Before First Federal Execution in Years, Family of Victims Dissents

HECTOR, Ark. — In early December, if nothing else changes, Daniel Lewis Lee will be the first federal prisoner put to death in nearly two decades. He was sentenced 20 years ago after being convicted — along with another man, both white supremacists on the hunt for guns and cash — of taping bags over the heads of a husband, wife and 8-year-old girl, tying rocks around them and throwing them into a bayou.

“We owe it to the victims and their families,” Attorney General William Barr said in July, “to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

As much as anyone, Earlene Branch Peterson, who lost her daughter Nancy and granddaughter Sarah in those murders, is the kind of person Barr was talking about. Now 80, and a conservative Trump supporter who lives in the Ozarks, she has come to a firm conviction about what she is owed and not owed.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t put Daniel Lee to death.”

There is nothing straightforward about death as retribution: who wants it, who gets it and on whose behalf it is carried out. This is true even in a case like that of Lee, whom Peterson first saw as “the persona of evilness.” The process that led to his death sentence left her and a striking number of people close to the case with a disquiet that lasted for decades.

Peterson is hardly alone in her belief that Lee should be spared. Her surviving daughter, Kimma Gurel, who sat beside her every excruciating day of the six-week trial, strongly agrees. So does her granddaughter, Monica Veillette, who has for years been pleading with officials to change Lee’s sentence. Not all family members are adamantly opposed to the execution. Scott Mueller, whose father William Mueller was the third victim, said: “It don’t really matter to me whether they kill him or not.”

But the lead prosecutor in the trial, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Stripling, wrote in a 2014 letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder that though he believed in capital punishment, he was disturbed by the randomness of its imposition. Lee’s death sentence, he wrote, “perfectly illustrates this inexplicable randomness.”

The federal judge who oversaw the trial — Thomas Eisele, a Nixon appointee to the bench, who died two years ago — wrote in a 2015 letter to Holder that he had second-guessed his decisions ever since and was left “with the firm conviction that justice was not served in this particular case, solely with regard to the sentence of death imposed on Daniel Lewis Lee.”

Little of this is motivated by any doubts about Lee’s guilt. His lawyers raised questions about the reliability of key witnesses, but “that is not the issue here,” said Gurel, 60, now living in Washington state. She was persuaded during the trial that Lee was guilty of heinous crimes and that he believed things she had always found abhorrent. Her husband is currently running for their local City Council on a platform of rejecting “hatred and bigotry.”

But on how the penalties were dispensed for that guilt, she said: “It just made no sense.”

Much of the unease revolves around the fate of the other man involved, Chevie Kehoe, whom the judge described as “the ringleader” in the crime.

Raised by his family in a white supremacist religion, Kehoe traveled the county proselytizing for an Aryan Peoples Republic and recruiting others to join his family’s small but lethal cell. Most of the trial was focused on Kehoe — his involvement in other murders and robberies, his violent threats toward his own family, his shootouts with the police. He had allegedly burglarized the Mueller home for guns once before and had brought Lee along for more. According to the testimony of Kehoe’s mother and brother, it was Chevie who had killed 8-year-old Sarah, because Lee could not bring himself to do it.

But Kehoe was clean-cut and charismatic, “like a young businessman,” Peterson remembers. The jury sentenced him to life in prison.

Lee — one eye ghostly, lost in a fight, his neck gilded with Nazi tattoos — was introduced to white supremacy by violent young men during his youth, spent in a series of religious boarding schools, mental health hospitals and juvenile detention centers. He drifted in the vicious periphery of skinhead groups before meeting Kehoe. Together they carried out anti-government plans, Kehoe as the mastermind and Lee, as one prosecutor put it in the trial, as “the faithful dog.”

When Kehoe was sentenced to life, the prosecution team collectively agreed not to seek death for Lee. They told his lawyer and the victims’ family members, who gave their assent. But Justice Department officials in Washington overruled this decision. So the prosecution argued that Lee was too dangerous to let live, even in prison, and the jury sentenced him to die.

“We were shocked,” Veillette said. “Shocked. That he got death. And Chevie didn’t.”

The disparity of the two sentences troubled Gurel, eventually leading her to question capital punishment altogether. Over the course of the trial, Veillette had begun to see the two men as at least partially being punished for their brutal upbringing.

“His dad and mom should be in jail for the way they raised their children,” Veillette said of Kehoe. “They did that to their child.”

Peterson does not look at things this way. A person must answer for his choices alone, she said. She disagrees with a lot of the views of her progressive daughter and granddaughter. At the time of the trial, she believed the answer for the men’s choices was plain.

“They both should die,” she said. “I felt that with all my heart.”

The killings were the worst thing that ever happened to Peterson, in a life that was not free of other tragedies. Nancy and Sarah’s pictures hang in Peterson’s bedroom, and Nancy’s handmade ceramics still sit on her bathroom sink.

After being abandoned by Sarah’s father, Nancy married William Mueller, whom she worked for as an electrician. He had come to rural Arkansas from New York, by way of Vietnam.

Peterson said that he beat Nancy badly, sending her to the hospital with broken bones. (Scott Mueller said he never saw physical abuse.) He insisted that her family members keep their distance. But they became aware that Mueller, a hoarder of guns and gold, had drifted into the orbit of far-right fanatics in the anti-government fervor of the 1990s.

Peterson and her husband became so concerned that they withdrew money from the bank, intending to pay someone to steal Nancy and Sarah away. Then, in January 1996, the whole family disappeared. And the following June, Peterson was at the coroner’s office identifying familiar winter coats, after bodies were found by a woman out fishing.

Peterson saw the disparate sentences for Kehoe and Lee as unfair. But she had no objection to death as punishment, not at first. She hated those men and was consumed with that hatred through years of prayer and talks with her pastor, through the death of Nancy’s father and her new life of solitude.

But she kept rereading one Bible verse. “My grace is sufficient,” she said, quivering with tears, almost unable to get the words out. She had been reading it for five years. “It ended up being that,” she said. “I come out whole. I’m OK. I’m a warrior.”

“I believe putting Daniel Lee to death is not the answer,” she said, composing herself. “It’s an easy way out. He should have to live through this. Like I did.”

She is now actively supporting efforts by federal public defenders seeking clemency for Lee — not freedom, Peterson clarified, but a life in prison. She has requested an audience with President Donald Trump. The sentences were not fair, she would tell him.

And the right punishment for Chevie Kehoe?

“Chevie has used the system his whole life,” Peterson said. She doubted that he would ever change, as the nuns who had spent time with Lee in prison told her he had. But, she said, “he’s a child of God. And I have to love him, too.”

Earlier this month, a polite man from a federal “crisis support team” called the family. He explained that the government would pay for flights to the execution, for a hotel and meals for up to eight people. A chaplain and counselor would be on hand. There would be a dinner before the execution and trips arranged to and from the facility.

When Peterson told the man she did not support any of this, he said he didn’t need to know that. He just needed to know if she planned to attend.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2019 The New York Times Company

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