Memphis Bicentennial: Here are 200 Bluff City historical facts

Memphis — the city established on the bluffs of the Mississippi River and named after an ancient capital on the Nile delta — turns 200 this year.

In recognition of this bicentennial, here are 200 markers along the road of history that led to the present day.

The events cited range from the comic to the tragic, from the risible to the world-shaking, from the all-but-forgotten to the never-to-be-forgotten. But they barely scratch the surface of the rich, silty soil that enabled Memphis to become "the Hardwood Capital of America," to cite just one of the city's nicknames.

In other words, this is not a definitive Memphis timeline. With a few exceptions, it ignores music and sports (which will be celebrated by this newspaper later in the year with their own bicentennial tributes). You will have complaints about omissions. But we hope you will enjoy or appreciate the inclusions.

So, here it is — a Memphis 200 for a Bluff City Bicentennial.

1. May 22, 1819: Modern Memphis is founded by planter and judge John Overton, Revolutionary War officer James Winchester and future president Andrew Jackson, a year after the federal government purchased the territory from the Chickasaw Nation in negotiations partly led by Jackson. Planned as a grid of streets along the river, the city is named for a former great river town, the ancient capital of Egypt.

2. Progress was slow. "From its founding in 1819 until about 1840, Memphis was a primitive and pestilential little mudhole striving to survive as a town." — John E. Harkins, "Metropolis of the American Nile," 1982.

3. The city's founding came 270 years after the first Memphis-area encounter between American Indians and Europeans, led by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. Both France and Spain would build forts on the "Chickasaw bluffs" in the 18th century.

4. Memphis' first grand jury indictment arrives in 1820, when Patrick Meagher is charged with two counts of assault and battery after indulging in too much "fire water" and brawling with bartenders. His fine: $2.

5. 1826: Encouraged by Memphis Mayor Marcus Winchester, Davy Crockett is elected to the U.S House of Representatives, representing Tennessee's 9th Congressional District — the seat (with very different boundaries) later held by Harold Ford and Steve Cohen.

6. Memphis' oldest noise ordinance, from 1827, prohibits "whooping, halloo-ing and swearing loudly," punishable by a $5 fine — or $10, if the offense occurs on a Sunday.

7. In Memphis, traffic problems predate automobiles: An 1837 law makes driving a horse-drawn conveyance "faster than a trot" punishable by a $10 fine.

8. April 21, 1841: Henry Van Pelt publishes the first issue of The Appeal. The paper later merges or buys out the Monitor, the Western Mercury and the Avalanche; in 1894, it is renamed The Commercial Appeal.

9. 1848: Free public school opens.

10. 1851: Nathan Bedford Forrest moves to Memphis and opens a slave trading company, one of a dozen in the city during the decade.

11. March 15, 1851: Memphians pay an astronomical $20 per ticket to see Jenny Lind, the so-called "Swedish Nightingale," perform at Odd Fellows Hall. Her manager for the tour: P.T. Barnum.

12. 1852: Construction of St. Peter's Catholic Church begins.

13. 1853: The first synagogue in Tennessee, B'nai Israel, is established by Jewish German immigrants. In 1943 it adopts its current name: Temple Israel.

14. July 15, 1853: Elmwood Cemetery opens for business, so to speak, when the late Mrs. R.B. Berry is laid to rest as its first occupant. The 75,000 interred since then have included slaves, suffragists, yellow fever victims and author Shelby Foote.

15. "May God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth.” — Mark Twain, in an 1858 letter to his sister, after visiting the Memphis hospital where his brother Henry was taken after a steamboat explosion that took "hundreds of lives."

16. June 6, 1862: The Mississippi River churns as Union gunboats defeat Confederate naval forces at the first Battle of Memphis.

17. Also June 6, 1862: To avoid "Yankee" takeover, the presses and plates of the pro-Confederacy newspaper, The Appeal, are loaded into a boxcar and moved to Grenada, Mississippi, where the newspaper resumes publication. Keeping one step ahead of Union confiscators, The Appeal later journeys to Jackson, Mississippi; Meridian, Mississippi; Atlanta; Montgomery, Alabama; and Columbus, Georgia.

18. Aug. 21, 1864: Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops raid the Union-occupied city but ultimately withdraw; this incursion becomes known as the second Battle of Memphis.

19. Bright kid, promising future: In 1865, 18-year-old Thomas Edison works as a telegraph operator in Memphis.

20. April 27, 1865: The greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history occurs on the Mississippi River at Memphis when the boilers of the overloaded Sultana explode. Close to 1,800 of the 2,400 people aboard the 260-foot wooden steamboat are killed or drowned (about 50 more than will be lost in the sinking of the Titanic). The boat's legal capacity was 376.

21. Forty-six black people and two white people are killed when white civilians and police officers rampage through black neighborhoods for two days of mob violence, May 1-3, 1866. The event becomes known as the "Memphis Massacre."

22. 1869: The foundation stone is laid for Beale Street Baptist Church (also known as First Baptist Church — Beale Street), a congregation organized by freed slaves.

23. The city's oldest degree-granting collegiate institution, Christian Brothers University, is established in 1871 (as Christian Brothers College) by members of a Catholic congregation founded by France's St. Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, the patron saint for "teachers of youth."

24. 1875: Walter Burke Sr. opens the original Burke's Book Store at 180 N Main. Now located at 936 Cooper, the store has remained independent and Memphis-owned ever since.

25. Jan. 15, 1877, becomes known as "The Day It Rained Snakes." According to newspaper reports that inspired an investigation by Scientific American, a "torrential downpour" left behind great numbers of snakes in the area of Vance and Lauderdale. The Monthly Weather Review reported the snakes were dark brown or black and "very thick in some places, being tangled together like a mass of thread or yarn." Whether the reptiles were driven from subterranean hiding places or deposited on the Bluff City via some sort of storm-driven snakenado remains a mystery.

26. Aug. 13, 1878: Restaurant owner Kate Bionda becomes the city's first recorded victim of yellow fever, having contracted the disease from a man who had escaped a quarantined steamboat. She would be followed by close to 5,000 others by the end of the year, as the epidemic devastates the city.

27. One of the most significant figures to ever call this city home, former slave Ida B. Wells moves to Memphis in 1882 at the age of 20. A few years later, she launches her anti-lynching campaign through her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight.

28. Wells makes an international reputation: "Miss Ida B. Wells is a negress, a young lady of little more than twenty years of age, a graceful, sweet-faced, intelligent, courageous girl. She hails from Memphis, Tenn. She is not going back there just now, because the white people are anxious to hang her up by the neck in the market place, and burn the soles of her feet, and gouge her beautiful dark eyes out with red-hot irons.'' — The London Sun, 1894.

29. An estimated 50 men, women and children, are killed on March 30, 1882, when a broken lantern causes a fire aboard the steamer Golden City, as the boat is about to dock. According to a newspaper account, the "howls of a burning menagerie ... mingled with shrieks of women and children."

30. 1887: Artesian well water becomes available for the first time, establishing Memphis as a city with notably pure drinking water.

