attention. Don't do anything until you are settled. You don't need the extra pressure."

Paula signed her exit papers. The business of setting her free was done. All she had to do was leave. But Paula stopped.

She was crying again.

"Why are you crying?" Stout asked. "You're going home."

But Paula's home, for the past 28 years, had been the place she was now leaving, the place she'd entered as a youth. Home … had been prison.

As an angry teenager, she'd fought the guards. As a woman, she'd fought the urge to become "institutionalized." Now, as a woman in midlife, she realized she was moving on. Through her tears, she told Stout: "I'm going to miss you guys."

Stout had seen inmates hesitate at the prison gate. Many exchange three meals and a bed for something much less certain. Rarely, though, had she seen someone as reluctant to leave as Paula. Slowly, Paula turned and walked out of the visitor center. At the rear gate, the officers in the unmarked van pulled up, the vehicle's tires squealing from the sudden stop. As Paula headed toward the van, she stopped again.

To her left, she saw the bell — the golden bell that the boys once rang on their way out. Paula knew the history. She'd heard the lore. She turned and looked back at the superintendent.

"Can I ring the bell?" Paula asked.

Stout didn't hesitate: "Yeah. Ring the bell."

Paula ran over to the bell, grabbed the short rope and gave a pull. The tone lingered as she sprinted for the van. She climbed in, and the door slammed shut behind her. The driver pulled through the back gate and onto the prison's perimeter road. On the road back to Indianapolis, a television news truck passed them heading toward Rockville.

And kept going.

Paula Cooper was in the clear now. Prison was in the rearview mirror. All that lay in front of her was a world she wouldn't recognize.

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Countryside faded into suburbia, and suburbia into the bustle of the city, as Paula Cooper watched a new world roll by outside her window.

She'd been locked away since 1985, and on that morning in June 2013, she looked out at an alien landscape. There were cell towers and digital billboards, clusters of big-box stores and cars running on battery power.

The two officers in her unmarked prison van — the driver and a security officer riding shotgun — kept an eye out for television trucks. As a precaution, the driver took a circuitous route around I-465 to their destination on Indianapolis' east side.

The van came to a stop at the District 3 parole office, a drab warehouse along East 30th Street, where a parole officer waited to introduce Paula to her future. She didn't realize it then, but she'd just closed a tremendous circle.

Next door to the parole office, in a building with a rock façade, stood the Indiana State Archives, which maintains a collection of mementos from her past. Filed away in crates and boxes — ­­in such quantities they have to be rolled out on carts — are letters and cards from around the world, their pages almost as crisp as the day they were mailed 25 years before. Reams of petitions from the 1980s contain the scrawled signatures of Italians with names like Leonelli Cinzia and Ernestina Balbusso. Many of the petitions bear headings with the words, "LIFE FOR PAULA COOPER."

Paula was oblivious to the closing of this little cosmic circle. At the beginning of her new life, she was just happy to be out of prison, stunned her day had finally come. As she stepped out of the van, there was an element of wonder in her voice, like that of a child on a new adventure. She took in a breath of free air and said simply to her escorts: "Here we go."

At 43, Paula was a woman in transition. She was neither old nor young, neither fat nor thin. Her face was round and without wrinkles, but some saw an empty wariness in her eyes. Her hair was full and without gray, yet she sometimes wore extensions. She was at an age when some women are grandmothers, yet people who knew her spoke of her as a striking beauty who still longed for children. She was at midlife. And that was an apt description for what lay ahead during this first year — a middle life beyond prison but not free of prison's watchful eye.

Parole officer Denise Jackson, a 13-year veteran and star of an obscure reality television show called "Parole Diaries," had worked with high-profile ex-offenders before, but none like Paula Cooper. Paula's case had once made headlines around the world. Just as important to Jackson was how long Paula had been locked away. Paula might be midlife now, Jackson reasoned, but she'd gone in a girl.

The last-minute shuffling in Paula's arrangements — shifting her landing spot from Hammond to Indianapolis — left Jackson with just a day to prepare. But in that short time she decided her first priorities were to keep Paula safe and to shield her from the media. She couldn't sharply define the threats Paula might face, but she was convinced they existed. As Jackson saw it, the solution was to hide Paula, give her tight supervision and attach her to a "team" of people to guide her. The first order of business was simpler than that: Paula was hungry. And on the drive toward Paula's new sanctuary, Jackson made the tactical decision of where to get Paula's first meal outside prison. Her solution: the drive-up window at the 16th Street Hardee's.

If a new life in obscurity was the goal, Paula's first home out of prison — a weathered duplex near the corner of 30th and Delaware streets — was ideal. Unmarked by signage, the house was part of a neighborhood with many homes that were boarded up or being restored.

Known as Spain's Residential Living center, or Spain's House, Paula's new home was a halfway house for women recovering from alcohol and drug addictions. Paula had never been an addict, but Spain's was among the few shelters willing to welcome the infamous Paula Cooper. As a bonus, Jackson knew the house manager, and the drug programming would offer a layer of accountability.

Jackson brought Paula in and looked the place over. She warned the other women to leave her client alone. She asked the manager to look after her. And, as part of the effort to protect her anonymity, she introduced Paula by her middle name: Renae. Soon, Paula moved into a room with another woman, and her odyssey began.

It didn't take long to see it would be a difficult ride. By 2 a.m., Paula was in panic mode. She called Jackson, jarring her awake with some unintelligible screaming. Once Jackson got Paula to calm down, she was able to make out a desperate plea.

"I can't stay here. I can't stay here, Miss Jackson," Paula shouted.

"It's dark in here."

For the previous 28 years, Paula had slept in jails and prisons that never went fully dark. Her room at Spain's? It was pitch black.

Jackson told Paula to see the house manager; she assured her that, in the morning, they'd buy a night light. But the episode reaffirmed Jackson's concern. Paula wasn't ready for the outside world.

For the first couple of weeks, Jackson — a parole officer with 88 other clients — saw Paula every day. They sat on the porch and watched children play. They watched mothers stroll babies. They watched cars pass in the street. They took walks around the block. Jackson saw to it that, during Paula's first two months on the outside, she went nowhere alone. Her watchful eyes included people from Spain's, two mentors, a psychologist, an employment counselor, a safety officer and someone from Catholic Charities.

If the watchful eyes weren't enough, Jackson drilled Paula in a special emergency procedure. Should she stumble into trouble — in a store, at the mall, wherever — Paula was to lock herself in the nearest bathroom, call 911 and call Jackson. It was crude, but Jackson viewed Paula Cooper less as the 43-year-old woman she was than as the teenager she'd been when she entered prison.

The helicopter parenting quickly proved to be an irritant for Paula, but in the beginning, she seemed to want all the help she could get. Within days of her release, Paula called Melissa Marble, a friend she'd known in prison who then lived in Marion. There was desperation in her voice.

"Sissy, I need you to move down here," Paula said.

Marble said she was moving to Indianapolis, but it would be a couple of months.

"No, I need you to come now."

Without a familiar shoulder to lean on, Paula turned to the new best friend that Jackson lined up for her — a mentor named Kim Kidd. By day, Kidd was a rules enforcer for the NCAA. On the side, she operated a prison ministry. She was perfect.

Kidd came by on Paula's second day and took her to buy a night light. In the months that followed, she would help Paula purchase a phone, set up a bank account, apply for food stamps and learn the ways of the world. She'd be a life coach, a counselor, a taxi driver and a new big sister. Kidd introduced Paula to shopping at Aldi's, dinner at Texas Roadhouse and the modern marvel of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Paula took well to Aldi's; she was frightened by the size of Wal-Mart.

Phones were a challenge for Paula. When she entered prison, phones were still attached to walls by a cord; many had rotary dials. Now, she was being confronted with a mobile phone. Its noises were abrupt and seemed impossible to silence. It was difficult even to dial.

Vexing, too, were debit cards. When Paula went to jail, most people bought groceries with cash or checks. But after her release, as she sat in a bank opening a debit card account, Paula stared blankly when asked for a password and a PIN number. For the longest time, she froze at the sight of a debit card reader in a checkout line. "She would literally just stand there," Kidd said. "I would say, 'Swipe your debit card.' She would not move. I would go over and take her card and swipe it."

Jackson, the parole officer, kept tabs on Paula's reintroduction into the wild. "It was like taking a baby and teaching them how to walk, teaching them how to eat," Jackson would say later.

The new Paula Cooper was a mercurial personality, sometimes bubbly and playful, other times fearful and edgy. "One minute she was this vulnerable person that needed help and needed guidance and direction, and the next minute she was this person saying, 'I'm growing. I know what to do,'" Jackson said.

The playful Paula appeared once when Kidd tried to give her some cellphone practice. While they were out on an errand, she asked Paula to call Kidd's husband, Charles. Paula felt mischievous:

Charles: "Hello."

Paula: "This is Paula."

