DATE: Saturday, July 26, 1997               TAG: 9707260391

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: RICHMOND                          LENGTH:   43 lines

PALERMO, ITALY, PREPARES TO BURY O'DELL'S BODY

The state medical examiner released the body of rapist-murderer Joseph Roger O'Dell III to a funeral home as the Italian government made preparations to fly it to Palermo for burial.

O'Dell was executed Wednesday night, still insisting he was innocent and telling witnesses it was the happiest day of his life because of his marriage eight hours earlier to longtime friend and confidante Lori Urs.

O'Dell's case received extraordinary publicity in Italy, where opposition to capital punishment runs high and where Urs had lobbied the news media, the Vatican and government officials for years.

At a public square in Rome where hundreds of Italians demonstrated against capital punishment, a long silence broken only by a man screaming ``Murder!'' followed the announcement of O'Dell's execution.

Urs said O'Dell would be buried in Palermo, where a monument would be erected in his memory. Leoluco Orlando, mayor of the Sicilian city, was among those who had met with Gov. George F. Allen to plead for O'Dell's life.

Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II and the Italian premier, president and parliament also had asked that O'Dell be spared, but Allen rejected the clemency request about four hours before the execution. The U.S. Supreme Court also denied last-minute appeals.

Allen said he saw ``no legitimate reason that would justify my overturning the judgment of the jury and judge who heard this case.''

O'Dell, 55, was executed at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt for the 1985 murder of Helen Schartner, a Virginia Beach secretary.

O'Dell claimed that another death row prisoner who was executed in 1993 raped, sodomized, bludgeoned and strangled Schartner.

The state medical examiner performed an autopsy on O'Dell's body, as it is required to do on all executed inmates. Robert Holloway, administrator of the medical examiner's office, said the body was then released to a funeral home, but he declined to identify the home.

Italian consul Vito Piraino in Norfolk said O'Dell's body will be flown to Palermo on Monday or Tuesday. Piraino said he believed the city of Palermo and possibly other sources were absorbing the cost of the flight. KEYWORDS: DEATH ROW CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

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