31. On Oct. 15, 1887, Grover Cleveland becomes the first president to visit Memphis while in office. Thousands lined the streets (and were infiltrated by gangs of pickpockets, according to The Commercial Appeal), but the joy gives way to shock when a prominent local citizen, Judge Henry T. Ellett, grandly introduces the 24th president of the United States and then promptly drops dead on stage. The newspaper calls it “one of the saddest incidents that ever characterized a gala occasion," and offers this recounting: "Judge Ellett was placed upon the platform, his shoes removed, and all that mortal effort and medical science could suggest applied to bring resuscitation. It was useless, his spirit had fled."

32. A Memphis community designed expressly for black residents, Orange Mound — named for the area's many Osage orange trees — begins to be developed in 1890, on former plantation property. For much of its history, the neighborhood is said to represent the largest concentration of African Americans outside of Harlem.

33. Feb. 23, 1892: "Tomboy" Alice Mitchell, 19, uses her father's razor blade to cut the throat of her former Higbee School for Young Ladies classmate, Freda Ward, 17; the sensational murder trial that follows exposes what the one newspaper calls "the Perverted Affection of One Girl for Another." Alice — who apparently had dreamed of dressing as a man and marrying Freda — is sentenced to what was then called the Western State Hospital for the Insane in Bolivar, Tennessee.

34. The city's first public library, the Cossitt Library, opens on April 12, 1893. However, a public campaign for donations is necessary to stock its shelves with books.

35. Memphis' first skyscraper, the 10-story Porter Building at 10 N. Main, is constructed in 1895.

36. A May 1901 reunion of Confederate troops ends with a parade of 15,000 veterans, according to The Commercial Appeal. "Never before in the history of Memphis were the people so enthused as they were yesterday," the newspaper reported, while also praising "the survivors of the most superb soldiery that ever bore a part in making world's history."

37. In about 1901, Natch the black bear — who over a century later would be weirdly reimagined as NBA mascot Grizz’s chief romantic rival — is put on display in Overton Park, stoking the public interest that results in the April 1906 founding of the Memphis Zoo. Natch, who lived chained to a tree, is poisoned by a bruincidal maniac in 1906; his head is removed, stuffed and put on display at the zoo, but reportedly is petted and hugged so often by the Natch-loving public that it literally falls to pieces.

38. Prohibition advocate Carrie Nation, notorious for attacking bars and taverns with her signature hatchet, makes the rounds of several Memphis saloons on Oct. 23, 1902. Although she "dashed to the floor a glass of liquor just as a thirsty person was turning it down his throat," according to The Commercial Appeal, she delivered tongue-lashings and temperance lectures instead of her so-called "hatchetations."

39. 1906: One of Memphis' most influential citizens, Robert R. Church, known as the South's first African American millionaire, becomes founding president of Solvent Savings Banks, Memphis' first "black" bank, vital to the development of black-owned business.

40. Marion Scudder Griffin in 1907 becomes the first woman to be granted a license to practice law in Tennessee; then, in 1923, she is the first woman elected to the state legislature. She practices law in Memphis for 40 years.

41. The nation's largest Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God in Christ is organized by "disfellowshipped" black Baptist preachers and formally incorporated during a 1907 meeting in Memphis. The church's founding bishop is a Memphis advocate of Holy Ghost-inspired "speaking in tongues," Charles Harrison Mason.

42. The city's first speed limit is instituted in 1910. It is 8 mph.

43. Edward Hull Crump is elected mayor of Memphis in 1909. He serves only one full term but he nevertheless essentially runs the city until the mid-1950s, as was known throughout the nation. In 1946, he appears on the cover of Time, identified as "Memphis' Boss Crump."

44. The Memphis Zoo begins to establish its reputation as the "Hippo Capital" of America with the 1914 arrival of its first hippopotamuses, Venus and Adonis. Enthusiastic parents, the proud pachyderms produce 16 calves.

45. In 1914, the LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School — which traces its origins to a movement to provide education for free black people and runaway slaves — relocates to the Walker Avenue address where it remains, now greatly expanded and known as LeMoyne-Owen College.

46. 1916: The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art opens in Overton Park.

47. "I'd rather be here/ Than anywhere I know." — W.C. Handy, 1916, "The Beale Street Blues."

48. Clarence Saunders, Part 1: A Virginia-born grocer who moved to Memphis in 1904, Saunders creates the self-service grocery store when the first Piggly Wiggly opens at 79 Jefferson Ave. on Sept. 11, 1916.

49. In December 1919, the city fire department auctions off its 37 horses to make way for motorized vehicles. The horses, according to newspaper accounts, have full names: Among the veteran hay-burners to find buyers are Charlie Fitz, Mike Haggerty and Mike Fitzmorris.

50. In 1923, The Commercial Appeal is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service for "the publication of cartoons and the handling of news in reference to the operations of the Ku Klux Klan.'' Leading the charge in the newspaper's battles with the Klan are editor C.P.J. Mooney and cartoonist J.P. Alley.

51. May 8, 1925: Immortalized as "a very worthy Negro" on an obelisk in the park that bears his name, 39-year-old levee worker Tom Lee — who could not swim — makes four trips in his small skiff, the Zev, to rescue 32 of the 72 people in danger of drowning in the swift currents of the Mississippi after the 1925 sinking of the M.E. Norman, a steamboat. Lee's effort remains Memphis' most famous act of heroism.

52. "The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel," journalist David Cohn wrote in 1935. And that lobby has been at 149 Union Avenue since Sept. 1, 1925, when "The South's Grand Hotel" reopened at its second and still current location.

53. Founded in Clarksville in 1848 as the Masonic University of Tennessee, the school that in 1984 would become known as Rhodes College relocates to Memphis in 1925.

54. Operating out of a Midtown house on Poplar Avenue, infamous black market baby trafficker Georgia Tann makes millions selling thousands of infants from the 1920s until her death in 1950, which preceded the public revelation of her scam. Tann used pressure tactics and legal threats to dupe single mothers into giving up their babies, which she sold to wealthy or desperate couples through her "adoption" agency.

55. Billed as one of the largest stores in the U.S., the Crosstown neighborhood Sears-Roebuck opens on Aug. 27, 1927, attracting a crowd of 2,000 before its art-deco doors are even unlocked. Closed and empty by 1993, the gargantuan building is re-imagined and redeveloped as the Crosstown Concourse "vertical village" of apartments and businesses, which has its grand opening Aug. 19, 2017.

56. 1927: Lloyd T. Binford is appointed head of the Memphis Censor Board; he reigns as America's most inflexible, eccentric and subjective censor until 1955, banning movies with Charlie Chaplin ("a London guttersnipe") and Ingrid Bergman (due to her "notorious adultery"), and penning the types of condemnations that transformed the targets of his ire into instant must-sees. Banning David O. Selznick's "Duel in the Sun" in 1947, Binford wrote: "It is sadism at its deepest level. It is the fleshpots of Pharaoh, modernized and filled to overflowing. It is a barbaric symphony of passion and hatred, spilling from a blood-tinted screen. It is mental and physical putrefaction."