Charles: "Paula who?"

Paula: "You know who I am. The blood tests are in, and you are the baby's father."

The edgy Paula was a remnant of the person in prison who never liked to be "handled" and who felt disdain for authority. Spain's House set curfews and mandatory substance abuse training. Paula complained. Jackson ordered a mental health evaluation to ensure Paula wasn't a threat to herself or others. Paula resisted.

When Jackson's tight rein felt oppressive, Paula threatened to go over her head to parole officials, just as she had done in prison. Partly, it was a bad temper. Partly, it was the impatience of a woman in a hurry. Frustrated at a delay in getting her food stamps going, Paula hung up the phone in Jackson's ear. Annoyed with a messy Spain's House roommate, Paula bagged up the woman's loose things and tossed them into the hall. "To me," Kidd said, "that was a temper tantrum."

For counseling, Paula sometimes met with Tobin, the Catholic archbishop. He saw her as someone struggling with the guilt of her crime, as well as with the new world.

Gradually, Paula was given a longer leash. She began riding city buses with other Spain's residents. She reconnected with friends she'd met in prison who, like her, were now free. And, in August 2013, less than three months after her release, Paula took a job that seemed ideal for an ex-felon who'd been a whiz in the kitchen — a slot in a restaurant run by other ex-offenders.

Rosalind Butler, the general manager of Five Guys Burgers and Fries on West 86th Street, had been given a chance to work when she came out of prison. Now, she wanted to offer the same for Paula. She started Paula out as a fry cook, and she took to the job well. When one of the Five Guys founders made a store visit, he asked someone to cook up some french fries. Paula whipped out a batch so in line with the Five Guys ideal that the founder gave her $100. Eventually, Butler moved Paula out front to a cash register. At first, Paula feared someone in the line of customers might recognize her. But no one — not at Five Guys, not anywhere in her travels — seemed to make the connection between the middle-aged cashier and the teenage killer.

But there were other, more practical concerns, such as handling the crush of the lunchtime crowds, and handling money. Initially, the lunch hour rush overwhelmed Paula to the point she "wigged out," as Butler put it. When she did, Butler would send Paula back to the frying station. Eventually, Paula learned to cope with the register and the lunchtime rush. She enjoyed getting to know the regular customers. In a store where customers pick up their food when their number is called, Paula would make table deliveries to the customers she knew well. Eventually, she began managing shifts and picking up extra hours. Paula never missed a day's work.

Five Guys exemplified the size and scope of the close-knit community of ex-offenders. In addition to working together in clusters, the community set up its own Facebook groups, made road trips and held events such as picnics and reunions. Within months of her release, Paula was plugged into the network. She reconnected with Melissa Marble, whom she'd known at Rockville, and Ormeshia Linton, who had roomed with her at the Indiana Women's Prison. In October 2013, when a group of Rockville alumni planned an event at an east-side Damon's Grill, word spread that Paula Cooper was the new special guest.

Paula was angry.

"I don't want to be put on display," she told Linton, who drove Paula to the gathering but had to pull over on the way to keep her from backing out. Linton tried to explain what was happening.

"They're waiting on you because you did almost 30 years and you came out. But you still have your faculties, and you're still all put together. The prison didn't break you. You're not falling to pieces. They're waiting on you because we've seen this walk that you had to do. They're waiting on you to congratulate you."

Paula agreed to go on to the party. It turned out to be a dud and quickly moved to a Downtown bar. Paula didn't dance, but she began to enjoy herself a little, even relax. Until someone started snapping pictures. The last thing she needed was a viral picture of herself enjoying a night out at a bar. It was a reminder of Paula's delicate walk — building a new life while managing her ugly past.

A difficult part of that walk involved her own family.

Herman Cooper, the father who had beaten her, was now dead. And he had even left Paula a modest inheritance.

Rhonda LaBroi, her sister, was still devoted to Paula, sending her gifts and taking her phone calls five times a day. But like Paula, she still struggled with the baggage of their childhood, including bouts of depression.

The biggest trouble was Gloria Reese, Paula's mother. Gloria had stood by and watched her husband beat the girls when they were young. She'd avoided the courtroom in Paula's moment of need. She'd avoided visiting Paula in prison for years. While Paula wanted to bring the family together, Rhonda wasn't keen on the idea. "She was trying to bring peace between them," Kidd said of Paula, "and she felt as if she was in the middle." It would become a key stress point in her life.

There were other challenges, too.

There was Michael.

When Paula emerged from prison, she quickly reconnected with her prison pen pal who had come to mean much more. Ever trying to knit together a family, Paula wanted a life with Michael, but he resisted. They went out together. They were lovers. But that was as far as he was willing to go. He told her she needed to work on getting her life straight before entering a relationship. As a working college student, he also seemed too busy for Paula's taste.

That frustrated Paula. In most of her relationships, Paula seemed to require on-demand availability. She peppered friends with text messages and calls, filling up an inbox, until they replied. But Michael had things to do.

Paula also longed for more independence. She wanted out of Spain's House and wanted her own apartment. By the end of 2013, she was pressing her parole team hard for the change. Kidd didn't think Paula was ready. "When you are alone," Kidd said later, "you are alone with your thoughts and with your nightmares that you've never gotten rid of." But Paula was insistent, and her support team relented, arranging for her to move.

Located in a gritty area near 38th and Meridian streets, it was a simple one-bedroom apartment with a small kitchen and a living room. For Paula, 44, it was another milestone: a place of her own.

When she arrived, the unit was furnished with just two chairs and a bed and reminded her of nothing so much as a prison cell. She set about furnishing it, first with a small dinette set and later with a futon. She kept it neat and tidy. She began to understand that she really was out of prison. And that wasn't an altogether good thing. Paula struggled being alone. For the first three months, she did little more than go to work, come home and sit in the empty apartment, gazing out the window. Whether it was the silence or the memories of her past, Paula felt uneasy. At times, she would sit alone with her thoughts until she came to tears. She told Marble it felt as if the walls were closing in. She sought out a psychiatrist, who told her the feelings were normal for someone in her situation. Paula concluded she needed to do more than work and sit in the apartment.

She sought out Michael when he was available.

She stayed engaged with the Rockville girls, making a couple of short road trips.

She frequently called Kidd, nosing around for companionship. Kidd would stop by in the evening after work or take Paula to her home in Fishers, where they would make dinner, bake cookies or watch movies.

But none of it could keep the darkness away.

In a vulnerable moment, Paula confided to Melissa Marble that she thought of killing herself. Marble rebuked her for suggesting such a thing.

She told Michael she'd reached out to a suicide crisis center, and he didn't believe her. He chalked it up to an attempt to get his attention.

She called Ormeshia Linton in tears. When Linton pressed her about what was wrong, Paula said: "I'm OK. I won't do anything to hurt myself." For several days, Linton kept close tabs on Paula.

As part of her efforts to escape the apartment, Paula asked for Michael's help as a driving teacher.

Paula had gone to jail before she was old enough to get a license. Tragically, her last road experience came at 15 — in the car she'd stolen from the woman she'd killed. Decades later, she had little experience even riding in traffic, little sense of direction and strange notions about handling a car.

She failed her first driving test, she later told friends, because she drove 60 mph through a school zone. Incredulous at the result, she told them, "I was trying to keep up with traffic."

In March 2014, she took the driving test again and passed. Her friends, barely able to discuss Paula's driving without erupting into laughter, suggested the examiner who passed her was guilty of professional malpractice. They said they were reluctant to ride with her without first having a stiff drink and updating their life insurance. Paula would leave a store parking lot and pull onto a busy street, only to hit the brakes and stop in the middle of the street. When other drivers slammed their brakes to avoid hitting her and honked their horns, Paula was furious.

"Did you see that bitch, Precious?" she asked Marble, calling her by a nickname. "Did you see?"

Paula made a habit of camping out in the passing lanes of the interstate while doing just 45 mph. As cars whizzed past, horns blaring, Paula couldn't see her own fault. "These damn people can't drive," she told Linton on one such outing. "They need to get out of my way." Later, she stopped her car in the middle of Monument Circle, stepped out into the street and called the friend she was meeting on her cellphone. From an office above, the friend saw Paula standing beside her car, waving up at the office windows, as she asked for directions.

Such automotive meltdowns were common for Paula. But the foray into driving illustrated another aspect of Paula's personality: She kept secrets and compartmentalized friends.

Paula's parole required that she report changes in her life status. But she never mentioned her car purchase. She never mentioned the second job she took at the Amazon warehouse in Indianapolis — another means to stay busy. There was nothing sinister or illegal about her secrecy. Friends said it was just a byproduct of a childhood that made her distrustful. Jackson, the parole officer, saw in it a remnant of prison life, where you learn certain things can be shared with certain inmates or certain guards, but not with everyone.

"We knew she was trying to conquer and divide us," Jackson said. "She would be pissed at me because I wouldn't let go."

