CORTLAND — Miriam Fife lives a comfortable life in a duplex off a main thoroughfare in Cortland, about a dozen miles or so from the wooded area on Warren’s southwest side where her life was changed forever.

The 82-year-old who has spent years in courtrooms counseling and comforting victims of crime has some profound insights when it comes to the crime that struck at the core of her being — the brutal Sept. 10, 1985, attack on her youngest son Raymond.

The boy was going to meet a friend to accompany him to a Boy Scout meeting when he was attacked. He died in the hospital two days after his father Ike — Miriam Fife’s late husband — found him along the path behind a Palmyra Road grocery store.

At her home recently, Fife spoke about justice and forgiveness when it comes to Danny Lee Hill, one of the two held responsible legally for Raymond’s death. Hill now has lost an appeal at the highest judicial level to save his own life.

Timothy Combs, who died in prison at age 50 several years ago, also was convicted in Raymond’s death but was a juvenile at the time of the crime and not eligible for death row.

Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins last week asked the Ohio Supreme Court to set an execution date for Hill, while his federal public defenders are going to try a past tactic that has proven unsuccessful with both federal and state courts: convincing a local court their client is mentally handicapped and thus constitutionally ineligible for the death chamber.

In talking with Fife after all these legal decisions have come down, one gets the impression she would rather talk about something else. She likes to talk about the way Raymond lived and what could have been.

She likes to talk about the present and keeps a positive attitude. She brightens up when talking about Saturday’s family gathering and picnic to celebrate an upcoming engagement.

Fife likes to talk about the current exploits of her grandchildren, especially the military career of a grandson who serves in the Coast Guard along the shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota, and the baseball exploits of another grandson, Gino. You can’t help to think that Fife is thinking about what could have been for Raymond when she is talking about these youngsters.

DOCUMENT

Watkins, who hired Fife to direct his Victim Witness Protection office after the Hill proceedings, was thinking about her and the Fife family when he penned the 19-page motion to the Supreme Court that was filed Wednesday.

A footnote in the motion talks about Fife working tirelessly assisting other families of homicide victims as well as other crime victims. She created the Trumbull County chapter of Parents of Murdered Children in 1987. Watkins also said Fife was instrumental in getting victims the right to submit statements in juvenile court.

Fife is still on the board of the Trumbull County Rape Crisis Team and the county’s Juvenile Victim Witness Division, Watkins said.

In his closing statements asking the high court to give an execution order in Hill’s case, Watkins writes, “the Fife family too is waiting to see justice carried out.” In going over details of the murder, Watkins keeps returning to the fact that his father found Raymond mortally wounded in that wooded field.

ANOTHER EXECUTION

In looking at the document that seeks Hill’s execution, Fife remembers the story Watkins tells about Ohio becoming the first state to adopt a one-drug execution protocol. She was there near the death house in Lucasville on Dec. 8, 2009, when one of Trumbull County’s convicted murderers — Kenneth Biros — became the first to be executed in the United States with the use of a single drug: sodium thiopental.

Fife remembers the actions that day of Mary Jane Hiess, the mother of Biros’ young victim, Tami Engstrom. Biros brutally murdered and then desecrated Engstrom’s body.

“She (Hiess) was extremely ill, and she was in a wheelchair. Three family members were there including Mary Jane. We were watching the execution from a building about 50 feet away from the death house,” Fife said. “When it happened, we saw Mary Jane in a wheelchair coming out the door of the death house onto that little porch — giving thumbs up from the wheelchair.”

Watkins said Hiess died a few months after the Biros execution.

“I remember her saying that she wanted to see him (Biros) die before she died … and she did,” she said.

Fife, however, said she was more impressed with the actions of then-Gov. Ted Strickland the day Biros was executed.

“Gov. Strickland did everything he had to do by law to make sure that execution took place,” she said. “You see, he was against the death penalty, but you would never know it by the way he talked to that family. He knew the law and had to abide by it.”

REPRIEVES QUESTIONED

In his motion filed last week, Watkins questions the actions of governors giving reprieves to delay executions. He mentioned that both Govs. John Kasich and Mike DeWine issued 45 reprieves since the last execution was carried out in Ohio on July 18, 2018. Two of those reprieves were handed out to Trumbull County murderers Stanley Adams and Sean Carter.

“Indeed these repeated reprieves are not what the framers envisioned … a reprieve is a ‘temporary suspension’ or … ‘only a delay and is not a reduction of sentence, commutation of sentence or pardon,'” Watkins writes.

Fife has harsher words for the current governor, whom she said as attorney general appointed his best people to help fight the repeated appeals by Hill’s attorneys.

“I just don’t understand Gov. DeWine putting a moratorium on executions with the reason that drugs can’t be found. Well, these other states are finding them,” she said.

But she remains patient and hopeful justice will prevail.

“Even at the age of 82, through all the delays, legal challenges and reviews, Fife has remained steadfast in seeking justice for her, her husband, her family and more importantly for Raymond,” Watkins writes.

Fife puts her own spin on the idea of justice.

“The idea of justice for Raymond takes me back to the courtroom in 1985 when that juvenile probation officer (was) talking during Hill’s (mitigation phase) hearing about Hill raping two girls as a juvenile — and how he should have been put away before all this happened. Raymond would be alive if that was done,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

One may be surprised when Fife says she forgives Hill.

“I can forgive him as a person. I have to for the sake of me having to live with myself. Besides, I am more angry at the justice system than I am at Hill right now.”

But she said Hill committed an act for which he must pay the ultimate price: “Those two evil minds came together that night, and Danny Lee Hill must pay the price.”