57. Aviator Charles Lindbergh, 25, visits Memphis in October 1927, some five months after his solo flight across the Atlantic makes him one of the world's most celebrated men. Reports The Commercial Appeal: "A tousle-haired boy, slender and shy, weighted down with plaudits of nations and tired of it all, captured the heart of Memphis yesterday with a simple smile as his only weapon."

58. Welcome Wagon, a company that attempts to connect new homeowners with local stores and businesses, is launched by Memphis entrepreneur Thomas Briggs in 1928. Now a "direct marketing" company based in Coral Springs, Florida, Welcome Wagon in the days before TV and social media employed gift basket-bearing "hostesses" who made home visits.

59. "I left Memphis to spread the news/ Memphis women don't wear no shoes" — Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones Part 2," 1928.

60. Filmed in and around Memphis in 1928, King Vidor's classic "Hallelujah" — the story of a sharecropper and a seductress — is one of the first major-studio films with an all-black cast. Released by MGM in 1929, the movie earned Vidor a Best Director Oscar nomination.

61. Clarence Saunders, Part 2: Now known as the Memphis Pink Palace Museum and Planetarium (or "Pink Palace," for short), the "Memphis Museum of Natural History and Industrial Arts" opened in 1930 in a Georgia pink marble mansion on Central Avenue that Saunders built in the 1920s. The city acquired the property after Saunders went bankrupt.

62. Insurance statistician Frederick L. Hoffman on March 20, 1930, issues a report declaring Memphis the murder capital of America, based on the 1929 homicide rate. Memphians object, pointing out that Chicago, for example, had hosted the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" that same year.

63. 1932: Duck decoys placed in the ornate Italian marble fountain of The Peabody prove so popular that the hotel institutes a tradition of live ducks in the lobby. Edward D. Pembroke becomes "duckmaster" in 1940 and keeps the job until 1991, ensuring that the chatty mallards — who waddle the elevator-to-fountain red carpet twice daily — remain Memphis' most popular runway models.

64. The bootlegging and kidnapping gangster career of former Central High School student George "Machine Gun" Kelly comes to an end when the FBI's first Public Enemy No. 1 is arrested on Sept. 26, 1933, at 1408 Rayner. Also arrested: Kelly's "Titian-tressed" (to quote The Commercial Appeal) wife, Kathryn.

65. Ice Ice Baby: According to "Memphis: A Folk History," by Linton Weeks, the "first wedding between two people encased in ice'' occurs during the 1935 Cotton Carnival when a pair of circus performers — Freezo, the Human Polar Bear, and Ginger, the Guillotine Girl — are sealed in cakes of ice with microphones that allow them to broadcast "I-I-I d-d-d-do."

66. A globe-trotting Indiana Jones of the 1920s and '30s whose adventures spellbound millions of newspaper readers, Memphian Richard Halliburton (namesake of Halliburton Tower on the Rhodes College campus) disappears in 1939 while attempting to cross the Pacific Ocean in a Chinese junk.

67. 1934: Written by local political leader George Washington Lee, "Beale Street: Where the Blues Began" becomes the first book by a black author to be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

68. 1937: The Goldsmith's department store on Main Street becomes one of the first major Memphis stores to adopt "all-the-year-round air-conditioning," in the form of an old-school refrigeration system installed by an ice company.

69. 1939: Memphis Light, Gas and Water is born after the city purchases a private electrical system, to augment its 37-years-earlier purchase of a private water delivery system.

70. 1940: Struggling entertainer Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz — known professionally as Danny Thomas — enters a church in Detroit, falls to his knees, and prays "specifically" to St. Jude Thaddeus. "If he was supposed to be the saint of the hopeless, that certainly included me," Thomas wrote in his autobiography. "I blurted out those words, 'Help me to find my way in life, and I'll build you a shrine.'" Twenty-two years later, Thomas — by then a top TV and nightclub star — founds St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, which becomes the world's leading institute in the battle against childhood cancer.

71. The notorious "Goat Gland Doctor," John Romulus Brinkley, earns a fortune and international fame by transplanting the testicular glands of goats into the testicule sacs of men, to restore the recipient's "potency." Buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Brinkley lives much of his life in Memphis, but performs most of his quackery in Kansas; he is bankrupted by lawsuits a few years before his 1941 death.

72. Named by pilot Robert K. Morgan for his Memphis sweetheart, Margaret Polk, the Memphis Belle — a B17 "Flying Fortress" bomber — completes 25 combat missions from 1942 to 1943, becoming one of the most celebrated airplanes of World War II.

73. WDIA AM-1070 begins broadcasting on June 7, 1947. After the success of Nat D. Williams' "Tan Town Jubilee" show aimed at black listeners in 1948, WDIA abandons country and pop and switches entirely to programming aimed at black audiences, hosted by black on-air personalities. It soon becomes Memphis' top radio station, with a staff of disc jockeys that includes B.B. King and Rufus Thomas.

74. A decade after TV came to New York, it arrives in Memphis when WMC — then co-owned by The Commercial Appeal — signs on the air on Dec. 11, 1948. After an hour of test patterns, dedications, political proclamations and backstage tours, the "entertainment" programming begins with Santa Claus, live on the air, reading letters from kids. WHBQ-TV Channel 13 followed in 1953, then WREC-TV (now WREG) Channel 3 in 1956.

75. Memphis businessman Kemmons Wilson opens the first Holiday Inn — a single-story motor court — in August 1952, at 4925 Summer. The name is inspired by the title of the 1942 Bing Crosby movie that introduced the song "White Christmas." In 1965, the growing chain introduces a centralized reservation system, and by 1968 Wilson is operating 1,000 Holiday Inns across America. A 1972 Time magazine cover story labels Wilson "The Man with 300,000 Beds."

76. Broadcasting at "1,000 Beautiful Watts," radio station WHER AM-1430 — "The First All-Girl-Radio-Station in the World" — goes on the air in October 1955, from a South Third studio dubbed "The Doll Den," decorated with nylon stockings draped over clotheslines. The station is the creation of two of Memphis' most famed innovators: Sun founder Sam Phillips and Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson.

77. A mere satellite compared to the nuclear furnace of Sun, Cordell Jackson's Moon Records label in 1956 releases Jackson's double-sided holiday single, "Rock and Roll Christmas," backed by "Beboppers' Christmas." The latter song contains perhaps the most memorable introduction of St. Nick since Clement Moore's: "He had white fuzz all over his chin/ He came boppin' up and said, 'Give me some skin.'"

78. Reviewing Elvis' acting debut in "Love Me Tender" in 1956, an unimpressed Time magazine critic wrote: "Is it a sausage? It is certainly smooth and damp-looking, but who ever heard of a 172-pound sausage, 6 feet tall? Is it a Walt Disney goldfish? It has the same sort of big, soft beautiful eyes and curly lashes, but who ever heard of a goldfish with sideburns?"