By June 2014, the divide-and-conquer strategy was no longer necessary. Paula had finished her year of parole. The tether was gone. For the first time, her life was her own to lead how she wanted.

—

Until that point, Paula's universe had largely been limited to her parole team, to the Rockville girls and to Michael. But the summer of 2014 was to be a season of transitions for Paula.

Michael had been, as she would say later, "her first true love," but it was becoming clear that the life she wanted to build with him would never be realized.

Friends saw Paula's growing frustration with Michael. And their relationship was becoming increasingly volatile. Michael said Paula lashed out at him physically, with flailing fists, although she didn't hurt him.

Adding to the agitation, friends said, were harassing phone calls Paula had received from women who knew Michael and objected to their relationship. In some cases, the callers made references to Paula's crime. They called her a "murderer."

Things came to a head when Paula learned the biggest reason behind Michael's reticence to commit to her: He was already married.

Michael said he never imagined their relationship would last beyond Paula's release from prison, especially if she paroled to Hammond to live with her mother. But she came to Indianapolis and leaned on him during that first year out. Michael said he didn't want to cut her off when she was struggling, but it's also true he allowed their relationship to grow more intimate while keeping his marriage secret. Not long after she learned the truth, Paula ended their relationship.

—

As one relationship ended, Paula decided to reach out to some old friends who had supported her in the past.

At the top of the list was Monica Foster.

Monica had been one of her lawyers on death row. She'd fought for Paula, counseled her and become her friend. After the reprieve from the death sentence, Monica continued visiting Paula in prison, but it became hard to watch Paula ignore her advice about ways to get along with the guards. Monica moved on with her life. In subsequent years, she'd had 15 to 20 more death penalty cases. She'd argued in front of the United States Supreme Court. She'd lost a client to lethal injection. By summer 2014, she was the chief public defender for people facing federal crimes in Indiana. But Monica would always have a place in her heart for Paula.

Monica had wanted to contact Paula as soon as she'd come out of prison. But she wondered if she might remind Paula of an unpleasant past. The notion disappeared quickly the first time she heard Paula's voice on a phone message.

"Hey girl," Paula said, "this is a blast from the past."

Monica took Paula out to a Broad Ripple restaurant to celebrate their reunion. They sat on the patio, watching people stroll Broad Ripple Avenue, and they made fun of the ones they thought looked weird. They joked about some of the people they'd met during their crusade to save her life. Laughing was something they'd always done together, even during the darkest hours on death row. It was one of the things that endeared Paula to Monica. They talked about Paula's relationship with Michael. And despite the years, they still had a closeness. But something was new. They were no longer attorney and client, adult and teenager. They were just a couple of middle-aged women enjoying dinner and drinks. The power dynamic had changed; they were friends. And with the weight of her new life, Paula needed a good friend.

They talked or texted a couple of times a week. They went out every 10 days or so. Paula came over to dinner with Monica and her husband, Bob Hammerle. "I just wanted to take care of her," Monica would say later, "and be stable." Paula was always trying to stitch together family where she could find it. Here was another chance.

—

Paula also reached out to Bill Pelke, but in reconnecting with the grandson of her murder victim, she was more cautious. In her final days in prison, Paula had become leery of Pelke's closeness with the media and his comfort in the public eye. Coming out of prison, she wanted to lie low. Out of sight. And she had left Bill alone. Now, she was ready to at least say hello.

When Pelke's phone rang in July 2014, he was on the road between New York and Connecticut carrying out his latest mission. Since his act of forgiveness toward Paula, Pelke had become a poignant voice in the movement against the death penalty. He'd started his own nonprofit — "Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing" — that not only opposed the death penalty but also promoted healing for the families of murder victims. He'd traveled the world telling his story of forgiveness. He'd marched with Sister Helen Prejean, author of "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty," and met Susan Sarandon, the actress who played Prejean in the "Dead Man Walking" movie.

On this latest Journey of Hope, Pelke was riding with Bill Babbitt, whose brother had been executed in California, and David Kaczynski, brother of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Both now worked against the death penalty, Babbitt in response to his brother's execution, Kaczynski because his brother had avoided death primarily through good legal counsel.

At first, Pelke didn't recognize the voice on the phone. And Paula seemed to enjoy that moment — the hesitation before her big reveal.

They spoke for just minutes. Paula asked about Bill's latest journey. Bill asked how Paula was doing. Fine, she said, except for one problem: The Internal Revenue Service was telling her she owed money, and she'd lose her car if she didn't pay. It sounded odd to Bill, who put her voice on speaker. Babbitt, who was familiar with Paula's history, thought it sounded like a scam. Bill urged her to ask Monica for help.

And that was their reconnection moment. The conversation made Bill uncomfortable. He was eager to see Paula, even to involve her in Journey of Hope. But he thought Paula was still on parole and that she might get in trouble for having contact with the victim's family — even a willing family member like him. They said their goodbyes, and Bill left Paula alone. He assumed they would reconnect eventually, maybe even march together. Paula had other plans. She seemed convinced that her best argument against the death penalty would be to lead a productive, meaningful life. Outside the public eye.

Increasingly, she also sensed that there should be more to her life than flipping hamburgers. She wore the smell of hamburgers home each night, and the work left her fatigued. She'd given up the second job at Amazon when she'd approached exhaustion. She began talking about what might come next with Monica, who came up with a radical idea: What if Paula came to work for her?

—

On one level, the notion of putting a convicted killer in her receptionist's chair seemed preposterous. When Monica broached it to her office mates, there were murmurs the boss was nuts. But Monica reasoned that if a group of public defenders couldn't offer a second chance, who could? So Paula began coming in on her days off from Five Guys to work in a place populated by lawyers, paralegals and, now, a former death row inmate.

At first, Paula couldn't type or use the internet. But she took some classes and began soaking it up. "It was exciting to her, and it was fun watching her just dive in," Dan Hill, who oversaw the office technology, would say later. "She was kind of fearless."

In prison, Paula had been something of an amateur legal adviser to fellow inmates. Now she was learning the meaning behind the terminology and the importance of precision. With the clients, she had a rapport the lawyers couldn't match. So in the fall of 2014, when a full-time job opened in the office, Monica asked the staff if Paula would be a good choice. The vote was a unanimous yes.

Paula answered the phones and greeted people coming for a visit, but she did much more, putting a personal touch on her work. When the lawyers had some correspondence for a client in jail, Paula would add handwritten notes to "keep your head up" or "stay hopeful." If the office borrowed a picture of a prisoner's child, Paula would return it with a note to the inmate that the kid was "the cutest we've seen." And everybody's kid, Foster noticed, was "the cutest we've seen."

When a prisoner's mother called with a concern about his medical needs, Paula pushed to get them met. When a mother worried about a prisoner who was mysteriously unreachable, Paula offered reassuring possibilities, then began finding answers. In many ways, she was as much a social worker as a receptionist.

Some of the habits that drove her friends crazy — the incessant, unrelenting phone calls until she got the answer she wanted — were an asset in the law office. She'd pepper prison officials with calls and leave a dozen messages, with threats of more, until she got an answer. She'd pester wardens with emails until they recognized she wasn't going away. "She was a grinder," Foster would say. "She would grind on the prisons until they called her back." Her dark past was useful in another way: It reminded the legal staff that their clients could be more than criminals.

Paula once waited to die on death row. Now she was working in an office overlooking Monument Circle. She would wear a business suit and work among professionals. And she would offer few glimpses into her inner struggles or the turmoil at home. The office suite, as it turned out, became yet another room in her highly compartmentalized life.

In the course of the job, Paula interacted daily with judges and prosecutors and prison officials. They were people who might have recognized her full name, might have known she'd once been bound for the electric chair. But they didn't connect it with the attractive, competent woman now in a receptionist's chair. For Paula, the office was a compartment of freedom. She could be herself.

"I don't have to look over my shoulders and worry about who's saying this or who's saying that," she told Ormeshia Linton. "I get to be Paula Cooper, and that's something I haven't been able to do since I've been out."

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Paula Cooper was in no mood for a pickup line, especially from a guy in the middle of a KFC parking lot.

Pulling up beside her in a truck, though, was a man wearing dirty work clothes, doing his best to start something. "Excuse me, ma'am," said the stranger. "Do you have a boyfriend?"

"No, and I'm not looking," Paula said. The pain from the breakup with Michael was fresh. She'd loved him, wanted to settle down with him and start a family. Then she learned he already had a wife and kids.

Not easily deterred, the man in the truck said: "I'm not looking to be your boyfriend. But I would like to take you to dinner."

Paula was a woman who wouldn't easily take no for an answer. Maybe she appreciated the guy's persistence or merely realized he was a nice-looking man, but she didn't drive away. When LeShon Davidson offered his business card, she took it. And later that evening, Paula called him.

