COLUMBUS — A man who bludgeoned his girlfriend to death, threw her body in a river and stole her ATM card to buy crack cocaine was denied clemency by Gov. Ted Strickland yesterday, a day ahead of the condemned man’s execution.
Michael Benge’s lethal injection today would be the eighth in 2010, breaking the state’s record of the most people executed in a year since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999.
Benge
The Ohio Parole Board recommended against mercy for the 49-year-old Benge of Hamilton in southwest Ohio in the 1993 murder of Judith Gabbard. A spokeswoman for the public defender’s office said Benge has no more legal appeals.
Benge was moved Tuesday to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, prisons spokeswoman Julie Walburn said. He was upbeat and spent much of the day on the phone and visited in person with his daughter and son, mother, sisters and other relatives, she said. His special meal request included a large chef salad, barbecue baby back ribs, two cans of salted cashews and two bottles of iced tea.
Benge and Gabbard had been out at the Riverview bar on Jan. 31, 1993. They both drank and he smoked crack outside.
After five hours, they left and went down to the west side of the Miami River, Benge said to talk.
Stories differ on what happened next.
Benge said he lifted her ATM card while they were at the bar and Gabbard discovered the breach at the river while reaching for her cigarettes. Prosecutors argued Benge took her to the river with the intent of stealing the card, noting one of the pockets in Gabbard’s jacket was found empty and turned inside out after the murder.
In either case, Benge’s theft of the card heightened an already escalating conflict between the two over his drug use.
He had stolen and pawned a pair of her gold earrings and tried to take her TV and VCR to sell for drug money, according a statement in the clemency report by her sister Kathy Johnson. As his drug use grew, their relationship turned violent, Johnson told parole officials.
“Judy lived in fear for weeks before her death. She told me she missed our cookout because he had hit her. She had a black eye. She didn’t want us to know,” said Johnson, one of Gabbard’s eight siblings. “She missed Thanksgiving and Christmas also. She said he had been hitting her.”
The night of the murder, Benge said Gabbard slapped him. He snapped.
Gabbard may have fled from the car to avoid his blows or he may have pushed her out onto the ground. Benge then picked up a tire iron and beat her repeatedly in the head. He weighted her body with concrete and slid it into the river, leaving her car stuck in the bloodstained mud.
Benge swam across the river and found his way to his friend John Fuller’s house, where he confessed to the crime. He told Fuller’s girlfriend, Awantha Shields, that he intended to tell police “a couple of black guys jumped him and his girlfriend and beat his girlfriend up.”
He later gave the ATM card to Larry Carter and Baron Carr, who were black, and urged them to use it to extract drug money, a move prosecutors said was intended to frame them for the murder. The three withdrew a total of $400 from Gabbard’s account for Benge’s drug purchases.
When he was apprehended by police, Benge dropped the card to the ground.
Benge was convicted in a jury trial of aggravated murder and aggravated robbery and found guilty of gross abuse of a corpse.
In seeking mercy, his lawyers said Benge was physically abused by a stepfather and stepbrother and began abusing substances when he was 11 — first alcohol, then marijuana, and eventually cocaine. They said he has a brain impairment as a result.
His mother, Juanita Babb, told the parole board she failed to provide her son love and affection and didn’t do enough to protect him from abuse. She said she felt responsible for some of his problems.
His former wife, Peggy Ferneding, his two children, and two sisters all said the violence was uncharacteristic of Benge before he began using crack. They described him as an active member of the family who helped advise his children to pursue careers in the military and cared for his mother.
Prosecutors said the conflicting stories that Benge told authorities, including at his parole hearing, prove he is not mentally impaired. “He concocted a lengthy, articulate story, which suggests that his executive functioning was not impaired,” according to the clemency report.
Gabbard’s son, Steve, asked the parole board not to spare Benge. He described his mother’s cheerful personality and her pride in earning her GED diploma. He said he’s overprotective of his wife and daughter as a result of his mother’s murder.
“I drive them nuts. I just know what can happen,” he wrote. “It’s not safe; we need to be more aggressive with criminals. If you hurt someone, you need to know you are going to pay with your life — then you’re going to deal with God.”