79. Known for his black outfits, Bogart sneer and prowess with a bullwhip, movie cowboy Lash LaRue is arrested for buying and concealing stolen property — sewing machines — in connection with car thefts that occur while he is a "Wild West" performer at the 1956 Mid-South Fair. Acquitted of the charges, LaRue returns to Memphis frequently in the 1970s and '80s as a guest of the nostalgia-oriented Memphis Film Festival. Said one organizer: "Occasionally, when things would be a little bit dead in the dealers' room, he would break out the whip.''

80. A prime example of 1950s Polynesian exotica, the Luau restaurant opens at 3135 Poplar in February 1959. The Memphis Press-Scimitar lauded the establishment for its tiki statuary, war clubs, stuffed sharks and waterfall entrance, "with a banyan tree rising toward the roof, dotted with coral and giant clam shells."

81. Jan. 13, 1960: Striking a body blow against the establishment, professional wrestler Sputnik Monroe is arrested on a disorderly conduct charge for what an officer describes as the crime of "drinking in a negro cafe with negros," according to The Commercial Appeal. In what the judge said was "the first time he can recall that a white man was represented in City Court by a negro attorney," Sputnik's lawyer was Russell B. Sugarmon Jr., the future General Sessions judge. Sputnik was fined $26.

82. Easter Sunday 1960: In a dramatic blaze that old-timers still talk about, fire destroys Russwood Park, the mostly wooden ballpark built in 1896 at 916 Madison Ave. that was home to the Memphis Chicks minor league baseball team.

83. "I've never been to Chicago/ They say it's a mighty fine place/ I never could get past Tennessee with Mississippi all over my face" — Johnny Cash, "Going to Memphis," 1960.

84. Sculpted by Leone Tommasi and cast in Florence, Italy (and not in Handy's hometown of Florence, Alabama), a bronze statue of W.C. Handy, the "Father of the Blues," is erected near Beale Street in 1960, two years after the Memphis composer's death.

85. "4 City Schools Are Integrated — Order Reigns." That's the front-page headline in The Commercial Appeal on Oct. 4, 1961, after 13 black first-graders are enrolled in four previously all-white elementary schools. Some 200 police officers are assigned to the schools for the week; but what broke out, according to the newspaper, was not trouble but games of Farmer-in-the-Dell and Drop-the-Handkerchief.

86. Hosted by "your monster of ceremonies," Sivad (Malco marketing maven Watson Davis), WHBQ-TV’s horror movie program “Fantastic Features” debuts on Sept 29, 1962, with “The Giant Behemoth” (1959), about a resurrected radioactive dinosaur that terrorizes London. Wildly successful, the show lasts 10 years, ending with the "Us"-anticipating “The Human Duplicators” (1962).

87. Its striking modern design by Memphis architect Roy Harrover now partially obscured by an ugly parking garage, the current Memphis International Airport terminal opens on June 7, 1963.

88. In perhaps the greatest convergence of talent since the Million Dollar Quartet, the 1963 Mid-South Fair brings the Three Stooges — Moe, Larry and Curly-Joe — and three of the Beverly Hillbillies — Granny (Irene Ryan), Jethro (Max Baer) and Elly May (Donna Douglas) — to Memphis for sold-out shows on consecutive days in the rodeo arena.

89. A beloved and seemingly ubiquitous harbinger of summer from the 1960s through the mid-1970s, the Memphis-born circular ice-cream delivery vehicle known as the "Merrymobile" roams the streets at a puttering 15 mph, making it easy prey for loose change-wielding, popsicle-craving urchins. During its late-1960s heyday, the Merrymobile company operates dozens of the iconic vehicles, which — with their striped canopy roofs — resemble circus tents or fairground carousels on wheels.

90. On Christmas Eve 1963, Memphis earns the distinction of being the coldest spot in the nation when the city records a temperature of 13 degrees below zero; this remains the record low for Memphis.

91. Killed in a Viet Cong ambush, Army Sgt. 1st Class Jesse Alexander Gray is the first of an estimated 214 Memphis and Shelby County casualties of the Vietnam War. Gray is honored during a city ceremony on July 29, 1964.

92. The $3.7-million city-built Memphis Memorial Stadium — later renamed Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium — opens in 1965 as the home football field for the Tigers (who previously played at Crump Stadium). The first rock band to play there is Three Dog Night, in 1972, with opening act Black Oak Arkansas; subsequent concert headliners include the Rolling Stones, Van Halen, Paul McCartney and U2.

93. Calling himself "Mr. Magic," WMC-TV Channel 5 "weather man" Dick Williams in 1965 debuts "Magicland," a weekly program for kids that showcases his talents as an illusionist and prestidigitator. The program ends in 1989 after some 1,200 episodes, making it TV's longest-running magic show, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

94. 1966: The city's first enclosed shopping mall, Southland Mall, opens on Shelby Drive in Whitehaven. It is followed by Raleigh Springs Mall (1971); the Mall of Memphis and Hickory Ridge Mall (both 1981); and Oak Court Mall (1988), among others.

95. According to the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the Beatles hope to begin recording tracks for their "Revolver" album at Stax on April 9, 1966, but the plans are scuttled due to security concerns.

96. Now the city's last remaining open-air cinema, Malco's ballyhooed two-screen Summer Drive-In opens on Sept. 1, 1966, with "23 Acres - No Dust, No Gravel or Mud" (according to newspaper advertisements). Opening night movies include "The Glass Bottom Boat," with Doris Day, and "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini."

97. 1967: Inspired by Oakland's Black Panthers, young Memphis militants organize a "black power" group called the Invaders. The moniker is inspired by the ABC science-fiction series of the same name, which depicts the infiltration of America by humanoid aliens. Said Invaders leader Coby Smith: "The kind of things we were talking about were as alien to our communities as if somebody had brought in these ideas from outer space."

98. Legendary lawman Buford Pusser is rushed to Baptist Hospital here after being shot in McNairy County during an April 12, 1967, ambush in which his wife, Pauline, is killed. Pusser, the McNairy County sheriff known for his one-man campaign against moonshine, prostitution and illegal gambling, was the inspiration for the movie "Walking Tall." He survived the ambush but died in a 1974 car accident while returning home from a Memphis news conference where it was announced he would play himself in a sequel.

99. On Feb. 1, 1968, sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker are crushed to death in a garbage compactor while taking shelter from the rain. The deaths help inspire the strike that will bring Dr Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis.

100. Feb. 12, 1968: Some 1,375 city workers do not show up for their jobs, launching the sanitation strike.

101. Strike news took second place to weather news when a storm dropped 17.3 inches of snow — the second heaviest snowfall on record — on Memphis from March 21 to 23, 1968.

102. Mitchell High School student Larry Payne is fatally shot in the stomach by police officer Leslie Dean Jones on March 28, 1968, in the aftermath of a demonstration led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in support of striking sanitation workers. Witnesses say the youth was unarmed. Jones, 76, died March 15, 2019.

103. April 4, 1968: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is shot and killed in Memphis — an event that the city and the nation have yet to fully reckon with.