It wasn't a good conversation. They talked for a bit, but LeShon told her it wasn't a good time. Paula hated being put off. When she called someone, she wanted to talk right then. The last guy who kept putting her off had a wife. She was more than a little annoyed.

LeShon awoke the next morning thinking about the woman he'd met the day before. Her brown face caught the light in a way that made her almost glow red. She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. For some reason, he felt the need to share with her a verse from the Bible.

It was a special piece of Scripture once given to him by a childhood friend. The boy and his brother had been abandoned by their parents. As LeShon tells it, they fended for themselves on the streets of Chicago for years, sometimes eating from trash cans. And what verse did these castoffs cling to?

Psalm 27:10: "Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me."

LeShon put the reference in a text with the note: "This was on my heart to send to you. Read this and tell me what you think."

Within minutes, LeShon's phone rang. It was Paula. She needed to see him immediately. She was a mystery woman, but he agreed to meet her in the KFC parking lot and lead her back to his apartment in their separate cars. When they finally sat down at his place, Paula was crying.

"Why did you send me that Scripture?" she asked.

He told her the story of his friend.

Paula had been beaten mercilessly by her father. She felt abandoned by her mother and forsaken as few children had.

"I used to cry and read my Bible," she told LeShon. "But when I found this Scripture that you sent me, that Scripture just lifted me up and made my time a lot easier."

"You sending me that Scripture," she said, "it says something. I think we should try. I think we should try and make it work."

This was moving fast. They'd just met. LeShon had approached Paula on impulse. And now she seemed to be moving things forward in a rush. He knew nothing about her. Until they began to talk.

"I just got out of prison," she said. "I did some time."

"I've done some time, too," said LeShon, who has unlicensed handgun possession charges on his Indiana record.

Paula replied: "Not like time I've done."

Twenty-eight years.

The obvious next question was: "What did you do?" But LeShon resisted the temptation to ask. He wasn't one to judge, and he didn't want Paula to think he'd shun her. And looking at the woman before him, he didn't care. Paula stayed the night.

The next morning, LeShon went to his job as a landscaper, curious about the woman he'd just met. Sitting in his truck, he pulled out his phone and Googled "Paula Cooper." Her name, her picture, her story — all of it was on the first Google page. The woman he'd spent the night with had murdered someone. She'd been sentenced to death. He was stunned.

But not afraid. Instead, LeShon felt a strange peace. Like he needed to love this woman all the more. Paula was eager for the open arms. After things ended badly with Michael, she was lonely. The walls of her apartment were closing in again. And LeShon, twice divorced, was lonely, too. She moved in with him almost immediately. Soon, they were inseparable.

LeShon learned quickly that Paula loved the outdoors. They went to Eagle Creek and sat by the water or went fishing, even in the cold. He took her on his landscaping jobs and put her to work, planting flowers. Sometimes, they sat on the deck of LeShon's apartment and watched the trees or listened to the birds. These were the moments Paula seemed most content. After the years of confinement, and of stagnant air, she declared, "This is real freedom right here."

Paula also seemed to enjoy the little family they were forming. She awoke each morning at 5 o'clock and asked LeShon what he wanted for breakfast. She'd get dressed for work in clothes he helped her buy, in high heels he'd coached her to wear. Always, she wanted a review of how she looked. Often, she wanted him to take a picture. At the end of the day, Paula would return home and spend 30 minutes sharing the details about her day. LeShon called it Paula's "downloading," and he listened patiently.

They even had a "child" to look after. LeShon had a younger friend he'd taken in, 28-year-old Chuck Burks. Paula began treating him like a son. She began keeping a stockpile of junk food in the apartment — Cheese Puffs, Little Debbie snack cakes, piles of potato chips — enough to cover a card table. LeShon knew that in prison such items were hot commodities when you could get them. Now, Paula never wanted to run out. She was building a tradition of cooking a big breakfast on Sundays — biscuits and gravy, French or cinnamon toast. For Sunday dinners, she'd make ribs and greens. Nobody left the table hungry. She was even working on LeShon, trying to get him to go back to church.

Paula came into some money from the sale of land her father owned. And she was not afraid to spend it. Her generosity overflowed the most at Christmas. After decades of making gifts in prison, she went crazy buying things for people. By LeShon's estimate, Paula spent $10,000 on friends during their first Christmas together. Other friends noticed the lavish spending, too. LeShon urged her to use caution, but she wouldn't be deterred.

"Money is going to come," she said.

In this new family, Paula referred to LeShon by his name only when she was angry with him. Mostly, she called him "Daddy." And in a quirk friends found hard to explain, Paula began strapping four teddy bears in the back seat of her car, as if they were children going along for the ride.

Paula shared with LeShon some of the harsher aspects of her past. She talked about her father's beatings as her mother looked on, about her mother's suicide attempt with the girls in the car, about the abortion.

In their light-speed romance, the subject of marriage came up quickly. On a trip to LeShon's family farm in Kentucky, they stopped in a small town to shop for clothes for her job. They wandered into a little jewelry store, and Paula found a ring she liked. LeShon said he'd buy it for her — if she'd be his wife. Paula, though, was hesitant.

"Not right now," she said, "there are things we have to work on."

LeShon knew that, too.

He wanted to work on some financial goals, get some more money together for a house — a dream house they had in mind for when they were married. But there were other issues.

Paula's wild mood swings, for one. Quickly, she could pass from the depths of depression to intense agitation.

Paula had a habit of ripping into him in angry outbursts, as if pushing for an argument. He would try to let the storms pass and speak to her when she'd calmed down the next day. Often, that would work. At first, the outbursts seemed to come from nowhere. But then LeShon noticed the disruptions seemed to be cyclical — attuned to Paula's menstrual periods. While it's a dangerous territory for a man to blame PMS, women close to her — Paula's sister, Rhonda, and her friend Ormeshia Linton — saw her struggle with it, too. LeShon and Paula talked about whether she should see a doctor. Both agreed the main thing Paula needed was greater calm in her life. LeShon tried to reassure her that, unlike the other men in her life, he wasn't going anywhere.

"I don't mean you any harm. I'm your man. I love you. I'm not going to do anything wrong, treat you wrong, disrespect you," he told her. "But you go off on the small stuff. And the small stuff we shouldn't bicker over."

She confessed to LeShon that the guilt of her crime still weighed on her. She tried to remind herself constantly that she'd served her sentence; she'd paid her debt; she'd been forgiven by Bill Pelke, the grandson of her victim. It never seemed to ease the burden.

In all their heart-to-heart talks, LeShon learned that one of the most sensitive areas of Paula's life was her mother. They had interacted occasionally since Paula's release from prison. Paula had even helped pay for a family funeral.

At her core, Paula felt a need to reconcile with Gloria, and to be a bridge between her mother and her sister. But LeShon also knew Gloria was resistant. "Her mother," LeShon would say later, "wouldn't let her get out of the shadow of what she did."

Paula and LeShon were engaged to be married by Christmas 2014, barely three months after they met. They began thinking of a wedding in Monica's beautiful backyard garden. The date for their union? That would come.

In a gesture of outreach, LeShon went to Gloria the first time he was introduced to her and thanked her for creating Paula. He gave her a ring. And he told her he wanted to marry Paula.

Gloria's response: Just get married quickly.

Gloria didn't approve of them living together. But LeShon wouldn't be rushed. He had been married twice. He wanted a long engagement, maybe as long as two years, to make sure this was right.

—

As 2015 began, Paula seemed interested in getting more help to sort through her complicated world. She reached out to Denise Jackson, her old parole officer, and to Kim Kidd, asking her to resume her role as a mentor. Kidd was eager to help, but Paula proved difficult to reach. Paula would get annoyed when her own phone calls weren't answered. But she was notorious for not accepting returned calls. She seemed to work on her own timetable.

After several days of such evasion, Kidd sent Paula a text with an urgent message: She was worried about her and needed to hear from her. That finally coaxed a response from Paula: "I'm at work," she said. "I'm OK, but I'm going through a lot right now. I really need to talk to you."

Jackson had equally frustrating exchanges with Paula. As Jackson and Kidd compared notes, they realized something was bothering Paula, but it was impossible to know what. They would have to allow Paula to come back to them and be ready to drop everything when she rang their phone the next time.

Whatever her personal troubles, Paula kept them from interfering with work at the law firm or tainting her image in that world. By the spring of 2015, her technology skills had progressed to the point that Paula was filing electronic briefs in court and setting up video conferences with clients in other states. This, from a woman who two years earlier couldn't use a cellphone. She dealt nimbly with judges, lawyers and prison guards, despite whatever scars she wore from the system. And Paula began discussing with Monica something they'd talked about since death row — trying to help the world learn from her mistakes and her wrenching experiences.

Paula would come out of hiding, at least in a limited way.

