Feb. 18 OHIO: Brother's nightmares come to end after forgiving sister's murderer -- Meeting cools sting in heart; Man no longer believes in death penalty after seeing change in Glenn Benner II For years, Rodney Bowser spewed raw hate for Glenn Benner II, the man who raped and killed his beloved little sister. "I couldn't even hear his name without going grrrrrrr," Bowser said in an interview Thursday at his Tallmadge home. He clenched his fists to emphasize the hatred. But all that has changed. It happened after the 2 met at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville shortly before Benner was executed last week. Rodney Bowser calls this "the most bizarre ending" he could imagine. Bowser, a 48-year-old machinist, spent two decades cursing the former childhood friend who killed his 21-year-old sister, Trina, a wholesome and pretty secretary, in 1986. He and his parents, Joyce and Willard Bowser, and his three older brothers spent years tracking the Benner case's torturous progress through the courts. They couldn't wait for Benner to die; they begged Gov. Bob Taft not to grant him any leniency. Rodney Bowser was so overcome at Benner's clemency hearing in January that he couldn't make his remarks. Instead, he covered his face with his hands and wept. Questions answered But he didn't want Benner, 43, to go to his grave without answering questions about Trina's death, clearing up mysteries that baffled police and family alike. Foremost was this: When Trina left a girlfriend's house in Stow at 10 p.m. on Jan. 1, 1986, to go home, what happened in the next 2 hours? A little after midnight on that snowy night, passersby spotted Trina's car ablaze, parked on the berm of Interstate 76. Rodney and his parents opened the trunk to find Trina's naked body, her fake fur coat covering her torso and underpants covering her face. That horrid picture would flash over and over in Rodney Bowser's mind. In the final weeks before Benner's execution on Feb. 7, the Bowser family tried to set up a meeting with Trina's killer to fill in the lost 2 hours. Rodney, closest in age to Benner, was drafted for the job. The 1st meeting at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown on Jan. 30 didn't happen. Benner, then housed there, got angry over unrelated issues, an official told Bowser. But on the night before his execution, right after he had said goodbye to 17 family members and friends, Benner made a phone call to Rodney Bowser. It was the 1st time the 2 had talked in 20 years. The call lasted for about 20 minutes. They agreed to meet the next morning, minutes before Benner would die. But Benner wasn't sure officials would permit that. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction had never allowed a member of a victim's family to meet with a prisoner in the death house, the spartan building at the Lucasville prison in which all executions take place. So Benner called Rodney Bowser back for a second talk -- just in case. This one lasted 90 minutes. They talked about their lives. They'd grown up 2 houses from each other -- Bowser in Tallmadge and Benner in Springfield Township. They'd played bows and arrows together. Benner talked about how he hated prison. He implied that he had faced almost as much violence in prison as he had doled out on the outside. He said this was no way to live. They talked about the awful details of Trina's death. "Don't sugar-coat it," Bowser said he told Benner. "Give it to me straight." Bowser won't repeat those details, except to say that Benner and Trina met accidentally at a Lawson's store. Benner was buying cigarettes; Trina pulled in the parking lot and approached him, not knowing he had raped and killed Cynthia Sedgwick, 26, of Cleveland Heights the previous August. Trina knew him from the neighborhood. She was just being friendly. Meeting face-to-face About an hour after Benner and Rodney Bowser had their 2nd phone conversation, Rodney was in the car, headed as planned to the Lucasville prison in southern Ohio. His confidence buckled when he walked into the death house early in the morning on Feb. 7 for his person-to-person talk with Benner, who was scheduled to die at 10 a.m. "I almost backed out," he recalled. "I was shaking like a leaf." Major David Warren, the prison's head of security, was dubious. Before he let the 2 meet, he sat Bowser down. Stay calm, he warned him. Keep Benner calm. Prison officials didn't want to have to drag an upset Benner to his execution, Andrea Dean, spokeswoman for the Ohio prison system explained this week. So Benner and Bowser talked in low voices through the jail bars. They went back over the same topics covered in the phone calls. About 10 members of Benner's execution team stood just out of earshot. Bowser said Benner didn't know why he killed. He didn't blame marijuana and alcohol, his companions since age 12. "'All my friends did those, and they didn't end up killing anybody,'" Bowser quoted Benner as saying. They called each other by their childhood nicknames -- "Bimbo" for Benner and "Rodney Man" for Bowser. Bowser clocked their talk, which began at 8 a.m., at 17 minutes -- 2 minutes over the limit. They were calm. There were tears. They shook hands. After that, Bowser was so overcome with emotion he gave up his execution witness seat to one of his brothers. He didn't want to see it happen. More surprising, he didn't want it to happen at all. "I didn't want to deal with it," Bowser said, "and I didn't want to take away from what the rest of the family wanted." At 8:55 a.m., he called Benner back. He was told that Benner was being readied for his execution and couldn't talk. But his spiritual advisor passed