Families of murder victims live with the memories

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By JoANNE YOUNG / Lincoln Journal Star

One by one, they turned to ink, dried and formed into words in a newspaper: body found, stabbed or beaten, shot or strangled.

Man charged. Woman charged. Sentenced to life, to 10 or 20 years or 30 years. Sentenced to their own deaths, some long day away.

It took months or years, but eventually the ink faded, too, leaving just the memory of a death, a violent, awful one.

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Standing near the middle of the former compound, Miriam Kelle looks toward the setting sun. Her brother's car was found parked near these trees to the right in the photo. (Robert Becker)

Remember that man who was shot and killed while he was trying to save someone from a burning car?

Remember that woman who was stalked, raped and killed after her picture appeared in the engagements section of the newspaper?

Remember that little boy who someone killed and fed to his dog?

Most people can close the newspaper, turn off the television or look away from the house on Urbana Lane where the man and woman were shot to death.

That’s not the case for the family and friends of more than 1,700 people killed in Nebraska in the past three decades. These are a few of their stories.

James Thimm

James Thimm, a 26-year-old Beatrice man, was pulled into a religious cult and in 1985 tortured and killed at a Rulo encampment. He died after being shot in the face, chained all day and night on a porch and then inside a hog shed, kicked, beaten, sodomized with a shovel handle, partially skinned alive, his fingers shot off and his chest crushed.

Five-year-old Luke Stice was also beaten and sexually abused before he was killed.

Thimm’s murderer, Michael Ryan, who also killed Luke, was sentenced to death. Several others involved in his torture pleaded to lesser charges and were sentenced to life or a set number of years. Three of those men are out of prison.

Miriam Kelle, Thimm’s sister, a nurse and a member of the Mennonite church, does not support the death penalty, even for Ryan.

“He needs to remain in prison, but he’s a human being, and therein lies the problem,” she said. “My family wishes I didn’t have this in my heart. They are willing to let the death penalty occur. … But I can’t allow another human being to be killed.”

Thimm was raised by Carl and Hilda Schmidt of Beatrice after their mother developed mental illness. But he and Kelle remained close.  After she got married, her brother would come to visit, watch TV and talk for hours. Their faith was their bond.

But Thimm began to pull away after he became involved with Ryan and developed more radical views on religion and survival. He tried to get his sister to leave her husband, bring her children and join him.

She refused.

When Thimm came to say goodbye in 1983 before moving to Rulo, he was thin, paranoid and “had so much anger,” his sister said.

“I just knew I would never see him again.”

After her brother’s death, Kelle had a lot of anger, too. She knew that Jim Haverkamp and David Andreas, who got lesser charges and sentences, would be released from prison and she feared that day.

She raged at Ryan in letters and then ripped them up.

Slowly, she began to make peace with her feelings about Andreas and Jim Haverkamp, knowing they were manipulated and likely were tortured, too. When Haverkamp left prison in 1998 after 22 years, she believes he was a different man. They have become friends.

Money spent on the many appeals of a death sentence is better spent on preventing murders, Kelle says. Young men, especially, are at risk of becoming violent.

“The death penalty is not a deterrent,” she said. “We’re spending all this money on the wrong end.”

She’d rather not be fighting for Ryan, she said, but she doesn’t have a choice.

“Ryan’s grandchildren are innocent,” she said. “How do we protect them? How do we teach them about love?”

Bob Parminter

Dennis Van Fossen’s former brother-in-law Bob Parminter was killed seven years ago when he pulled Shannon Bluhm from a burning car near his farm house and was shot by Kimberly Faust, who was trying to kill Bluhm.

Van Fossen takes every opportunity to speak in favor of the death penalty. He knows the system has flaws, that some who deserve death don’t get it. It’s just the way the system works, he says. The death penalty will be given inconsistently as long as judges have different views and interpretations of the law. That doesn’t mean it should be repealed.

He wanted Faust to be put to death for her crimes. Life in prison isn’t enough punishment for her.