—

To those who knew how far Paula had come, she was both a post-prison success story and a potential spokesperson for criminal justice reform. At Rockville, Julie Stout was eager for Paula to speak to her prisoners. Tobin, the archbishop, wanted her involved in Catholic prison ministries. Bill Pelke had hopes that she might join him as a powerful ally on his Journeys of Hope. She was even considering a visit to the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center, where she might speak to kids before they'd gone too far down the path to personal destruction.

Yet Paula's first public speaking opportunity came in a different venue — ­before college students at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where associate professor Crystal Garcia taught a class on the death penalty.

Grimly titled "Killing the Killers," the class met once a week for seven hours. It was a broader format that enabled Garcia to bring in guest speakers such as judges, prosecutors and public defenders. She'd also featured a man sent to death row who turned out to be innocent, and a governor who let a man die rather than issue a stay of execution.

Over the years, Monica Foster had spoken to Garcia's classes several times. Always, Garcia's students had shown particular interest in Monica's involvement with the Paula Cooper case. Garcia was a student of Paula's case, too. When Monica shared that Paula was working for her, Garcia told her Paula had an open invitation to speak to the class anytime she wanted. Never had Garcia brought in a killer who'd been sent to death row and lived to tell the tale. Such credentials were rare, to say the least. With some trepidation, Paula eventually accepted.

On the morning of March 27, 2015, Paula was nervous. She wore her best dark business suit. Her hair was perfect. Garcia didn't give her 21 students any advance notice about the special guest. And Paula slipped into the back of the classroom virtually unnoticed. She would be making quite a splash.

—

Previously, Garcia talked to her students about how long-term prisoners can experience post-traumatic stress; she talked to them about asking questions in a sensitive way. But to help Paula further, Monica worked it out that she would speak for a while, then invite Paula up for an interview. Paula would sit in the back of the classroom as Monica spoke of her death penalty cases. Paula had waited 30 years for this chance to tell her story; she could wait 30 minutes more.

Monica ran through her rogue's gallery of cases and then asked if the class was familiar with Paula Cooper. Garcia spoke up. Yes, they'd talked about it; the students affirmed it. And Monica said, "Well, I brought her with me because she works with me."

The gasp from the audience of students was loud enough that it was captured on an audio recording made by a former student tipped off about Paula's visit. As Paula made her way down the center aisle to the front, someone said in a loud whisper, "Wowwww."

Monica gave Paula a hug, acknowledged her jitters and began the interview. The first questions were simple: What year did you go to prison? How many other women were with you on death row? And so were the answers. But as she settled in, Paula took command of the room. The interview ended; she began narrating her own story.

Paula talked about her original public defender, of whom she held a dim view. They spoke only three times — at an introduction, the time he advised her to plead guilty and at her final hearing. She said he had told her if she pleaded guilty she "wouldn't receive a death penalty."

She spoke of her rugged childhood, of her father's abuse and her mother's alcoholism. She spoke of the beatings with the extension cords and in the woods. She said her home life pushed her into the streets, into drugs, burglaries and shoplifting. It influenced her in her crime, she said. But, twice, she noted, "I'm not making that as an excuse ..."

She spoke of the shock of her death sentence, the tedium of her years in prison, its dehumanizing effects and how she was determined not to become institutionalized like other prisoners.

In some ways, Paula seemed bitter. She complained about bad press coverage and about being dubbed the "ringleader" in the killing of Ruth Pelke. She ground away at her favorite ax — her refusal to turn on her co-defendants and the death sentence she alone faced.

In other ways, Paula seemed enlightened. She understood the judge was "doing his job" in sentencing her to death. In prison, she came to believe she deserved to die. She was grateful to Julie Stout at Rockville for showing her "how to be a woman." On the outside, she was glad to have a job. She understood — after reading the case files of Monica's clients — why people wanted to write off criminals, but she urged the students to know the whole story before judging someone. She was grateful for Monica's acceptance and Bill Pelke's compassion. She felt "blessed" to have met "the man of my dreams," who loved her despite her past.

To Garcia, the warmth of this person she'd previously known only as a scholarly subject was mesmerizing: "She just really seemed to have this peaceful presence."

Garcia also was struck, in the weeks that followed, by Paula's answer to the key question posed by the course: Are you in favor of the death penalty? Paula offered an unequivocal no. She did not favor executions. But not for the reasons you might think.

"If you really want to think about punishment," Paula told the class, "it's much harder to have to live in prison every day and think about what you did than it is to be executed."

By the end, some of the students were in tears. One prefaced a question by congratulating Paula "on her success." When Paula was done, the students applauded. Once scorned and banished to death, Paula was now being cheered. "It was clear," said Ashley Kincaid, the graduate who made the audio recording, "this wasn't the murderer they locked up 30 years ago."

Garcia asked her students to write weekly about their views of capital punishment. In advance of Paula's visit, most were in favor. After her visit, they were universally against.

"Her visit," Garcia said, "taught my class more about the power of forgiveness and redemption and rehabilitation than any book or any class or any professor ever could."

Once the poster child for violent youths, Paula had morphed into a living, breathing argument against the death penalty. A few weeks later, she would make a similar appearance before a class at Butler University. A friend who saw it left in tears, awed by how far Paula had come.

—

This was the great paradox of Paula's new life.

In some venues — at work, in front of college students — she appeared to have everything figured out, appeared to be far ahead of the curve for ex-offenders returning to society.

In other venues — among the community of ex-offenders, with the men she'd been intimate with, with her mentor and parole officer who'd served as guides — her flaws were much more visible.

The paradox could be attributable to perspective.

The people who saw the well-adapted Paula tended to be a mostly white crowd of activists, clergy and lawyers who were in the business of helping fix the broken. To a certain degree, they were vested in her success, and they wanted it.

The people who saw the more flawed version of Paula tended to be a mostly black crowd of people who'd served time in prison. They wanted to see Paula succeed, but having been to the hell where she'd gone, they more easily recognized the struggle.

Most people lead dual lives — one person at work, another at home. There's also the gravitational pull that leads people to associate and be more transparent with people from their own racial group. Yet some of Paula's friends, such as Ormeshia Linton, described Paula as having a façade, not for deception but to navigate a complicated life.

In her remarks at IUPUI, Paula acknowledged the complications. She said her greatest fear, upon leaving prison, "was dealing with my mother." She loved her mother, she told the students, but they had "a lot of issues."

Gloria Reese, who still lives in Hammond, declined repeated requests from IndyStar to discuss her role in Paula's life. At one point, she dismissed the idea of answering questions about things in the past. At another, she said simply, "Write whatever you want."

Several people — most pointedly, LeShon and Meshia — pointed to a crucial point in Paula's relationship with her mother: their falling out in the spring of 2015.

As Mother's Day approached, Paula had begun asking Gloria if she and LeShon could drive to Hammond and go to church with her, maybe even take her out to dinner. It was another attempt at family building. Gloria thought it was a bad idea. She didn't care for the fact that Paula and LeShon were still living together without being married. "Let me talk to my pastor first," she'd said.

Rejected again by her mother, Paula called LeShon to relay what Gloria had said. She was heartbroken. She didn't buy the notion that living with LeShon was her mother's real concern. "What it is," she told LeShon, "is that my mother doesn't want me to come down there to her church because of my past. That's in the past, and I'm not that person anymore, but my own mother won't let the past go."

Paula called her mother back two weeks later, making one last offer of a visit. This time, according to LeShon, Gloria cursed at her. LeShon wanted to leave work to console Paula, but she held him off. "No, Daddy," she said. "I'm going to be all right. I'm not going to mess with my mom. I'm done."

But Paula wasn't done. When the day arrived, she phoned Gloria to wish her a happy Mother's Day. But the call was a reminder of the gulf between them. Four days later, on May 14, Paula faced another grim reminder: the 30th anniversary of Ruth Pelke's murder.

—

Paula showed no outward signs of turmoil a week later when she poked her head into Monica Foster's office and asked, hopefully: Could everyone knock off work early today?

It was the Friday before Memorial Day. There were barbecues and Indy 500 parties to prepare for. And Foster was known to grant such pre-holiday requests. This time, though, Monica sensed a conspiracy. "Did the others send you in here because they know I can't say no to you?"

Paula's eyes grew large. No, she said sheepishly. There was no conspiracy. She just thought everyone might like an early start on the weekend. Foster put up no resistance.

Yes, you can leave early, she said.

Paula bounced off down the hallway of their Chase Tower office to spread the good news. Soon, she cranked up the music. Twenty-one floors above Monument Circle, they jammed to "Uptown Funk." When Foster — who was older and whiter — joined in the dancing, Paula was dumbfounded.

"I didn't know you knew this song," she said.

Basking in Paula's surprise, Foster boasted, "I know a lot of things you don't know."

People in the office had grown familiar with Paula's antics. By this time, she had not only become the face of the office, but its heart and soul. For Foster, the revelry of that Friday was a signpost of how far she had traveled with Paula. They had cried together on death row; now they were dancing in their high-rise office. There was certainly nothing to indicate how the weekend would end.