on Bowser's message -- that Bowser forgave him. About an hour later, just before he died, Benner publicly apologized to the Bowser and Sedgwick families. He called Trina and Cynthia "beautiful girls who didn't deserve what I done to them." A changed man As Rodney Bowser sees it, by the time of his death Benner was a changed man. He had become religious. He wanted the Bowser family -- and especially Rodney -- to learn what they wanted to know. Though Benner didn't attend his own clemency hearing, he did see news reports and read the transcript of the remarks that Bowser was too overcome to deliver. Bowser knows that because Benner talked about those remarks. Since Benner's death, Bowser has compared the known facts about Trina's death with what Benner told him. Bowser has concluded that Benner told the truth. Rodney Bowser also has shared Benner's story with his parents -- as much as they wanted to hear, that is. A weight has been lifted. Rodney Bowser doesn't have nightmares any more. He doesn't believe in the death penalty anymore, either. A life sentence for Benner would have been just fine, he says now. People can change, he now believes. After all, his sister's killer did. (source: Akron Beacon Journal) DELAWARE: Robber: Wrong man convicted in '96 shooting ---- Fellow death row prisoner says dead partner, not convict, aided in Kenton home invasion Ralph E. "Randy" Swan was not present the night Kenneth Warren, a Kenton cattle breeder, was killed in a 1996 home invasion, a man sentenced to death along with Swan testified Friday. Adam W. Norcross said a "drug buddy" who he knows only as "Wayne" was the 2nd of 2 men who blasted their way into Warren's home and shot him to death as his wife and his 19-month-old son looked on. The testimony came during a hearing on Swan's motion for a new trial. Norcross and Swan were sentenced to death in October 2001 -- with the trial judge John E. Babiarz Jr. describing them as "like jackals lurking at a water hole." Norcross said Wayne blasted out a glass back door of Warren's home. Wayne was shot in the upper torso after the 2 men went into the house and scuffled with Warren, Norcross said. Norcross said he later granted a request to put his companion out of his misery. "There was no way I could get him to the hospital," Norcross said of Wayne, who, spitting up blood, reportedly crawled out of a blood-soaked car and about 10 yards into woods along a back road. "He said, 'You've got to stop the pain, man.' I couldn't get him to a hospital, and he was going to die anyway. So I put a bullet in his head." Friday's Kent County Superior Court hearing before Babiarz was prompted by a letter mailed by Norcross to the judge and lawyers in the case last February. In the letter, Norcross introduced Wayne as the second of 2 men who killed Warren, the nephew of state Sen. Nancy Cook, D-Kenton. "I had to straighten it out because it was weighing on me," Norcross said. During cross-examination, Deputy Attorney General Robert J. O'Neill suggested that Norcross' newly acquired pangs of conscience may have been inspired by interaction with Swan, a 34-year-old ex-Marine with martial arts training and gang affiliations. The 2 men live on the same death row tier at the Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna, and, in response to a question, Norcross acknowledged that he'd probably get a sound whipping in a fight between the 2. "Aren't you just substituting Wayne for Swan?" O'Neill asked, drawing a negative response from Norcross. Babiarz took the testimony under advisement, noting that he'd issue a ruling after studying the hearing transcript and reviewing motions on evidentiary issues from the prosecution and Swan's lawyer, Christopher Tease. In often-contradictory testimony, Norcross attempted to discount police statements and court testimony in which witnesses, including his estranged wife, Bridget Phillips, said they had heard Norcross talk of teaming up with Swan for the break-in and slaying. Norcross and Swan, who were co-workers at a Middletown concrete plant, were convicted in separate trials, but they were sentenced together by Babiarz. Finding resistance According to Norcross, he was short of money on Nov. 4, 1996, and borrowed Swan's car with the intent to drive to the Clayton-area home of his grandfather, whose name he could not immediately recall, and steal some antique guns to sell later. That plan, he said, was thwarted when he and Wayne encountered a woman at the residence. The two, lost on west Kent County back roads, eventually chose the Warren home for a random break-in. Once the two men were inside the house, Norcross testified, he attacked Warren, who was seated at a table and eating a sandwich. He knocked the victim off his chair and, with Warren's wife and child crying out loud, shot him in the head during a struggle on the floor. At 2001 trial, there was testimony that several shots were fired, including one that pierced Warren's skull from point-blank range, but investigators never figured out which man fired the fatal shot. Another motion Norcross has filed his own motion for a new trial, accusing his trial lawyers, assistant public defenders Lloyd Schmid and Paul Swierzbinski, of ineffective counsel. His appeal attorneys, Joseph A. Gabay and Jennifer-Kate Aaronson, were present during the hearing to make sure that Norcross didn't undermine attorney-client privilege or otherwise hurt his own case while on the stand. For their trouble, the killers got away with nothing but an empty purse, which was found later behind the concrete plant. And if there was a Wayne, O'Neill said, his body apparently was never found. (source: The News Journal)
