As in her book “Dead Man Walking,” “The Death of Innocents” is Sister Helen Prejean’s account of accompanying two condemned death row inmates to execution — but with one difference. Prejean believes that the two men described in “The Death of Innocents” — Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph Roger O’Dell — were innocent.
Prejean takes us back to Virginia’s death row on July 23, 1997, for O’Dell’s execution. O’Dell, who has just married Lori Urs, his advocate, is now meeting with Prejean, his other advocate who doubles as O’Dell’s spiritual adviser. O’Dell, whose case was championed by Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, and the government and people of Italy, is about to be executed for the 1985 rape and murder of Helen Schartner, crimes he claimed he did not commit.
Prejean told O’Dell, “Joe, you helped change a big Catholic book, the Catholic Catechism. I personally think that when the pope heard of the suffering you went through — maybe it helped him to see the torture in the death penalty and that it can never be justified.”
Prejean’s narrative prompted me to do an independent review of the O’Dell and Williams cases.
Witnesses testified O’Dell left the tavern about the same time Helen Schartner left. The next day, Schartner’s car was found in the tavern’s parking lot. Her body was found in a muddy field across the highway from the tavern. Schartner had been killed by manual strangulation, with a force sufficient to break bones in her neck and leave finger imprints. She also suffered head wounds consistent with blows from a handgun’s barrel. Her wounds had bled excessively.
A day later, after reading a newspaper account of Schartner’s murder, which described how she had last been seen at the County Line Lounge, O’Dell’s girlfriend remembered that O’Dell customarily went to this place on Tuesday nights — the same........