—

Paula went home to LeShon that night and, instead of her usual downloading, launched into a tirade. What prompted it isn't clear. But she remained upset the rest of the night. When LeShon tried his normal approach of smoothing things over the next day, it didn't work. Things grew more heated and spilled over outside the apartment. As other people looked on, Paula yelled and cursed at LeShon, belittling him in front of strangers. Her words cut deeply.

For LeShon, it finally had become too much. In a moment of anger, he collected some empty boxes for her; it was time for Paula to go. She looked at the boxes and simply said: "I don't know why you did that. I don't need that."

Paula's tone grew colder. By Sunday, she didn't appear hurt. She was more callous than that, as if she no longer cared.

LeShon told her: "I can't do this anymore."

He left the apartment and went fishing with his nephew. For good measure, he blocked calls from Paula on his phone. LeShon knew the struggles Paula faced. He considered her the most amazing woman he'd ever known. But, as he told his son on the phone, he thought she was "trippin'."

With LeShon gone, Paula reached out to Ormeshia Linton. Meshia, as Paula knew her, sensed something in Paula's voice. She asked Paula to come have lunch at the north-side Dairy Queen where she worked. Ever lost, Paula drove past the store and phoned for directions, dangerously crossing lanes of traffic when she got close.

Meshia brought Paula some food, and they began to talk. She always thought Paula was made of steel. But now Paula's shoulders slumped. Tears formed in her eyes. She looked defeated.

"What's wrong?" Meshia asked.

"Friend," Paula replied, "I can't take this no more."

"Take what?"

"I can't do it anymore. The pain inside … I can't deal with it anymore."

Paula's tears flowed now. Meshia was alarmed. She feared Paula might be ready to do something that would send her back to jail.

"I know you're not ready to go back inside."

"No, friend," Paula said. "I'm just going to end it all."

Meshia knew Paula well enough to take her seriously. What she said she was going to do, she usually did. She had never heard Paula talk like this. She didn't want to leave her alone.

"I've got that extra room," Meshia said. "Why don't you come over with me for a few days and let's just think about some stuff?"

Paula agreed, and Meshia took off the rest of the day from work. She went home and changed clothes, and the two of them went out for margaritas at a Mexican restaurant. They ended the night talking on Meshia's patio. The next day was Memorial Day. They would have a barbecue after Meshia got home from work.

The next morning, Paula called Meshia at Dairy Queen to ask her what supplies they needed for the barbecue. When Meshia came home, they went to a grocery store for some side items. As grim as Paula had been on Sunday, the holiday was looking festive. Paula even mentioned that her sister, Rhonda, might stop by.

On the patio, their barbecue conversation took some strange turns. The discussion turned to Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who suffered a heart attack and sank into a vegetative state 10 years earlier. Schiavo remained in such a condition for years — until her husband won a court ruling that allowed her to die. Paula made it clear: If something happened to her, she didn't want to linger like that.

"I want to go with dignity," she said.

It was an unlikely topic, but Meshia thought nothing about it.

Paula asked Meshia if she knew another Rockville alumna, Melissa Marble. No, Meshia said. Paula was adamant that her two friends meet.

They spoke of an upcoming Rockville reunion, where prison alumnae were planning to go camping. They agreed that Meshia's husband and LeShon should come along to go fishing. As bad as the spat with LeShon had been, Paula talked now as if it would blow over.

Soon, Rhonda arrived. She was heading home to Gary after a weekend in Kentucky. As children, she and Paula clung to each other when it was scary to be in their home. They'd kept their ties during Paula's decades in prison. And when Paula was released, they'd spoken by phone as many as five times a day. Rhonda didn't have Paula's interest in mending fences with their mother, but she loved Paula. And when they saw each other at the Memorial Day cookout, Paula gave Rhonda a hug and a kiss and told her how beautiful she was. Rhonda felt the same about Paula. "She was beautiful. She was glowing." They visited for about an hour before saying a final goodbye.

When the cookout ended, Paula told Meshia she wanted to go shopping at Rainbow, a women's clothing store. Meshia was tired. She told Paula the only clothing store open so late on Memorial Day would be Wal-Mart, but they could go.

Paula stepped aside and called Melissa Marble, whom she'd been peppering with phone calls that afternoon. Marble still had family around for her own cookout. She'd put off Paula's repeated calls but realized it was pointless to resist. When she finally took her call, the message seemed less than urgent.

"I just wanted to tell you I love you," Paula said, "and I'm on my way to Wal-Mart." The conversation made little sense. Until the next day.

—

Paula was never a Wal-Mart fan; it was too big and too crowded for her. But for some reason, at the end of the holiday weekend, Paula needed an entirely new outfit. She purchased a pair of gray Capri pants, a black-and-gray blouse, slip-on sandals, a bra and panties.

In the checkout line, Paula whipped out her debit card. She paid without hesitation. She didn't freeze at the touch screen. The technology of the checkout line once stymied her. No more. Soon, they headed home.

Back at Meshia's, Paula asked for writing paper. Meshia gave her a couple of sheets, but Paula asked for more. She took the paper out to the table on the patio, where she sometimes sat and smoked. But before long, Paula came back in and said she was heading out. It was well after dark. Paula hated driving at night. But she was leaving.

—

She wound up going back to Michael Johnson.

The two of them hadn't spoken in months. In that time, Michael, 49, had graduated from IUPUI and moved in with his aunt on the north side. He worked nights at a local hospital as a certified nursing assistant. Like Paula, he was an ex-offender who seemed to be moving on. And, technically, he was still married.

Paula had phoned Michael over the weekend, about the time of her fallout with LeShon. Now she wanted to get together. Knowing her problems with directions, Michael agreed to meet her at a pizza shop and lead her back to his house, a few blocks east of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

As Michael told IndyStar, they arrived around 10 p.m. At his aunt's home, they talked about the house and its décor, about Michael's schooling and his graduation and about Paula's ongoing troubles with her mother. Soon, though, they began kissing. Things advanced quickly from there.

In the afterglow, their pillow talk was casual. The Paula he knew from a year earlier was someone who had always been intense, almost aggressive in her manner. On this night, Michael saw none of that. To him, she was as calm as he'd ever seen her. He told her he hadn't been everything she'd needed him to be. And she seemed to accept it.

Paula stayed with Michael for more than two hours, until he had to leave for his shift at the hospital. To help her find her way, Michael said, he led Paula out of the neighborhood to 30th and Meridian streets. When he last saw her, just after midnight, she sat at a red light, lighting a cigarette.

Paula phoned Meshia, letting her know she'd be back in a few minutes and that she'd need her to unlock the door. When Paula arrived, Meshia got up and let Paula in the house. What she said was oddly blunt: "I wasn't with LeShon."

Meshia was no longer inclined to pry into Paula's love life. She had done so months ago, with concerns about Michael, and it had put a strain on their friendship. This time, Meshia just went back to bed.

Paula went back to her writing paper, penning a letter to Michael, one of the four she would write.

"I needed closure with you. That's why I saw you tonight. No one would understand you were my first true love and I gave you so much of myself," she began. She said she wished she could be as strong as Michael. "There was a time I had no one and I am so happy we made peace in the end."

She put Michael's letter and the three others on the stove.

At 3:05 a.m., Paula added to her correspondence, with a text message to Michael:

"Thank you for tonight it was the best ever I wrote you a letter. Get it from Mesha. She will call you. It was our last time together. I really am leaving. But I wanted you to know I loved you first. You werey heart no one could replace it. I'm so proud of you and what you have done for yourself. I will always hold you close to my heart and you will always be my special man. Just be happy that I can find some peace finally. I love you"

Michael looked at the text. Later, he would say, he assumed Paula meant that she was leaving Indianapolis. At 3:46 a.m., he responded with a text of his own: "Where are you going?"

No response ever came.

—

Meshia rose about 6 the next morning, May 26, 2015. Walking through her house, she noticed that the room where Paula had been staying was empty. The powerful smell of Paula's perfume, a mixture of scents, lingered. But the bed looked as if it hadn't been slept in. And Paula was nowhere to be seen. Wherever she was, she was wearing her new outfit from Wal-Mart. Tags from the clothes were scattered atop the covers.

It was the Tuesday after Memorial Day and far too early for Paula to be at work. Meshia called her mobile phone.

No answer.

Paula was always letting her phone run out of charge, so Meshia went back to bed. A few minutes later, she awoke to the sound of her husband's voice. Tony was calling out to her.

"Meshia, Meshia."

Drowsily, she ignored him. And Tony called again, "Meshia, Meshia." Tony worked nights, and it was unusual for him to make so much noise in the morning. She got up to see what was going on.

In the kitchen, she found Tony holding three envelopes and a piece of paper; he'd picked them up off the stove.

