Daily Archives: 30 August, 2017

2000: Gary Lee Roll, pained

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On this date in 2000, Missouri put Gary Lee Roll out of his suffering.

A war veteran with no criminal record prior to the triple homicide that landed him in these pages, Gary Lee Roll came from — and, according to his remorseful last statement, failed — a stable and secure family.

He could trace his own tragedy back in 1973 when a botched operation by a U.S. Army oral surgeon left him with a life-altering pain in his jaw that would never go away. It eventually pulled him into a spiral of self-medication..

“It hurts to talk about it,” Roll said of the continual debilitating pain that afflicted most of his adulthood. “It affected my life so much. It changed me.”

One night in August 1992 Roll, his pain abated but his mind clouded by pot, LSD, and alcohol, persuaded two buddies to join him on a spur-of-moment robbery of a drug dealer. Our man barged into the place posing as a cop, and then reflected that he was liable to be identified by his victims. Before the trio fled richer by $215 and 12 ounces of pot, they’d left Sherry Scheper bludgeoned to death, her son Curtis, 22, knifed to death, and her other son Randy, 17, shot to death. (Randy was the one in the drug trade.)

As ill-planned as this sounds, and was, the killers were not detected for weeks afterwards, when one of Roll’s accomplices grew nervous about his situation and secretly taped our man admitting to the murder. Those tapes found their way into the hands of police.

The pain-wracked Roll entered guilty pleas and though not technically a volunteer for his own execution also showed little zeal to oppose it. “If I thought there was something I could say, I would say anything. But I don’t think there is,” he reportedly mused. His accomplices both received life sentences.

On this day..