1819
Troy was platted in 1819.
about 0:10:05The story
Troy, Illinois, is a small town in Madison County in the southwestern part of the state, about 25 minutes from St. Louis. It grew from ten acres platted in 1819 into a middle-class commuter town of just over 10,000 people. In February 1990 it became the scene of the murder of a 69-year-old retired janitor named Roy Pendleton, whom everyone called Jasper. Jasper was a widower who had moved into a motel room after his wife died. He drove a 1978 Pontiac, ate Dinty Moore stew out of the can and was preparing to travel to Las Vegas to visit his dying brother.
He was a seventh-grade dropout whose mother left when he was small and whose father beat him severely. He ran away from home at ten and for good at 15, then worked in oil fields and construction and sang country music in bars.
Inside he ordered her to undress and put a leather strap around her neck, waved a butcher knife and threatened to kill her. The assault and torture lasted from 1 a.m. until about 8:30 a.m. He put the tip of the knife inside her and stabbed the mattress in a semicircle around her head. He left her alive.
In the parking lot of the Troy motel where Jasper lived, he asked for a ride to St. Louis and offered to pay for petrol. Jasper refused. Jasper let him in. He told Jasper he had a choice: be tied up and gagged, or be killed. He tied his wrists and ankles, put tape over his mouth and then over his nose, and held his hand over his nose and mouth until he thought he was dead. It bled. He held his hand over Jasper's nose and mouth for another five to ten minutes, slashed his throat and left a large chef knife embedded in his neck.
He then drove back to Troy and was stopped by police at a Texaco truck stop on February 9, 1990, in Jasper's stolen 1978 Pontiac. Police went to the motel to tell Jasper his car had been recovered and found him dead. He had been bound with ropes, tape and a nylon dog leash. He had three lacerations on his forehead, burns and what appeared to be cigarette ashes on his eyelids, stab holes in the mattress around his head, and his throat had been slashed with the knife still in it.
The investigator described him as cool as a cucumber with no remorse. He said he killed Jasper because he wanted to steal from him and did not want to be caught. His problem, he said, always had been that he did not give a damn. His fingerprints were all over the room, saliva on cigarette butts matched his, and a spot of blood matched Jasper's.
About three days before the killing, a woman in Troy had been tied up, held captive for three or four days and beaten intermittently with a hammer; she escaped when he fell asleep and ran to the police.
Patricia Vader of the Illinois Coalition against the Death Penalty called him a gifted man who had lost all hope. A petition organised by his childhood friend Herschel Crawford, a 73-year-old retiree from the Edwardsville area, gathered more than 300 signatures asking for the maximum punishment.
He said he had burned Jasper's eyelids and stolen from him deliberately to ensure that he got the death penalty. The defence presented no evidence. The court found him eligible for death, and Schaefermeyer testified that she had received counselling for post-traumatic stress for over a year.
It failed. His last meal that time had been coffee and cigarettes.
He asked for Coca-Cola and unfiltered Camel cigarettes as his last meal, and nobody visited him. His last words said that he offered no excuses, that he had been running from himself since he was a small boy in Texas and that he hoped his loved ones would forgive him.