DATE: Saturday, July 26, 1997               TAG: 9707260008

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: KERRY DOUGHERTY

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

O'DELL WANTED PUBLICITY MORE THAN HE WANTED A FAIR TRIAL

Virginia's long, ugly nightmare starring Joe O'Dell is finally over. The man who brutally tortured, raped and killed Helen Capps Schartner 12 years ago, who killed a fellow inmate in prison and who abducted one Florida woman with the intent of raping and killing her, too, has been put to death.

Like many, I privately recoil from the death penalty. I don't like what it says about American society that we thirst for this kind of revenge on the murderers among us.

But if ever a man was an argument in favor of capital punishment, if ever there was a poster boy for the death penalty, it was Joe O'Dell.

In the dozen years since he ruthlessly killed Ms. Schartner, O'Dell never showed one twinge of remorse. Worse, he shamelessly sought attention and, by weaving a web of lies and half-truths, used well-intentioned people to feed his insatiable hunger for publicity. These last dozen years have been excruciating for Schartner's family as her killer paraded himself in front of the world as a misunderstood victim of the justice system.

Yet O'Dell was right about one thing: The U.S. justice system did not work in his case. Had it, O'Dell would still be locked in a Florida prison for the kidnapping of a woman there. In 1975 he abducted and pistol-whipped Donna Doyle, threatening to sexually molest her - if not while alive, then after killing her.

Luckily for Doyle the police were in pursuit and, unlike Ms. Schartner, she lived to tell about her terrifying encounter. O'Dell was sentenced to a total of 114 years for the crimes he committed that night. Yet, Florida prison authorities foolishly released him a few years later and, consequently, turned this nightstalker - who had 14 prior felony convictions dating back to 1958 - loose on society again.

Who could have predicted 12 years ago, when O'Dell's case was crawling through the Virginia Beach courts, that all these years later the papers would still be full of a man whom prosecutors believed to be a serial killer?

On a drizzly night in 1985 he snatched a perfectly innocent woman out of a parking lot and tortured her until she was dead. In so doing, O'Dell didn't just snuff out the life of one person. He brutally intruded into and irrevocably changed the lives of others. Schartner, a single mother, left behind a teen-age son and a family that dearly loved her.

On the surface, there was nothing to set his case a apart from a handful of other capital murder cases being tried in Virginia Beach in the mid-1980s. But almost from the start O'Dell sought attention more than good legal counsel. With much fanfare, he fired his court-appointed lawyer and decided to represent himself.

As the reporter who covered most of O'Dell's case and many of the others from that period, I am sickened by the celebrity status this man managed to attain. When I learned that the people of Italy had adopted Joe O'Dell, made him an honorary citizen of Palermo, my stomach turned. If only he'd gone to Palermo when Florida paroled him.

The story of Joe O'Dell concerns a homicidal man and a bungling justice system, but it isn't without a hero: Her name is Connie Craig. O'Dell was living with her at the time he killed Ms. Schartner. Shortly after the murder, he asked Craig how to wash blood out of clothing. Curious, Ms. Craig waited until O'Dell left the house to go to her garage, where she discovered a pile of his blood-saturated clothes. She knew from reading the newspaper that O'Dell had been at the same club where a woman had been abducted and murdered.

Craig courageously phoned police.

The detectives took the clothes for testing but didn't return to arrest O'Dell until many agonizing hours later. Ms. Craig testified of her terror that O'Dell would find the bloody clothes missing and kill her, too.

Murders of strangers are the most difficult to solve, and Joe O'Dell was what criminologists call a ``stranger-predator.''

If Ms. Craig had not turned O'Dell over to police, he might have gotten away with Schartner's murder.

So while the people of Palermo mourn the passing of O'Dell, excuse me while I instead grieve for Helen Schartner.

And at the same time, I pause to remember Connie Craig's act of courage. MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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