The envelopes had names on them — one for Rhonda, one for LeShon and one for Michael. The paper was a letter with a word at the top that indicated it was for Meshia. It was labeled "Friend."

Meshia couldn't read it. Immediately, she panicked. She had to find Paula.

Written on the envelopes for Michael and LeShon were their phone numbers. Meshia called them both. Michael said he'd seen Paula for a couple of hours the night before, but not since. LeShon said he hadn't seen her at all, and she wasn't answering his calls.

Meshia called Paula's sister, Rhonda, who'd come by the barbecue the day before. She had heard nothing.

With no other options, Meshia decided to read Paula's letter. It was what she feared. Paula intended to end her life. She said they would find her at the dream house.

Meshia knew the house that Paula and LeShon had been looking at. It was on the northwest side. She went there, but there was no sign of Paula. She went back a couple of times that morning. Nothing.

She asked LeShon to go to places that had been special to them. He tried Eagle Creek. He tried other spots.

No Paula.

LeShon didn't think to check the place, not far from his apartment, that was just one of a hundred places they'd been, that would seem nothing special to most people, but that, in the end, somehow mattered to Paula.

—

Earlier that morning, Paula pulled her black Toyota Corolla up to ITT Technical Institute and parked under a row of ash trees.

Situated across I-465 from The Pyramids, the institute is just another nondescript building in a commercial area on the northwest side — to passers-by, eminently forgettable.

To Paula, it meant a little more. She'd helped LeShon plant flowers in front of a nearby medical office. She'd ridden with him in the parking lot on the back of a motorcycle he kept in an equipment shed there. In that sense, it was a place of good memories. And as she drove around in the darkness in those early morning hours, it was the place Paula chose for her final stop.

In the pre-dawn gloom, it was a lonely place. Dark buildings. Empty parking lot. Sickly yellow security lights. All of it made lonelier by the noise of cars whizzing by on the interstate — a world moving swiftly, oblivious to the solitary figure sitting in the shadows.

In the back of her darkened car, a row of teddy bears sat strapped into the seat. They were her only remaining companions. The only witnesses to what would come next.

This was the day Paula had foreseen decades before when she was just 17 and far too young to be so melancholy. The judge who had sentenced her to death had died suddenly in a car crash. In the aftermath, she'd written a friend, saying: "We are all on death row … we all have a date that is already planned & the way it will happen."

This was her day. This is how it would happen.

Sitting in the car, Paula pulled out a digital voice recorder. Where she acquired it isn't clear. But she had secured it for this moment, tucked it away for her final thoughts. She turned it on and introduced herself. She recorded the date and the time. And she began her address "to all of the people that I love."

"This pain that I feel every day; I walk around. I'm so miserable inside. I can't deal with this reality. This is a reality that's too much for me to handle. It's best that I go … I must have peace; peace of mind, peace in my heart."

She spoke lovingly to her sister, Rhonda, to Monica and Bob, and to Meshia. She thanked Michael for his apology, even calling him "a good man," despite breaking her heart. She drenched LeShon in love for making her feel beautiful. She admitted she hadn't appreciated everything he'd done. She apologized for hurting him.

Juxtaposed against all this love, she took a moment to savage just one person — her mother. "You cut me off. You judged me. You didn't want me at your church. You hurt me about the man I love."

It was bitter and full of venom, and yet Paula couldn't help making one last plea for her mother's grace. "I still love you. I hope you forgive me."

Before closing, Paula took a moment to spell out exactly what she wanted for her arrangements. "At my funeral I wanted to be cremated. I don't want to be buried in the ground. I told LeShon in a letter that I wrote him. I want him to play my favorite music. And those red flowers that he showed me when I fell in love with him — I want those there in plants. I do not want any flower arrangements. I want my service to be happy, quiet and only for those who I cared about to be invited. I want to wear a black dress, that skirt outfit my sister just gave me. It was beautiful. I don't want people crying and having a lot of regrets feeling like they could have did more. There was nothing anybody could do. It's time."

She put down the voice recorder and picked up the other item she'd brought for this moment — a loaded .38-caliber handgun.

Like the recorder, the gun's origin is unclear. As an ex-felon, it would have been illegal for Paula to buy one from a store. But then getting a gun in Indianapolis — illegally or otherwise — has never been hard. Some speculated she bought it on the street, maybe during one of her daily walks among the characters near the Ohio Street bus stop. Some speculated a friend must have given it to her. A police trace would turn up nothing on its origin.

Wherever the gun came from, Paula had it as she stepped out of the car and closed the door. She walked a few steps over to one of the ash trees. She sat on the grass and leaned against its trunk.

The tree was diseased, its upper branches devoid of leaves. But where she sat, there were flowers in bloom. There were singing birds. The breeze was warm. Finally, she'd found a peaceful place.

—

A short time later, in the dawn's early light, the first worker to arrive at the ITT campus noticed a parked car out front. She also noticed a person sitting against a tree. Maybe someone had pulled over to sleep one off?

The campus manager arrived next. He walked over to investigate. As he approached, he noticed the person's hair. It was blowing in the breeze. But the person wasn't moving.

He saw a gun in her lap.

He drew closer, and it was clear.

The person wasn't sleeping. She was dead.

—

After their fruitless search, LeShon and Meshia returned to his apartment and hoped for some word about Paula. When the phone rang, it wasn't the word they were hoping for. It was the call they'd feared. It was a detective from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.

They'd found Paula.

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At the Rockville Correctional Facility, an inmate watching television in a rec room saw the news first — words crawling across the screen. Nearby, a guard saw them, too, and phoned the office of Superintendent Julie Stout.

Nearly two years before, Stout had been the last person at Rockville to wave goodbye to Paula Cooper. Since then, Paula had checked in regularly to let her know of her progress, like a kid phoning home.

Paula had called when she landed a job, when she somehow managed to get her driver's license, when she was going on a trip to a casino. Everything had sounded so good, Stout wanted Paula to come and speak to the inmates. Hers would have been a powerful message: If Paula Cooper could make it outside, anyone could.

Now, though, it appeared Paula hadn't made it. As Stout scoured the web for confirmation of the news, the phone rang at her desk. It was someone who had been close to Paula, someone who knew Paula would want Stout to know the latest. But this report made Stout sick to her stomach.

"Paula was our success story," Stout said. "She had done everything the right way."

On a runway in Minneapolis, the news came to Monica Foster as she sat on a plane awaiting takeoff. Her phone sprang to life with an ominous message: "911 call the office immediately."

Foster called in and made the connection; she just didn't believe it. Four days earlier, she had been singing and dancing with Paula.

"There's no way she killed herself," she said.

Back in Indianapolis, news outlets were piecing together the few details of Paula's death — from an apparent suicide. They backfilled their reports with highlights from Paula's past. Her infamous crime, her death sentence, the campaign to save her life, the forgiveness of an unlikely friend, the pope's intervention, the reprieve.

Scarce in the reports were any particulars about Paula's life beyond the old highlights. Almost nothing about her world in the two years since she'd left prison. Paula had wanted to lie low and stay out of sight; she'd done that very well.

Easier to find, however, were the volcanoes of perspective from people who'd never met Paula, but who seized on the irony of a woman who had escaped a death sentence only to kill herself. Quickly, it coagulated into a witch's brew of bitterness in places such as the comments section of IndyStar.com.

"The world will not miss her," a man named Steve Bollivary wrote on IndyStar.com, "may she rot in hell for her heinous crime."

"Should have killed cooper immediately," Don Purciful wrote, "I am glad the blood of that senior saint was finally paid for."

"Good riddance," added Shelby Smitherman. "If the state had done what should have been done 27 yrs ago they could have saved tax payers alot of money."

—

It was inevitable that a substantial part of the world would remember Paula Cooper as a monster. It was a crowd that now saw her demise as justice served, as karmic retribution.

Much tinier was the colony of people who felt that the monster in Paula had died long ago, who suddenly were confronted by a tragedy they could scarcely comprehend.

Her friends couldn't see how Paula — who hated driving at night and was so directionally challenged — had found the place where she died.

They questioned how Paula acquired the gun. As an ex-felon, she was prohibited by law from buying one.

Central to many of the doubters was the view that Paula had too many things going for her to take her own life.

"If you just looked at the black ink on a white page you would say, 'Of course this is how it ended up,'" Monica Foster said. "But if you knew her, it caused you not to think of black ink on a white page. If you knew her, you really felt like she was the one. She was the one who was going to make it out alive. She was going to be the one that was going to make something of herself."

The lawyer and the skeptic in Foster had to know more about Paula's death; she arranged to speak to the detective. When she arrived at the police station, Monica found Paula's mother, Gloria Reese. It was not a warm encounter. Gloria aired grievances about things Monica had said decades earlier about her parenting. In no mood to litigate the past, Monica simply said something she knew to be true: "Gloria, I know Paula loved you."

Then they listened together to Paula's final audio recording.