104. After the King assassination, Time magazine in its April 12, 1968, issue refers to Memphis as a "Southern backwater" and "decaying Mississippi River town."

105. April 16, 1968: The city sanitation strike ends. Workers win union recognition and wage increases.

106. June 21, 1968: Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson visits Memphis to promote the opening of Mahalia Jackson Glori-Fried Chicken, a first restaurant in a fast-food franchise established by Memphians A.W. Willis and Benjamin L. Hooks in partnership with Jackson and the Minnie Pearl's Chicken franchise company. The union of white country and black gospel vocalists was intended to "set an example of racial partnership" in the wake of King's assassination, according to publicity, but both chains folded, in part because a major investor was financially embattled Tennessee gubernatorial candidate John Jay Hooker.

107. About a dozen Memphis and Shelby County library titles — including "Valley of the Dolls," "Myra Breckenridge" and "Portnoy's Complaint" — are placed off limits to readers under 18 in the summer of 1969 after Mayor Henry Loeb attended a library board meeting and "shooed all women out of the room and read aloud passages he had underlined in red ink" from "Portnoy," according to The Commercial Appeal. Asked one board member: "Is this book fit for women to read?" After the newspaper's story appears, demand for "Portnoy" increases so much that the library orders 10 extra copies to join the five already in circulation.

108. According to a report in The Commercial Appeal, Memphians on July 20, 1969, are so engrossed by the Apollo 11 moon landing that for a period of seven minutes water pressure rises so high from lack of usage that MLGW is forced to shut down all five main pumping stations.

109. Sept. 11, 1969: Memphis "spree killer" George Howard Putt, 59, is arrested after a month-long reign of terror in which he bludgeoned, strangled and stabbed five victims, male and female, between the ages of 21 and 80.

110. Hard to believe, but it is not until Nov. 25, 1969, that voters pass a special referendum allowing "liquor by the drink," meaning that adults could purchase alcoholic drinks at a restaurant rather than "brown-bagging" it by bringing their own bottles.

111. Visionary Memphis State University theater director Keith Kennedy courts controversy and causes a sensation in March 1970 by staging a student production of Broadway's Age-of-Aquarius "tribal love-rock" musical, "Hair" — the first licensed production outside New York. One compromise: In Memphis, no nudity.

112. May 21, 1970: Inspired by the new availability of liquor-by-the-drink, Memphis investors open the first Friday's restaurant and bar outside of New York, spurring what would become the Overton Square-centered nightlife explosion of the next two decades. (The location currently is occupied by Babalu, a Mexican restaurant.)

113. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Memphis is founded on June 20, 1970. Prior to that decision by Pope Paul VI, the entire state of Tennessee had been encompassed by the Diocese of Nashville.

114. 1971: Outraged by the use of nude models and an exhibition of nude photography at Memphis College of Art (then known as the Academy of Art), brick mason Newton C. Estes kidnaps the 14-year-old son of art instructor Richard Batey, in order to force the school to remove the offending pictures. College officials quickly comply, and the boy is released unharmed two hours later.

115. March 1971: In a victory for the citizens who organized to fight plans to extend Interstate 40 through Overton Park, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns decisions by district and appellate courts and rules that the federal Secretary of Transportation had failed to demonstrate the lack of “feasible and prudent” alternatives to the park route, as required by a 1966 highway bill intended to protect public spaces. The decision preserves the park.

116. June 7, 1971: After years in Ellis Auditorium, professional wrestling relocates to the Mid-South Coliseum, attracting 9,253 fans for opening-night matches showcasing such suplex superstars as Tojo Yamamoto, Bearcat Brown, the Fabulous Moolah, Len Rossi and Sputnik Monroe. Although the arena opened in 1963, "I probably am responsible for building this coliseum," Sputnik told The Commercial Appeal. "They didn't have room for me anywhere else to wrestle."

117. April 20, 1972: U.S. District Judge Robert McRae Jr. orders the Memphis Board of Education to implement a desegregation plan that will require the busing of an estimated 13,789 students during the following school year. The decision forever changes local education.

118. East Memphis' 34-story Clark Tower is completed in June 1972, adjacent to the 22-story White Station Tower (now the i-Bank Tower), which opened seven years earlier. The twin towers remain East Memphis anomalies.

119. April 17, 1973: Fred Smith's Federal Express — now, FedEx — begins operations when 14 aircraft take off from Memphis to deliver 186 packages to 25 U.S cities, absolutely positively overnight.

120. June 4, 1973: The Park Commission ends the popular practice of staging commercial rock concerts in the Overton Park Shell after complaints about "criminal" behavior in the audience. According to the Memphis Press-Scimitar, crowds "at various times smoked marijuana, drank alcoholic beverages, took drugs and openly participated in love-making."

121. 1974: Harold Ford Sr. becomes the first black person elected to Congress in Tennessee. Other Fords who have held elective office include his brothers, John, Joe, Edmund and James; his sister, Ophelia; his uncle, Emmitt; and his son, Harold Jr., to name a few.

122. The city completes construction of the Mid-America Mall on Main Street in 1975. The controversial pedestrian-mall project is intended to restore Downtown's luster, but longtime merchants complain that the elimination of street parking kills their business.

123. 1975: Through the coordination of Catholic Charities, refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos begin to resettle in Memphis in earnest, following the April "fall of Saigon."

124. In what comes to be regarded as a revolutionary moment in the history of photography, an exhibit of color work by William Eggleston goes on display on May 24, 1976, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, establishing the Memphis photographer as arguably the Bluff City's most influential artist outside the realm of music.

125. Nov. 23, 1976: A pistol-toting and inebriated Jerry Lee Lewis is arrested after pulling up to the gates of Graceland in a new Lincoln Continental and demanding to see Elvis. Mugshots show an injury to the singer's nose that apparently resulted from a rebounding champagne bottle that Jerry Lee had tried to hurl out a rolled-up window.

126. 1977: Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks of Memphis becomes national executive director of the NAACP.

127. Jan. 15, 1977: Three months after hitting No. 1 with his novelty dance hit "Disco Duck," Memphis deejay Rick Dees — recording as "Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots" — releases a follow-up single, "Dis-Gorilla." Even an appearance on "The Brady Bunch Hour" that finds Dees introduced by the kids from "What's Happening!!" and performing in front of a pair of swinging King Kong arms couldn't lift the song above No. 56 on the Billboard pop charts.

128. The Memphis in May International Festival is organized in 1977. The first "honored country" is Japan.

129. Out of office less than five months, former president Gerald Ford sinks a hole-in-one during the June 1977 pro-am portion of the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic golf tournament at Colonial Country Club. (The shot made up for a past tournament, when one of Ford's errant balls beaned a spectator.)

130. Aug. 16, 1977: Elvis Presley dies at 42.

131. A trio of apparent would-be grave robbers said to be plotting to burgle Elvis' body from Forest Hill Cemetery are arrested on Aug. 29, 1977, when one of them turns FBI informant. The thieves reportedly had planned to ransom the corpse for $10 million. Soon after, Presley's body is moved to Graceland.

