ACTIVIST OPPOSED DEATH PENALTY
FORGAVE YOUNG WOMAN WHO KILLED HIS GRANDMOTHER
Ruth Pelke had welcomed a group of teenage girls, who were playing hooky from school, into her home on May 14, 1985. They asked to attend the Bible lessons Pelke, 78, had taught for decades.
Inside, one of the girls, Paula Cooper, then 15, bludgeoned Pelke with a butcher knife. The girls stole $10 and drove off with Pelke’s Plymouth. They were arrested shortly thereafter, having bragged about the act.
The brutality of Pelke’s murder brought national attention to Gary, Ind., an industrial city in the throes of painful decay. Even greater attention came in 1986 when Cooper, after pleading guilty, was sentenced to death. At 16, she was the youngest woman in nearly 100 years to receive a capital sentence in the United States. Three accomplices received prison sentences.
Bill Pelke was devastated by the murder of his grandmother. Already struggling amid bankruptcy and the break up of his marriage, he boiled in anger at God for having allowed him to survive Vietnam only to then be faced with such grief.
Pelke was initially satisfied by Cooper’s death sentence, he said, but underwent a transformative experience at work one November day the year after his grandmother’s death. Devoutly Christian, he began praying as tears streamed down his face. In his mind, he said, he saw a photograph of his grandmother smiling serenely but with “tears flowing out of her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.”
“At first I thought they might be tears of pain,” he later wrote in a memoir, “but I immediately realized they were tears of love and compassion for Paula Cooper and her family.”
In her abiding religious faith, he concluded, his grandmother would not have wanted Cooper to be executed. She would have wanted her killer to be forgiven. “I felt Nana wanted someone in our family to have that same love and compassion,” Pelke wrote.
Pelke, who forgave and befriended his grandmother’s murderer, helped lead a successful effort for her death sentence to be reduced, and became a nationally known advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, died Nov. 12 at his home in Anchorage. He was 73. The cause was a heart attack, said his partner, Kathy Harris.
In 1993, Pelke co- founded Journey of Hope — From Violence to Healing, an advocacy group led by family members of murder victims seeking to end the death penalty. Often travelling in a dilapidated bus, Pelke and other activists criss- crossed the country speaking in churches, schools and other gathering places and protesting outside prisons and the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The death penalty has absolutely nothing to do with the healing the murder victim’s family members need when a loved one has been killed,” he said. “It just continues the cycle of violence and creates more murder-victim family members.”
Pelke was credited with helping change public opinion in the U. S. about the death penalty.
In his speeches, Pelke would emphasize the humanity of her killer, who had endured a scarringly abusive upbringing. He corresponded with Cooper for years, visited her repeatedly in prison and sought a relationship with her family as he campaigned — over the objection of some of his relatives — against her execution.
Because of her youth, Cooper’s case attracted international outcry, including an appeal for clemency from Pope John Paul II. At the time of her sentencing, Indiana law allowed the execution of defendants as young as 10. In 1989, amid a series of changes in state and federal laws, the Indiana Supreme Court cut Cooper’s death sentence to 60 years in prison.
Pelke welcomed Cooper’s release from prison in 2013, when she was 43. She had earned a bachelor’s degree during her incarceration and, after her release, found work and became engaged. But in 2015, she died by suicide. “I have taken a life and never felt worthy,” she wrote in a letter to her fiancé.
Rhonda Labroi, Cooper’s older sister, said Pelke “was just beautiful. From the first day that he decided to forgive to the last day of his breath.”
William Robert Pelke was born in Lebanon, Ind., on Sept. 16, 1947. For his service in Vietnam, he was awarded a Purple Heart. He received a bachelor’s degree in pastoral theology in 1977. His marriages to Mary Lohman and Judy Falls ended in divorce. In 1999 he moved to Alaska to be with his partner, an anti- death- penalty activist. His 2003 memoir, like his organization, is titled Journey of Hope … From Violence to Healing.
Besides Harris, of Anchorage, survivors include three children from his first marriage, two stepchildren from his second marriage, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“Forgiving Paula Cooper did more for me than it did for her. It gave me the philosophy of life,” he told the Anchorage Daily News in 2004.