The voice, Monica recognized right away, was unmistakably Paula's. And, undoubtedly, this was a message that presaged a suicide. Still, she noticed something missing in Paula's voice — any semblance of emotion. Paula had been such an ebullient character — a force of nature. Yet her last words sounded as if they were coming from a robot.

"It was like she had a bunch of boxes to check. 'Check. Check. Check,'" Monica said. "'OK, now I can go do what I got to do.' It was real matter-of-fact. It was just weird."

Monica noticed that Paula's criticism of her mother — so fierce it might have prompted some mothers to drop to their knees and beg God's forgiveness — seemed to barely register with Gloria. In fact, she didn't react to the criticism, but to Paula's desire to be cremated. That, Gloria said, wasn't going to happen.

Monica was incredulous. She asked Gloria if she had been listening to what Paula had just said on the recording.

"Yeah, I don't care," Gloria told Monica. "We don't cremate."

Gloria was the next of kin. She had custody of the remains. It was her decision. And one last time, she was going to deny Paula's request. She would take the body back to Hammond, then bury it in a cemetery on the south side of Chicago. In an unmarked grave.

Monica could do nothing about that. But her doubts about the suicide had been put to rest. She knew the detective to be one of the best in the police department. Police found the gun on Paula's lap. The recording was incontrovertible. This was a suicide all the way.

Now all Monica had to do was return to her law office, where everyone's hearts had been ripped out, and join them in pondering the bigger question.

Why?

Paula's final words made it clear she was "miserable inside" and her reality was "too much for me to handle." But that left much to interpretation. And multiple theories abounded.

There was the theory suggested by Kim Kidd, the mentor who coached Paula after prison and saw her explosive temper, that perhaps Paula took her own life to avoid blowing up and hurting someone else.

There was the theory that, after 28 years locked up, Paula was overwhelmed by the choices and the pace of the free world. Rosalind Butler, who hired Paula to flip burgers, thought Paula tried to do too much, too fast, and was undone by the pressure. Denise Jackson, her parole officer, said Paula needed a second year of state supervision. And LeShon Davidson, her fiancé, suggested Paula was overwhelmed by the world's pace and the complexity, noting that even the myriad choices on a grocery store shelf could send her into a panic attack. The abrupt return to freedom, he said, was akin to "throwing her to the wolves."

There was the theory that Paula couldn't live with the guilt of what she'd done to Ruth Pelke, who had warned Paula with her dying words, "If you kill me, you'll be sorry." Friends said the guilt never stopped eating away at Paula. Archbishop Tobin, recently elevated to a cardinal, called it "a terrible challenge" to forgive oneself. When online commenters suggested her death was karmic retribution, Tobin said sharply: "I don't buy that crap. There's a darkness that sometimes overwhelms people."

Then there was the theory Paula simply succumbed to depression. Her sister, Rhonda LaBroi, said depression had been a challenge for Paula since they were children. Michael Johnson, Paula's lover and longtime friend, said that in jail Paula had an adverse reaction to depression medication and refused further treatments that might have helped. At a more basic level, Monica Foster said Paula grew up thinking she never had any worth and never learned otherwise, saying: "I don't know how you ever quiet that voice."

As is often the case with suicide, people in Paula's orbit begin gnashing their teeth for missing the signs, for calls they didn't make and things left unsaid. But Paula had left clues all her life.

As a troubled teen, as a killer on death row, as an aging prisoner, as a free woman, she'd left them. Yet no one saw the whole picture. That's the way Paula wanted it — to keep her friends in compartments. The seed for suicide had been planted early by Paula's mother, who'd said the Cooper girls would be better off in heaven, as Rhonda had recalled in court so long ago. Paula toyed with the idea for 30 years. Eventually, she decided her mother was right. And when she came to that point, she was determined to end it.

In a letter to Michael Johnson she penned just hours before her death, Paula wrote: "I couldn't tell you because I know you would have tried to stop me."

She'd spoken to college students about the death penalty. To them, it was an academic subject. To Paula, the death penalty was much more personal. She'd been debating her own death for decades. She'd weighed the pros and cons. And she'd come down in favor.

She no longer feared death. She became her own executioner.

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Why do we care so much about the life of Paula Cooper?

During a year of reporting and writing this story, I was asked some form of that question more than once. Implied with the questions was a sense of "What else is there to say about Paula Cooper?" Others have noted that to spend a year on Paula Cooper's life is to go to some very dark places.

While much has been written about Paula — and much of it grim — it turns out that her life was much more complicated than we ever imagined. That became obvious when we learned, in the days after her death, that Paula was engaged to be married and that she was working in a law office. It was obvious, too, when we realized there were people who loved Paula deeply and suggested there was more to this woman than crime and punishment.

When Bill Pelke provided us access to 120 letters Paula had written him, many of them from death row, we began to see a three-dimensional person beyond the yellowed news clippings. She had been in the news so long she was almost a caricature, but we started to see her as raw and real, someone with a restless mind and a troubled soul.

Then there were the unanswered questions. Why on earth did she plead guilty to a capital crime? How could a liberal black judge known for his opposition to the death penalty sentence her to death? How did the cause to spare her life spread across Europe? What were the long years in prison like? Why, exactly, would she spend 28 years in prison, go free and then decide to take her own life?

The search for answers revealed some fascinating characters — Jack Crawford at the height of his prosecutorial power; Judge James C. Kimbrough as he wrestled with his conscience; Bill Pelke as he moved in and out of Paula's circle of trust; Monica Foster as she tried to understand a Paula she thought she knew; LeShon Davidson and his unconditional love.

But the most intriguing character of all was Paula. She was an abused child worth pitying and a murderer worth loathing. She cowered in fear of the executioner and longed for death to come. She had once been arrogant, angry and violent, and she had matured into a model inmate. She was impatient to build a new life, and she was determined to end it.

Beyond the characters, Paula's story is about dysfunctional families. Many people can relate to how alcohol and drugs ravage a home and put children at risk. Her story is about how the child welfare system failed her, and the perils we face for repeating the mistake.

Paula's story is also about the advent of a new kind of criminal — the brutally violent teenager. Back in 1985, it was a new phenomenon the country was just beginning to recognize. That we are now numb to it says much about how we responded.

Paula's story is about a justice system that wasn't ready for the teen crime wave. When Paula came along, Indiana law still allowed for the execution of 10-year-olds. Prosecutors checked the boxes necessary for a death penalty, but her inexperienced, part-time public defender didn't rise to the challenge. Judge Kimbrough bemoaned this from the bench, but then he lowered the boom. It took three years of anguish before the Indiana Supreme Court cleaned up the mess.

Paula's story is about the prison system's handling of a battered teenager. A psychologist said Paula was a troubled young woman with signs of depression and difficulty grasping reality. She had some counseling early on in prison. But she also spent six years in segregation — mostly cut off from the world — before turning 30. Arguments continue today over the best way to handle violent juveniles.

Beyond the broad social and policy issues, Paula Cooper's story is especially human. It's about a grievous crime and lifelong consequences. It's about fierce condemnation and amazing grace. It's about the struggle to forgive oneself and the search for redemption. Few of us commit murder, but most of us can relate to the emotional and spiritual journey that follows when we fail.

Paula's story is about anger. Hers burned within her all the days of her life. Paula was able, at times, to subdue it and achieve around it. But the anger never left. Anger was a product of her abuse, a lack of a loving home and a flawed child protective system. Most of us contain our anger; Paula could not. It raged within her to the end — until she extinguished it the only way she knew how.

While anger was one of Paula's uglier character traits, she had others. Even her friends found her to be impatient and impulsive. Some saw her as manipulative. But she was also a perfectionist. From her jobs in prison, to flipping burgers, to working in the law office, she excelled at every stage. When she struggled — with driving, with debit cards, with relating to her mother — she became frustrated. That last one — her failure to gain her mother's forgiveness — was one of the great failures of Paula's life. She forever longed for a loving family; she never quite found it. She came to believe that it was denied to her because of the greatest blemish of her life. The stain she could never remove. The murder of Ruth Pelke.

Yet other aspects of Paula's character draw us to her. Her sister described Paula as a warrior. She endured a hellish childhood and a seemingly interminable prison sentence and found considerable success on the outside. Despite the anger, her friends also recounted her sense of humor. She encouraged those around her to nurture their family ties and appreciate them. She was generous almost to a fault.

Ultimately, Paula Cooper's story is about someone who made a journey few others have completed — to death row and back. She paid her debt to society, and her taste of success made us want more for her. We wanted her redemption.

In the end, Paula just wanted peace.

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Call IndyStar reporter Robert King at (317) 444-6089. Follow him on Twitter: @RbtKing.

Jill Disis and Cathy Knapp contributed additional reporting to this story. Illustrations by Michael Campbell with animations development by Jon Dang. Additional design by Marianne Epstein.

Produced by Michael Campbell.