THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602110052
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 145 lines
``The justice system has cracks, and sometimes things fall through the cracks,'' said J. Michael O'Connor, who eight years ago saw charges dropped against the man accused of brutally killing his fiancee, Grace Elizabeth Payne.
Norfolk police didn't close the case, however.
``They put it on the back burner, but they never put it in the cupboard,'' a grateful O'Connor said Saturday, a day after police again arrested Ricky DeWayne Rogers, now 40, and charged him for a second time with Payne's murder.
Citing ``new technology,'' and after extensive interviews with witnesses, investigators have charged Rogers with murder, rape, robbery, credit card theft and credit card forgery. He is in jail without bond.
O'Connor is as certain now as he was in 1987 that police have the right man. ``You just wouldn't chase someone that was a maybe,'' O'Connor said. ``Not for eight years.''
Dale Pennell, the victim's sister, isn't letting her desire to see Rogers convicted cloud her realism.
``I hope. I hope,'' said Pennell, 46, an assistant principal on the Peninsula. ``But it's going to be up to the citizens of Norfolk.''
After her sister was killed and the charges against Rogers were dropped, Pennell became an activist, fighting for tougher sentencing.
She stood with Gov. George F. Allen as he criss-crossed the state two years ago, galvanizing public support for parole reform. Yet, even with her own experience, she is not seeking pure retribution.
``You have to have punishment, but you also need prevention and rehabilitation,'' she said then. ``I'm still very interested in seeing all those things happen. I don't see them as opposing each other.''
Pennell often spoke of what happened to her sister. Audiences listened. So did legislators.
She joined Justice for Victims of Crime, based in Virginia Beach, and Family and Friends Against Crime Today, based on the Peninsula. And she is helping to found a new statewide group, Virginians United Against Crime.
Even as she focused on those efforts, however, Pennell kept an eye on her sister's case.
``I felt like it was my responsibility because there are a lot of young women over there (in Norfolk) that I believe are at risk,'' she said. ``I kept in touch with the police and the commonwealth's attorney's office. I believe this is what she would have wanted me to do.''
And she is ready to face the ordeal of a trial a third time.
So is O'Connor. He said Saturday that he is as ready now to testify against the suspect as he was eight years ago when he sat in a Norfolk courtroom, stunned as he heard a prosecutor move to drop charges against Rogers.
A key witness had been killed in a domestic dispute; another had changed his testimony; DNA testing - used for the first time in a Norfolk murder case - had proved inconclusive; and other potential evidence was weak. Rather than risk an acquittal which would have left Rogers immune from further prosecution for the murder, the state dropped the charges.
In 1991, O'Connor was again in the courtroom when Rogers was on trial in Norfolk for the abduction and rape of two women. But the jury found him guilty only of sodomy. Because he had already been in jail six months awaiting trial, he was freed.
``That was a real surprise to me,'' said O'Connor, 46, a rate analyst with a transportation company in Richmond.
During the trial, Rogers had taken to turning around and looking back at O'Connor and Pennell as well as other family and friends of the three victims.
``I made eyes with him every chance I got,'' O'Connor said. ``He tries to get people to back down; he tried to intimidate me. But, basically, I wanted him to know I would be persistent.''
Persistence - by Payne's friends and family and investigators - paid off. On Friday, O'Connor got a phone call from Pennell telling him that the suspect was in custody again.
``Finally! Thank goodness,'' was his immediate reaction, O'Connor said. ``We made the next hurdle.''
He went out and celebrated Friday night. But he is realistically cautious, too. ``You never know how a jury is going to see something,'' he said.
O'Connor said no day goes by when he doesn't think of the woman with whom he planned to share the rest of his life.
He knows all the grim details of her death, but prefers to remember the woman he knew.
``She was a totally honest person. Very caring . . . a genuinely good person,'' O'Connor said. ``She had a real good sense of humor. She was a fun person. You met her once and you felt like you had known her all your life. Everybody seemed to like her.''
During the two years they dated, ``I had several of her friends - a half-dozen or more - tell me that Liz was their best friend,'' O'Connor said. ``I think that's highly unusual that you have that many people refer to someone in those terms.''
Payne, a 1977 graduate of Menchville High School in Newport News, went on to earn a degree in business administration from Old Dominion University. She then worked for several years for a Portsmouth company. In 1986, however, job stress and the deaths of both of her parents within 11 months of each other took their toll.
After taking a few months off, she took a job with a Smithfield company and began to rebound.
All the while, she had been dating O'Connor.
Payne moved into O'Connor's apartment in Norfolk after his job took him to Charlotte and then Richmond. She was looking ahead, thinking of moving to Richmond, too, and opening her own business, a frame shop.
The couple planned to wed in the spring of 1988. But they never had a chance.
On June 21, 1987, Payne didn't show up for work. Police found her car parked in front of her home on Westover Avenue in Norfolk's Ghent section. When they broke into her converted attic apartment, they found her body in a bedroom.
She had been raped, bound, and strangled with electrical cord. A sock was stuffed in her mouth, and her face had been burned with lye and covered with tape. One knife was buried in her chest; another, in her abdomen. She died of a combination of multiple stab wounds and strangulation.
``Not everything has come out about what all he did to her and how much and how long she suffered before she died,'' Pennell, the victim's sister, said.
A week after the murder, O'Connor got Payne's Visa bill in the mail. It showed a $300 withdrawal from a Crestar ATM - made the day after she was killed. O'Connor called police.
Shortly after, investigators asked him to review a security camera videotape taken at the ATM.
``They didn't tell me anything,'' he said. ``They just asked me to look at the tape and see if I recognized anyone. One of the detectives stood beside me and two of them were in front of me. Watching me. All three of them were waiting for my first reaction.''
The tape ran. And then a familiar face stepped into the frame. A man who had occasionally worked with O'Connor at Campeco Cleaners. A man who had been in Payne's apartment on a couple occasions when he went there to meet O'Connor to go out on a cleaning job.
A man O'Connor had not suspected. Until now.
He told police it was Ricky DeWayne Rogers.
``There was a sense of relief that we finally had a lead or a clue,'' O'Connor said. ``But it was still sort of shocking to know that it was someone I knew.''
Now, with Rogers in custody again, O'Connor has a passionate hope that he'll see justice done. Otherwise, all he has are memories of his wife-to-be.
And a lot of good friends.
``There is a circle of people that were friends of hers that became friends of mine,'' said O'Connor, who remains single. ``I guess it's her legacy to me. And I think that's pretty special.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
In 1987, Grace E. Payne was brutally slain in her Ghent home.
KEYWORDS: RAPE SEX CRIME MURDER ARREST by CNB