ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 31, 1996 TAG: 9601310060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Lede
Hours before he was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for clubbing a Roanoke woman to death, Paul D. Thompson expressed no remorse for the three people he has been convicted of killing, and hinted that police have yet to find all the victims of his deadly road trip across the Southeast.
"It don't bother me a bit, man," Thompson said in a telephone interview from the Roanoke City Jail.
"The people that I killed, I did it for a reason. It was not just to kill somebody."
Thompson - a drifter who committed his first murder when he was 16 - more recently has been convicted of killing a West Virginia man in 1994, coming to Roanoke and killing Virgie Green of Old Southwest, then traveling to Florida and trying to kill another man.
In the interview, Thompson suggested he had killed two other people in West Virginia.
At least one of the victims was killed in a drug-related shootout, Thompson said, but he declined to elaborate. "It's three that they've got," he said, referring to the three murders for which he has been convicted. "But it's two more."
Authorities confirmed that Thompson was involved in a 1994 shootout that left one of his friends dead in Raleigh County, W.Va. But Thompson did not fire the fatal shot, according to Sgt. Gordon Gregory of the Raleigh County Sheriff's Department.
"Not that I know of," Gregory said when asked if Thompson could have been involved in any other killings in West Virginia. "But anything's possible with these guys."
Thompson's extensive criminal record - and his complete lack of remorse - prompted a Roanoke prosecutor to compare him to the roving psychopath who killed at random in the movie "Natural Born Killers."
"He kills people like most people swat at flies," Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Greg Phillips said.
"But starting today, we now know that he's never going to do it again," Phillips said, "because he'll be in the penitentiary for the rest of his life."
Thompson's 10-minute sentencing hearing Tuesday in Roanoke Circuit Court was a formality, with Judge Clifford Weckstein imposing two life sentences plus 25 years in prison as part of a plea agreement reached last month.
Thompson, 26, will never be eligible for parole.
"It ain't nothing bad," he said about spending the rest of his life behind bars. "I've been locked up since I was 16. The first charge I ever had was a murder charge. So it ain't no big difference. I'm used to being locked up."
Because West Virginia does not have a death penalty, Thompson could not be punished any more if, in fact, he had killed additional people there.
"I can't imagine that anyone would prosecute him on anything else," said David Damico, a Roanoke lawyer who represents Thompson. "Why bother? Why spend the money and take the risk of transferring him to another jurisdiction?''
Damico said he was aware of the drug-related shooting in which Thompson was involved. Thompson, David McKeone - his traveling companion who also has been convicted for his role in Green's murder and robbery - and a third friend went to the Raleigh County home of a man who owed them drug money.
Guns were drawn, and Thompson's friend was killed in the shootout, apparently by the man who owed them money. A prosecutor concluded that the man fired in self-defense and did not pursue charges, Gregory said.
In the three killings for which Thompson has been convicted, the motive has been essentially the same - a need for money to finance a lifestyle of drugs, alcohol and aimless drifting across the country.
The spree started shortly after Thompson and McKeone were released from a West Virginia prison on theft changes in the summer of 1994. After hearing that Harold Lee Jones had a stash of money somewhere on his Marion County farm, they went there in August and confronted him in a shed.
Jones, 63, was killed by a blow to the back of his head. From there, Thompson and McKeone headed to Roanoke.
In October, they met the daughter of Virgie Green at a fast-food restaurant next to the cheap motel where they were staying. They struck up a friendship that developed over the next few weeks, until Green, 44, invited them into her home on Woods Avenue in Old Southwest.
But Thompson was soon restless to hit the road again, worrying that Green - aware of their criminal exploits in West Virginia - might turn them in to police.
About 1 a.m. Oct. 24, Thompson took a pipe wrench and struck Green in the head from behind as she sat on a bed playing cards, witnesses have testified in earlier hearings. A small amount of money, tools, a television and a vacuum cleaner were taken from her home.
Thompson and McKeone then wrapped Green's body in blankets, pulled two trash bags over her head, and dumped her body in the trunk of a junked blue Buick in her back yard. Her body was discovered the following week.
By then, Thompson and McKeone had already driven to West Virginia to sell Green's pickup truck, caught a taxi back to Roanoke, and taken a bus to Florida.
Their next known crime happened near Tampa, where they were involved in the carjacking and attempted murder of an elderly man. From there they headed to Texas, where police finally arrested them.
In confessions to police, the two men said they had taken turns striking the blows in each attack. McKeone had the last shot. "If I had hit him, he would have been dead," Thompson told police, referring to the Florida man who survived the attack.
Tuesday's sentencing was the final chapter in a long series of court appearances for Thompson. His total sentence: Two life sentences plus 25 years for Green's killing, life with no parole for the West Virginia murder, and 12 years for the attempted murder in Florida.
In saying that he felt no sorrow for his victims, Thompson explained that he had a reason for killing each one of them. He had no choice but to kill Green, he said, because she was going to turn him in to police.
"If she would have told me that she wasn't going to call the cops, she would be alive today," he said.
During the interview, Thompson also admitted killing a man in Texas when he was 16, a crime that his lawyers would have fought to keep out of court if he had gone to trial for capital murder in Roanoke. That killing involved a botched robbery in which Thompson and two other people lured a homosexual man out of a nightclub to rob him, but ended up beating him to death when he resisted.
Thompson was convicted as a juvenile and spent about two years in a facility for troubled youths, Damico said.
If Thompson had not accepted a plea agreement that gave him a life sentence in Roanoke, his lawyers would have presented testimony about his difficult childhood in an effort to persuade the jury to spare his life.
Thompson's mother was 14 when he was born, Damico said, and the boy had no father figure, only his mother's steady stream of boyfriends and husbands who stayed briefly before moving on.
"His mother partied a lot, which would be a euphemistic way of saying it," Damico said. "She was not present a lot during his early childhood."
For the most part, Thompson was raised by grandparents in West Virginia. In his early teens, he was given a trailer and allowed to live on his own, Damico said. Thompson dropped out of high school and began to abuse alcohol and drugs.
"He's done about every drug you've ever heard of," Damico said.
Thompson had moved back to Texas to be with his mother when he was convicted of his first murder. When released from the juvenile correctional facility, he returned to West Virginia and was convicted of several theft charges. After he and McKeone were paroled, they launched what would be Thompson's final crime spree.
Asked what he plans to do for the rest of his life, Thompson said he wants to go into the tattoo business, giving inmates homemade tattoos with a makeshift gun that he plans to construct behind bars.
Thompson's arms are covered with tattoos - many from his earlier days in prison - and his stomach bears an inked likeness of Freddy Krueger, a character in the movie "Nightmare on Elm Street." He has so many tattoos that Thompson could not count them. "Basically, I'm about covered up," he said.
For a while, Thompson said, he was thinking about pleading guilty to capital murder and asking for a death sentence to shorten his life of incarceration.
"You've got to die sometime, man," he said. "Dying ain't nothing big."
LENGTH: Long : 149 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Paul D. Thompson/``It don't bother me a bit, man''.by CNBcolor. KEYWORDS: ROMUR