ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, November 22, 1996 TAG: 9611260134
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: JARRATT
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY STAFF WRITER
Ronald Bennett was executed by lethal injection Thursday night for the 1985 murder and robbery of a Chesterfield County woman.
Surrounded by eight blue-uniformed guards, the heavy-set, bearded Bennett was led shackled to the death chamber and strapped to a white-sheeted gurney about 9 p.m.
Officials then pulled a curtain in front of the gurney so they could insert intravenous lines into Bennett's body without being seen by witnesses.
When the curtain opened 15 minutes later, Bennett, IV lines in place, lay inert on the gurney with his hands bandaged to each arm support. A white towel was draped over his left forearm. He was dead in 10 minutes. He was 42.
Bennett was sentenced to death for the murder of Ann Vaden. A 28-year-old real estate agent, Vaden was tied up, stabbed, choked and beaten to death during a robbery in her apartment in 1985.
The case remained unsolved until 1986, when Bennett's ex-wife drunkenly confided to a friend in California that the ring she was wearing had belonged to the murdered woman.
The friend alerted authorities, who sought out Mary Bennett and eventually used her testimony and the testimony of another man to convict Ronald Bennett and sentence him to death in a 1987 trial.
The case took another turn in 1994 when a lawyer and investigator for Bennett tracked down Mary Bennett - now Mary Bennett Stroh - in Spokane, Wash.
In an affidavit videotaped in Spokane, Stroh told the men she lied at Bennett's trial to protect herself. The real killer, she said, was Kenneth Harris, the only other witness to testify against Bennett at the trial.
Stroh said that as she looked on, Harris murdered Vaden, hitting her with a Scotch whisky bottle and ``something he got from the kitchen.'' Bennett, she said, was not there.
Asked by Bennett's lawyer if she realized the serious consequences of admitting she had been present at a capital murder, Stroh said yes.
A year later, however, she changed her mind.
She said she had lied on the videotape to save Bennett from execution.
The tape became an object of contention during the last days of Bennett's life, when Bennett's lawyer sent it to Gov. George Allen for consideration in a clemency plea.
The move prompted a flurry of accusations from Chesterfield County Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Warren Von Schuch, who accused Bennett's lawyers of talking Stroh into committing perjury. Von Schuch countered with another affidavit in which an investigator says Stroh told him she was ``conned'' into making the videotape.
Von Schuch witnessed Bennett's execution Thursday night.
Reached in Washington on Thursday, Stroh accused the investigator of lying.
``[They] didn't force me into anything,'' Stroh said of Bennett's lawyers and employees of the Virginia Capital Resource Center who worked on the case.
``I was not conned into doing anything. I lied during that taping. I was trying to save my [ex] husband's life. I also recanted that statement.
``The resource center has done nothing but tell me to tell the truth. Even when I wanted to jump up and lie again, they told me not to.''
Did Stroh lie at Bennett's trial? Did she lie on the videotape, or did she lie about lying on the videotape? It doesn't matter, Donald Lee, Bennett's lawyer, said Thursday.
``The point is we should not execute a man based on the testimony of someone so incredibly unreliable,'' he said.
Allen disagreed.
``The videotaped recantation by Mary Bennett is not per- suasive,'' he said in a statement released Thursday afternoon.
``She herself has reconfirmed that her trial testimony was the truth. ... The statements made on the videotape are not only uncorroborated, but in direct variance to the evidence brought forth at trial. I find no reason to believe that the testimony of Mary Bennett at trial was unreliable.''
Vaden's parents, Shirley and Harry Keller, said this week that they are certain Bennett killed their daughter but feel ambivalent about his execution.
``I have mixed emotions,'' Harry Keller told a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. ``I hate to see a life be taken. But it should be [taken] for the heinous crime he committed. But it don't make me happy.''
Virginia plans five more executions before Christmas. If all five go forward, the state will lead the country in the number of executions this year.
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