132. Nov. 15, 1977: Memphis-based "Woolly Bully" creator Sam the Sham releases "The Wookie," a "Star Wars"-inspired would-be dance hit that celebrates Han Solo's furry sidekick, Chewbacca. Sample lyric: "Not too many things can bend him out of shape/ His mama must have come from the Planet of the Apes."

133. Hundreds of National Guardsmen are assigned to Memphis in the summer of 1978 after police officers and firefighters go on strike. On July 1, 1,400 firefighters walk off the job; that same day, 45 fires occur in four hours, inspiring a front-page editorial in The Commercial Appeal: "The rash of vandalism and harassment that accompanied the strike is contrary to the public image of Memphis firemen. It comes as an ugly shock." The next month, police also go on strike.

134. 1979: Adrian Rogers, senior pastor at Bellevue Baptist Church, is elected to the first of the three terms he will serve as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. A charismatic and telegenic preacher, Rogers is a leader in the denomination's "conservative resurgence," which emphasizes a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.

135. Known for pastel-colored playful postmodern furniture and ceramics, an internationally influential affiliation of Italian designers in 1980 dubs itself "The Memphis Group," in homage to the Bob Dylan song, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

136. July 13, 1980: Memphis experiences what remains its record high temperature: 108 degrees.

137. After Mayor Wyeth Chandler resigns from office in 1982 to accept a Circuit Court judgeship, City Council member J.O. Patterson Jr. is named interim mayor — making him the city's first black mayor. (W.W. Herenton does not become the first elected black mayor until 10 years later.)

138. Graceland opens to the public on July 7, 1982 — less than five years after Elvis' death. It is now the second most-visited home in the U.S., after the White House.

139. Distraught over the death of his 8-year-old son, who had been treated for leukemia at the hospital, a marijuana-smoking and .357 Magnum-wielding French-Canadian, John Claude Goulet, 40, takes a pediatrician, a nurse, a psychiatrist and a psychologist hostage inside an office at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The 34-hour siege ends when police storm the office and kill Goulet on Feb. 5, 1982.

140. St. Agnes student Leslie Marie Gattas, 15, is rescued March 18, 1982, from an attic hideaway at Christ United Methodist Church, where her kidnapper, Ernest Stubblefield, had kept her for 119 days.

141. April 5, 1982: Wrestler Jerry Lawler "injures" comedian/wrestler Andy Kaufman with a "piledriver" move at the Mid-South Coliseum, a highlight of a still much talked-about feud that reaches its apex in July when Lawler slaps Kaufman's face on "Late Night with David Letterman."

142. January 1983: The "Shannon Street" tragedy leaves seven suspects dead after police storm a North Memphis house and kill all occupants, following the torture death of a police officer, Robert S. Hester, 34, who had been held hostage in the house.

143. The city's daily evening newspaper, the distinctively named Memphis Press-Scimitar, publishes its final edition on Halloween 1983. The paper had operated as the Press-Scimitar since the 1926 merger of two competing evening dailies, The News Scimitar and the Memphis Press.

144. Memphis State University football coach Rex Dockery, 41, and three others — freshman defensive back Charles Greenhill, offensive coordinator Chris Faros and booster Glenn Jones — are killed Dec. 12, 1983, in a small plane crash while en route to a speaking engagement in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee.

145. Organized by a coalition of bar owners, restaurateurs and devotees of blarney that calls itself "Irish Eyes of Memphis," the St. Patrick's Day "pub crawl" reaches its bacchanalian height (or depth) in 1982, when an estimated 50,000 revelers stagger from Main Street to Overton Square in search of green-dyed beer. Legal fees and other complications eventually reduce the event to its current manageable form, a parade on Beale.

146. 1982: The Mud Island river park opens to the public, complete with concert amphitheater and monorail transportation between the park and the "mainland." Its most impressive aspect may be its "Riverwalk," a scale reproduction of the 954 miles of the lower Mississippi River, with "every sandbar, oxbow, and topographic contour faithfully reproduced in cement," according to Roadside America. Starting at "Cairo, Illinois," the Riverwalk ends at a "Gulf of Mexico" that for several embarrassing years was rebranded as a Budweiser-sponsored water park named "Bud Boogie Beach."

147. When the New York Metropolitan Opera brings a touring performance of "Macbeth" that features a topless witch to the Auditorium North Hall on May 10, 1983, a group calling itself MASH — Memphians Against Social Harassment — stage a "strip-in" to protest the unequal enforcement of the city's anti-nudity ordinance. When the witch appears onstage, MASH members in the audience — mostly dancers at "adult" nightclubs — remove their tops. The ordinance later is declared unconstitutional.

148. "Memphis — A Diamond in the Bluff'" is the winning entry in a 1983 contest to pick a slogan for Memphis, sponsored by The Commercial Appeal and the Rotary Club. Newspaper stories promise that the coinage "will soon grace billboards, newspaper advertisements and possibly airwaves." Memphis boosters are asked to use the phrase as often as possible. It is never heard of again.

149. Oct. 30, 1983: Founded in 1901, Bellevue Baptist Church votes to leave its longtime Midtown location and relocate to a Cordova campus, where it expands to "megachurch" proportions.

150. "While most of us were stuffing ourselves with turkey," The Commercial Appeal reports on Nov. 25, 1983, "a pair of armed, Halloween-masked gunmen pulled off the largest robbery in Memphis history, stealing an estimated $2 million from the Wells Fargo building on Monroe."

151. Jan. 7, 1984: Restored to its former glory, The Orpheum — Main Street's historic "palace" of a theater — reopens with a public "Champagne and Gershwin" party. A harbinger of Downtown's revival, the theater was built in 1928, on the site of the Grand Opera House, which had burned to the ground in 1923.

152. The bizarre and "epic" (in the characterization of The Commercial Appeal) Georgian Hills Day Care child sex abuse scandal dominates much of the news from 1984 to 1988 and results in the indictments of four adult workers in connection with the alleged molestations of at least 19 children. Eventually, all charges are dropped and the one conviction overturned, due in part to the implausibility of much of the testimony of the child witnesses (one boy said child victims were "baptized to the devil"). The investigation is now regarded as a textbook case of 1980s "satanic panic."

153. Sept. 5, 1986: In a predecessor to the current "Mighty Lights" display, the "M"-shaped structure of the Hernando de Soto Bridge (still referred to as "the new bridge," if you're old) is illuminated with 200 sodium lights, following a fundraising campaign by fashion designer Pat Kerr Tigrett and developer Henry Turley.

154. "After we moved to Memphis, I don't recall Mother's ever once saying: 'A gentleman must always' do so and so. Or: 'A lady will never' do so and so ... The old delicate balance between her wild nature and her strict Presbyterian, genteel upbringing was gone in Memphis ... When we were all in the doldrums, she more than once said: 'I sometimes think a shooting in the family would have been better than a move to Memphis.'" — Peter Taylor, "A Summons to Memphis," which wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1987.