“During the trial, I watched her making eyes at the jurors, smiling, trying to manipulate them with her facial expressions,” he said.

Parminter’s father, Everett, feels the same way: Because Faust is a woman, she didn’t get what she deserved.

Nebraska judges have never sentenced a woman to death.

“She should have more punishment,” he said. “You just can’t kill two people like that.”

Van Fossen said the pain and the bad feelings toward Faust are still with the family.

“We lost a good friend. All he did was try to help,” he said.

Bob Parminter had two little girls and a stepdaughter.

Everett Parminter said his son loved life.

“When you lose a child, you can’t hardly describe it,” he said.

Bob’s wife has remarried and moved to the western part of the state with the girls, now 11 and 13, he said. The Parminters continue to see their grandchildren.

“We talk about him a lot,” Everett Parminter said, “to make sure they remember their daddy Bob.”

Creighton Greene

Mary Witcher of Omaha is new to this ordeal.

Her son, Creighton Kihara Greene Sr., 35, was shot and killed Aug. 28 in Omaha, the victim of a mistaken identity.

A Florida man, Tony Berry, and a Crete woman, LaRhonda Flowers, have been arrested and charged in the killing.

Witcher said the two were looking to collect a debt from another man and came to her son’s house, where that man used to live. They held her grandson, who was 14, at gunpoint and ordered him to call his father.

Creighton Greene rushed home from work and confronted Berry about the treatment of his son. Berry is alleged to have shot Greene, who died later at a hospital.

“They shed innocent blood, for what reason I don’t know,” Witcher said. “And his son witnessed things that will affect him for the rest of his life.”

Families become victims, too, she said, when this kind of violence happens.

If the two are guilty, she said, they should be sentenced to life without parole so they can never do this again to another family.

“People have to live with the consequences of their choices,” she said. “They don’t deserve a plea agreement. I will follow this process. I want the maximum sentence under the law.”

Witcher said she is against the death penalty, because it hasn’t deterred murders. But murderers should not be allowed back on the streets.

“There are some people who don’t deserve a second chance,” she said.

Craig Dodge

It’s been 20 years since Lancaster County Sheriff’s Deputy Craig Dodge was killed while responding to a domestic assault in Hickman.

His wife, Barbara, who never remarried, continues to stay involved in victims’ rights issues and a police survivors’ organization.

And she continues to believe in the death penalty. Her husband’s killer, Terry Reynolds, is serving a life sentence.

The death penalty, she said, is logical, appropriate and practical.

Reynolds has been in prison for 20 years and could be there for 20 more.

“What has it cost us?” she asked. “Is there a better way to spend our money?”

Her husband was in favor of the death penalty, as was his family, Dodge said.

When he died, an aggravating circumstance in the death penalty law applied only to situations in which police officers were killed by someone they held in custody. It did not apply to Reynolds because he had not yet been arrested.

Reynolds also did not have a significant violent criminal history and the shooting was not considered heinous.

Barbara and Craig Dodge had been married three years, bringing together four sons into a blended family.

“It’s a huge loss what we didn’t get to have,” she said.

Her husband was good at his job and took extra measures to be safe, she said. He had gone into the house without backup because he was concerned about Reynolds’ wife and children. He placed their safety above his own.

“Sometimes it seems like yesterday, and sometimes it seems like it’s been 100 years,” she said.

Barbara Dodge followed the case and attended Reynolds’ trial.

“I was trying so hard to understand everything, the why and how,” she said. “Through it all, I did find compassion for his killer. He was a miserable messed-up guy. My heart goes out to his family. They have suffered.”

Barbara Dodge has become a believer in restorative justice, which puts victims and offenders together to talk about the impact of the crime upon their lives, to ask questions and get answers, and to participate in holding the offender accountable for the crime through some sort of compensation.

“A lot of times a victim just wants to understand,” she said.

She would like to see a restorative justice project take hold in Nebraska.

“We need some legislation to open the door for restorative justice,” she said. “Other states speak highly of its results.“

Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.