Published: August 22, 2007 09:57 am      

Brutal killer is executed at OSP

Exactly 53 years to the day from the day Debbie Stevens was born, the man convicted of killing her died himself.

But Frank Duane Welch wasn’t executed for killing Stevens on May 6, 1987. He didn’t get the death penalty.

Instead, the 46-year-old inmate was executed for killing a different woman, Talley Cooper, almost three months before.

When Tracy Cooper left his Norman home to go to work on the morning of Feb. 25, 1987, he left his wife, Talley, and their 8-month-old son behind.

Talley was planning to go house hunting, looking for a new, larger home that she and her husband could own, rather than rent. After all, they not only had young Travis to think of, but there was also the new son she’d been carrying in her womb for the past three months. The 28-year-old woman had made arrangements to drop Travis off at a friend’s while she and another friend went to look at houses.

She never made it to the babysitter’s.

At about 1 p.m., Tracy returned home to find the front door locked and the family dogs in the garage. Since the Coopers seldom locked their doors, Tracy had to climb a fence and go through the garage to get in the house, where he heard Travis crying in a bedroom. And where he found his wife dead on the living room floor, strangled by a leather strap wrapped tightly around her neck, according to court documents. She’d been sexually violated.

About two and a half months later, Stacie Stromberg, then an 11-year-old girl, was waiting for her mother to pick her up from school. When her mother didn’t show up, Stacie caught a ride to her Tuttle home with another woman — and found the bound and raped body of her 32-year-old mother, Debbie Stevens.

“I will never be able to get the image of finding my mother dead out of my mind,” Stromberg wrote in a letter to the Oklahoma Pardon & Parole Board; one of many letters asking the board to deny clemency for Welch.

The board did on Aug. 1.

The two murders remained unsolved for almost 10 years, despite the dogged determination of police. But in 1996, Welch’s DNA was matched to semen found on Stevens’ body and, several months later, to semen recovered at the scene of the Cooper murder.

Welch didn’t spend the intervening years as a free man, however. In 1988 he was convicted of forging checks, embezzlement and other crimes and sentenced to the Department of Corrections. Three months after he was released in 1994, he attacked a woman named Paige Hora in the parking lot of a Tulsa Wal-Mart.

She survived, with a cut on her neck and another on her hand, to testify against Welch, who was sentenced to life in prison for the attack, as well as additional 45-year sentences for kidnapping and possession of a stolen vehicle.

And he was in prison at Oklahoma State Penitentiary when DNA evidence linked him to the Cooper and Stevens murders.

He never left alive.

Welch was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m. Tuesday, about eight minutes after a lethal mixture of drugs began flowing into his system. In the minutes leading up to his death, Welch told members of his family that he loved them and told his victims’ family members that what had happened to the dead women was his fault and his alone. “There’s nothing that can change the horrible thing I done,” he said while strapped to a gurney in the state’s execution chamber. “There’s nothing I can say that can change that. I’m truly, truly sorry for all the hurt and pain I caused y’all.

“I take full responsibility for what I done. There’s no excuse for it. There never was.”

He closed his eyes and never reopened them. He didn’t see his sisters sobbing — or when one of his brothers began complaining of chest pains and difficulty breathing before sagging in his chair. Medical personnel helped the man with the “Fred” belt buckle to the floor, gave him a nitroglycerine tablet and kept a careful watch on him as a lethal mixture of drugs flowed into his brother’s veins a few feet away.

He refused further medical treatment and left under his own power, according to prison officials.

The incident seemed to make a mockery of what should have been a solemn occasion, according to victims’ family members. Hora and 20 others witnessed the execution.

“My family and I will move on,” said Jeb Anderson, Cooper’s brother. “We will focus on keeping alive the good memories of Talley and burying the bad. Her legacy lives on through the many lives she touched and her son Travis, who has such a big heart and sharp mind.”

“None of this will ever bring my mom back,” Travis Cooper said, adding that he’s learned about his mother through family members. “I want to remember the good things about my mother.”

The families of Hora and the two murder victims have come together over the years, something that they said has helped them all to heal.

Welch was the second inmate executed in Oklahoma this year.

Contact Doug Russell at drussell@mcalesternews.com.