155. 1988: Michael Hooks becomes the first black candidate elected to countywide office when he wins the race for assessor.

156. 1989: Self-promoting promoter Sidney Shlenker makes a deal to take over Mud Island, announcing plans to convert the river park to a $100 million entertainment complex called "Rakapolis," a name intended to suggest ancient Egypt and modern rock 'n' roll. Rakapolis was to come complete with a huge crystal sphinx, a "time machine" ride and a re-created Egyptian village. Shlenker — who already had the contract to manage the then-under-construction Pyramid arena — predicts 3 million visitors a year. For some reason, people believe him. Eventually, local government has to sue to regain control of the attractions.

157. Commodities trader Charles D. McVean invests about $8 million into the development of a new type of "horse" racing: indoor Hackney pony races with remote-controlled robots for jockeys, the reins attached to the robots' tiny metal arms. "You put 10,000 people in here with a six-pack of beer apiece, and then by God you've got something!" McVean told the Wall Street Journal, during a test run at the Fairgrounds in 1989. The state Racing Commission rejects the idea.

158. Memphians are all shook up when the news media hypes "self-proclaimed climatologist" Dr. Iben Browning's prediction that a major earthquake will rock the New Madrid Fault on Dec. 3, 1990. When the much-feared date arrives, Memphis fails to shake, rattle, or even roll, at least tectonically.

159. Writing in his book "Rythm Oil" in 1991, Stanley Booth sticks up for the Bluff City when confronted by skeptics: "I told them that in this century, Memphis, Tennessee, had changed the lives of more people than any other city in the world. I used, I regret to report, the phrase 'cultural influence' ... I never had a chance to tell them that, like it or not, they had shopped at supermarkets, eaten at drive-in restaurants, slept in Holiday Inns, and heard the blues because people in Memphis had found ways to convert these things into groceries."

160. July 4, 1991: Constructed around the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the National Civil Rights Museum is dedicated. It opens to the public in September 1991.

161. Oct. 4, 1991: Former city schools superintendent W.W. Herenton is elected mayor, defeating incumbent Dick Hackett by 172 votes out of about 250,000 cast. (Proving joke candidates can make a difference, Robert "Prince Mongo" Hodges, who claimed to be a resident of a planet named Zambodia, received 2,921 votes.) The city's first elected black mayor, Herenton will be elected to five terms; he resigns in 2009 to pursue an unsuccessful bid for Congress.

162. Memphis' distinctive Pyramid arena opens with a concert on Nov. 9, 1991. The headliners? The mother-and-daughter country act, the Judds.

163. On Nov. 16, 1991, patrons burst like scalded cats from the doors of the Madison Avenue punk club, the Antenna, when shock rocker GG Allin lived up to his reputation and began flinging his own feces into the crowd. The cover charge: $5.

164. "They left Chickasaw Gardens and drove west with the traffic toward downtown, into the fading sun ... The warm, sticky, humid Memphis summer air settled in with the dark. Softball fields came to life as teams of fat men with tight polyester pants and lime-green and fluorescent-yellow shirts laid chalk lines and prepared to do battle. Cars full of teenagers crowded into fast-food joints to drink beer and gossip and check out the opposite sex." — John Grisham, "The Firm," 1991.

165. Lionel Linder, 60, editor of The Commercial Appeal since 1988, is killed in a 1992 New Year's Eve accident on Union Avenue when a drunk driver plows into his car. Linder spearheaded the campaign to bring President George H.W. Bush to Memphis in 1989 for an event on the newspaper's lawn, where Bush designated The CA as the first "Point of Light" in a program honoring the nation's volunteers.

166. "In his prime, he was one of the three greatest jazz pianists of all time," wrote critic Leonard Feather. He was Phineas Newborn Jr., whose classic albums include "A World of Piano!" (1961) and "The Newborn Touch" (1964). He is found dead of natural causes at his Memphis home on May 26, 1989, at the age of 57.

167. 1992: "Several visitors to a zoo exhibit called 'Dinosaurs Live!' asked for refunds after discovering that dinosaurs ceased to roam the Earth 65 million years ago," the newspaper reports, in a story about zoo patrons who expected to find real live dinosaurs when they attended an exhibit that actually featured motorized mechanical replica dinosaurs. "People have watched too much Fred Flintstone," says zoo vice president Ann Ball.

168. Artist Carroll Cloar, 79, who had been suffering from cancer, dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 10, 1993. In The Commercial Appeal, critic Fredric Koeppel writes that the Arkansas-born Cloar "drew on memories of rural life to compose canvases whose realism was tempered with touches of whimsy, folklore and mystery." Many of Cloar's paintings are on display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

169. Feb. 11, 1994: Memphians wake to the warzone-like cracks of explosive timber after the region is blanketed by a devastating ice storm that snaps trees — at least one person is killed by a falling limb — and cuts power to close to 425,000 MLGW customers, some of whom are without electricity for 17 days.

170. On April 7, 1994, the crew of a Federal Express DC10 flight leaving Memphis overpowers a hammer-wielding company employee and safely lands the plane after a hijacking-suicide attempt by Auburn Calloway, 42, a pilot facing termination for falsifying his job application. Calloway is sentenced to life terms for attempted murder and attempted air piracy; he said he planned to crash the aircraft so his family could collect his $2.5 million life insurance policy.

171. On July 1, 1994, Memphis State University becomes the University of Memphis — the fifth name change since its founding in 1912 as the West Tennessee Normal School.

172. Longtime WHBQ-TV kiddie-show host and toy store impresario Harold "Happy Hal" Miller, 74, dies on Nov. 28, 1997. From the 1950s to 1973, Miller was Memphis' answer to "Captain Kangaroo"; his hand-puppet sidekick was the blue-hued and taxonomically indeterminate "Lil' Bow," described by Miller in a 1988 interview as a bow-tie-wearing "cross between a mouse and a chipmunk-type thing."

173. In 1998, University of Memphis student Kelly Chandler hangs a sheet on the wall of The Edge coffee shop in Cooper-Young and hosts a group of local filmmakers, who project their work on the sheet. This is the humble origin of what is now the region's largest film event, the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

174. Downtown's gem of a baseball diamond, AutoZone Park, opens on April 1, 2000, with an exhibition game between the Memphis Redbirds and the St. Louis Cardinals. Columnist Geoff Calkins calls it "the first day of the rest of our baseball lives."

175. 2001: A community gathering place and headquarters for the Memphis Public Libraries system, the new five-story $70 million "main library" opens at 3030 Poplar, replacing the old central library at Peabody and McLean. It is renamed the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library in 2005.

176. Ben Affleck, Michael Jordan and Donald Trump are among the 15,327 who reportedly attend the Mike Tyson-Lennox Lewis heavyweight boxing match at the Pyramid on June 8, 2002. Lewis knocks out Tyson in the 8th round in what at the time was the highest-grossing event in pay-per-view history.

177. In 2002, former Shelby County Public Defender A C Wharton is elected the first black mayor of Shelby County. In 2009, he is elected the 63rd mayor of Memphis, but he loses his 2015 re-election bid to Jim Strickland.

