New book Seventy Times Seven – a terrible crime that led to forgiveness
New book Seventy Times Seven – a terrible crime that led to forgiveness
Alex Mar has written an absorbing account of a murder by a teenage girl, a death sentence, and how feelings of understanding and mercy broke through
Author Alex Mar spent five years working on her new book Seventy Times Seven.
Her non-fiction account of a grandmother’s 1985 murder in Gary, Indiana, and the teenage girl sentenced to death for it is a telling departure from the media’s fixation on outrage and retribution.
Instead, Seventy Times Seven is about mercy in extraordinary circumstances.
Paula Cooper was black and aged 15. She and her older sister, Rhonda, spent much of their youth moving between emergency shelters and foster care.
When Paula was nine and Rhonda 12, their mother decided to end it all and take her girls with her. She put them on the back seat of her car, shut the garage door and switched on the engine.
She told her girls that ending their all lives was the best thing for them.
In the end, she had a changed of heart and halted the joint suicide. Thereafter, the girls would plead with social workers and police officers to take them away.
Their mother was a heavy boozer, while their father would strip them and beat them with a cord.
Murder of Ruth Pelke
Paula was said to have turned out to be a bully at school. She was also the ringleader when she and three friends – 14, 15, 16 years old – decided to rob a Bible teacher, Ruth Peake, aged 77. It was Paula that pushed Ruth to the ground, hit her with a paperweight and stabbed her repeatedly at her home.
The girls got away with $10 and took Ruth’s Plymouth car,
‘Bible teacher, 77, murdered in her home’, was the lead story of the Gary Post-Tribune.
Lake County prosecutor, Jack Crawford, and his team pushed for the death penalty, Indiana being a state that allowed the execution of someone under 18. The minimum age allowed in Indiana was 10 years old.
Paula’s friends – Karen, April and Denise – each got lengthy prison sentences.
When it was Paula’s turn to be sentenced, her parents were not present in court. The deputy prosecutor told the court that the people of Indiana ‘shall not be bullied into believing that retribution is evil’.
The judge said he was concerned about Paula’s background, but added that she committed the murder. Paula’s grandfather, in tears, cried from the gallery, ‘My grandbaby! My grandbaby!’
The sentence was death.
Bill Pelke’s story
So far, so routine. Ruth Pelke’s family had got the justice, and the prosecution got the ‘retribution’ they wanted.
It is at this point, halfway through the book, that Seventy Times Seven veers off into surprising territory.
It was Ruth’s grandson, Bill Pelke, who broke ranks with his grieving family. While sitting in the cab of the crane he operated, Bill had something of an tearful epiphany.
In court he had wanted the maximum penalty for the loss of his beloved grandmother. But now he wondered if Bible-teaching Ruth would have wanted Paula to be executed.
He wondered about Jesus’s emphasis on forgiveness. Did Paula know what she was doing? Bill, a Vietnam vet, decided to write to the girl, then 17, tell her about his grandmother, about God’s forgiveness. He said he wanted to help her, he had forgiven her. He wrote almost entirely in capital letters. He wonders if she will write back He realised he did want to see her die.
His changed of heart put him at odds with many members of his family. His former partner would call him ‘nuts’.
I found this to be a hugely moving account. The correspondence between Bill and Paula – he will write to her a couple of hundred times – is affecting. It also highlights much that is wrong with the death penalty – the focus on retribution, political grandstanding, the vulnerability of an abused child from a deprived background.
It is written with calm, the author letting the story tell itself. She also got close to Bill and others involved here, so there is no need for fanciful speculation.
Seventy Times Seven – a reference to the number of times Jesus told Peter he should offer forgiveness – does what the best non-fiction crime writing can do. It takes us beyond the headlines and the theatrics of the trial. Here we get a glimpse of Paula and Bill’s humanity. Their unlikely bond has unforeseen and heartening consequences.
It’s a book that is likely to stay in the reader’s thoughts for a while.
The Guardian previewed the book here
Alex Mar’s author site is here
We just marked the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I saw there is a new book about the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which offers and interesting angle. Deanne Stillman’s American Confidential: Uncovering the Bizarre Relationship Between Lee Harvey Oswald and his Mother does what is says on the tin. It looks at how mum Marguerite and Lee formed a ‘conspiracy of one’, the mother feeding her son fantasies of meeting rich people, pursuing fame and recognition. This strikes me as a convincing bit of background to Oswald. Years ago I read conspiracy-theory books on the assassination by authors such as Anthony Summers, and was suitably agog – and confused – by the multiplicity of suspects and murderous agendas. However, it was Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale that hit me between the eyes, offering a compelling profile of a pathetic fame-seeker in Oswald. He’d had his moment in the media flashbulb when he defected to Russia and married a Russian, which was a newsworthy thing to do during the Cold War. On return to the US, he slid again into obscurity, beating his wife, drifting. Then, he discovered the president would be passing beneath his window at the book depository in Dallas where he was working, presenting the wannabe – who had apparently already tried to assassinate a major-general – with another chance to be somebody. There was no magic bullet, Oliver Stone’s JFK was entertaining fiction. A nonentity wife-beater, with dreams of fame, or infamy, brought down the most powerful man in the world.
I’ll be appearing on a panel at next April’s Crime Writers’ Association Conference in Brighton. The panel is about how non-fiction crime authors research their books, with tips on good sources to use. It’s a great three-day event, with many top crime authors in attendance and a convivial atmosphere. Full details are here.