Group fights Roll’s execution

• Despite protests, father, husband favors the action.

JULIE ANN BARKER/ Missourian Outside the Boone County Courthouse in Columbia, Jeff Stack sets up a mannequin to emulate a lethal injection execution. Almost 20 people participated in a protest Tuesday against capital punishment.

The decision to proceed with the execution, which comes nearly eight years after the killings, outraged Missouri associations against the death penalty. But it was a relief, of sorts, to the family of the victims.

“I’d get a projector,” said Ronald Scheper Sr., the husband of Sherry Scheper and father of Randy and Curtis Scheper. “I wish I could be able to get all the crime scene photos of my son’s head blowed-off and my wife’s brains on the floor and see how many people would be against the death penalty then.”

However, groups such as Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty feel differently. Yesterday, the group and other organizations held statewide vigils and protests to oppose capital punishment.

In temperatures nearing 100 degrees, 18 people gathered at the columns in front of the Boone County Courthouse, bearing signs that read, “Violence begets violence.”

“Life is sacred,” said Jeff Stack, spokesperson for the Columbia-based Fellowship of Reconciliation. “Roll was involved in killing them and we are opposed to replicating that sort of loss.”

Besides being against capital punishment in general, the group feels Roll’s attorney did not act in his best interest and that Roll’s drug addiction played a part in the murders, said Margaret Phillips of the Eastern Missouri Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in St. Louis. Phillips said that while Roll’s drug addiction did not excuse the crime, it did shed light on his capacity to thoughtfully premeditate the killings.

Blake Danner, 17, a student at Rock Bridge High School and the youngest protester, said he was just glad to be doing something for his belief that killing is wrong.

Still, Scheper does not buy into the beliefs of the group. He said all three men convicted in connection with the murders of his wife and two sons deserve the death penalty.

“They all deserved to die,” he said. “One is not going to justify the crime.”

The other two men convicted, David Rhodes and John Browne Jr., pled guilty to second-degree murder and were each sentenced to life terms.

Roll, who confessed to the Aug. 8, 1992, killings, was later convicted in what was determined by the Boone County Court to be a drug-related armed robbery. On Nov. 16, 1993, Judge Frank Conley decided that Roll would die by lethal injection for the murders of the Cape Girardeau mother and her two sons.

John Fougere, spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Corrections, said Roll is the third to die this year under the state’s capital punishment law. James Hampton was executed in March and Bert Hunter in June. Mose Young, scheduled to be put to death on July 12, was granted a stay.

There are 79 inmates on death row in Missouri. George Harris is scheduled to be the next person executed on Sept. 13.

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