178. During Elvis Week 2002, Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, then at the height of his leonine majesty, sits atop the base of a large upwardly tilted silver "rocket" ship during the Elvis Beale Street parade. The suggestion that this man is the literal father of rock 'n' roll is hard to miss.

179. Nicknamed "Hurricane Elvis," the most damaging wind storm in Memphis history strikes on July 22, 2003, toppling trees and telephone poles, cutting service to 340,000 homes and businesses, and introducing Memphians to the term "derecho," which refers to a type of devastating straight-line wind.

180. After some five years of planning, the $250 million FedExForum opens to the public with a Sept. 6, 2004, "open house."

181. His fur was brown and shaggy, his belly was round and saggy: A slobby Everybear, the original version of Grizz, the Memphis Grizzlies mascot, is retired for the current blue-furred Superbear when the team moves from the Pyramid to FedExForum in 2004.

182. A movie about a North Memphis hustler who "dares to dream the pimpossible dream" (to quote Time magazine), Craig Brewer's future Oscar-winner "Hustle & Flow" has its Memphis premiere at the now vanished Muvico Peabody Place 22 on July 6, 2005. Police report that some 6,000 "well-behaved" fans crowd the red carpet to see such celebrities as Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson; producer John Singleton; members of Three 6 Mafia; Brewer (“resplendent” in a Girbaud denim suit, gold Versace sunglasses, straw cowboy hat and a 3-carat diamond ring that had belonged to Sam Phillips); and — incongruously — martial-arts star Steven Seagal.

183. In a spectacular blast that attracts hundreds of spectators, the 50-year-old Baptist Memorial Hospital on Union Avenue — where Elvis was declared dead, among other historic happenstances — is razed at 6:45 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2005, by the controlled detonations of 600 pounds of explosives placed on six of the building's 21 stories.

184. March 5, 2006: Thirty-four years after Stax legend Isaac Hayes earned an Oscar in the same category for "Theme from Shaft," Memphis hip-hop artists Jordan Houston (Juicy J), Paul Beauregard (DJ Paul) and Cedric Coleman (Frayser Boy) win the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," their contribution to writer-director Craig Brewer's made-in-Memphis "Hustle & Flow."

185. Graceland is known for celebrity visitors, but on July 1, 2006, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visits Elvis' home in the company of President George W. Bush. "Hold me close, hold me tight," sang Koizumi, as he put his arm around Elvis' daughter, Lisa Marie Presley.

186. An off-course manatee appears on Oct. 24, 2006, in Wolf River Harbor, some 720 miles north of its usual coastal habitat. Reports of the marine mammal's meanderings transfixed Memphians for several days, but the docile creature eluded capture and came to a sad end: It was found dead in December in McKellar Lake.

187. Farewell to the Ape Girl, water-skiing squirrels and a life-sized Dolly Parton sculpted from butter: The last Mid-South Fair at the old Fairgrounds is held in 2008.

188. A second printing of more than 40,000 copies quickly disappears as Memphians descend on The Commercial Appeal offices on Nov. 5, 2008, seeking souvenir editions of the newspaper that reported Barack Obama's presidential victory with a front-page headline that proclaimed "Yes He Did" — a play on the Obama campaign slogan, "Yes We Can."

189. Sept. 22, 2009: Memphis Mayor Pro Tem Myron Lowery greets the Dalai Lama with a fist bump and the comment: "I've always wanted to say, 'Hello, Dalai!'"

190. Crews in January 2010, dismantle Elvis' favorite roller coaster, the 80-year-old Zippin Pippin, marking a definitive end to decades of amusement park rides at the Fairgrounds. The nerve-wrackingly rickety old-school wooden roller coaster is re-created at the Bay Beach Amusement Park in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

191. April 9, 2011: Funeral services are held for former University of Memphis basketball player and coach Larry Finch, 60, arguably the most significant sports figure in local history. Finch led Memphis State to the 1973 NCAA title game against victorious UCLA that — however briefly — united the city.

192. After a decade of planning, Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid opens to the public on April 29, 2015, bringing camo boots, duck decoys and live gators to the 14-year-old pyramid-shaped arena that had hosted the Tigers, Grizzlies, Bruce Springsteen and Prince.

193. May 23, 2015: The Memphis in May Sunset Symphony ends its 39-year annual run at Tom Lee Park. The event was perhaps best known for its 17 years of “Ol' Man River,” the "Showboat" tune that was a centerpiece of the symphony until the 1998 retirement of James Hyter, the sonorous-voiced singer who each year led thousands of riverside revelers in multiple singalong encores.

194. In association with nationwide actions organized by Black Lives Matter in response to the police killings of black civilians, almost a thousand protesters shut down the Interstate 40 bridge over the Mississippi River for close to four hours on July 10, 2016.

195. Statues of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest and Confederate president Jefferson Davis are removed from city parks on Dec. 20, 2017, following some political sleight of hand in which the city outfoxes statue advocates in the state legislature by selling the two parks to nonprofit Memphis Greenspace for $1,000 each.

196. According to city records, there currently are about 9,850 street names in Memphis, including Saint Nick Drive and North Pole Cove; Elvis Presley Boulevard and Elvis Cove; Danny Thomas Boulevard and Uncle Remus Road; Nottingham Place, Maid Marian Lane, Friar Tuck Road, Robin Hood Lane and Zorro Cove; Nightingale Drive, Parrot Cove, Parakeet Road and Mockingbird Lane; Panda Lane, Otter Drive and Doberman Cove; and, perplexingly, Sea Shore Road.

197. Long distance information, give me Memphis, Missouri: Memphis, Tennessee, population 646,889 (according to the 2010 Census), may be the biggest Memphis in the United States, but it isn't the only one. Some others include Memphis, Florida, pop. 7,848; Memphis, Texas, 2,290; Memphis, Missouri, 1,822; Memphis, Nebraska, 114; Memphis, Mississippi, 70; and Memphis, Alabama, which, according to a 2017 estimate, has 28 residents.

198. Feb. 2, 2019: The Tom Lee Park Engagement Center at Beale Street Landing opens, to give Memphians a chance to view a proposed redesign that would radically transform the popular Mississippi River-front park.

199. In recognition of this year's 150th anniversary of The Peabody, chefs at Chez Philippe created a $150 burger. The patty is between a brioche bun, and is accessorized with butter-poached lobster, caramelized onion, Saint-André cheese, huckleberry aioli and Parmesan black truffle fries.

200. Meanwhile, the 67-year-old Tops Bar-B-Q chain gets new owners, a partnership group announces April 2. A Tops burger costs $3.95 (or $4.25, with cheese).

Special thanks to former Shelby County Historian Jimmy Ogle; G. Wayne Dowdy, archivist at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library: wrestling scholar Mark James (MarkJamesBooks.com); and Corinne Kennedy and Micaela Watts of The Commercial Appeal.

Indiana killer Paula Cooper: The Executioner Within

Robert King

robert.king@indystar.com

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 rea