Richard Cooey & Clinton Dickens - Murderers

What exactly drives young men to abduct, rape and torture, then murder two young women for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  Are we regressing backwards to a caveman mentality?  Is it that the world is full of  psychotic people that believe that they have to kill or are entitled to do that, just because they feel like it?  Richard Wade Cooey and Clinton Dickens did just that, and the end result is that it saw Cooey finish up on a gurney in a death chamber.  Cooey was born in 1967 in Akron, Ohio, and saw himself shunted between his father and grandmother.  The usual story of a troubled and violent upbringing have been aired - though many thousands endure unpleasant childhoods but rise above it, and after leaving school in 1985, Cooey joined the Army.  The following year, in September 1986, Cooey was on leave in Akron, when he was with a friend, 17 year old Clinton Dickens, they were on Stoner Street Bridge, throwing lumps of concrete at passing cars that were travelling on Interstate 77.

    They managed to smash the windscreen of one car, and they made a show of running to help the occupants, but had other ideas.  The driver was 21 year old Wendy Offredo and her friend, 20 year old Dawn McCreery.  They were abducted, taken to a field close by, where they were systematically raped, tortured and then murdered, over a prolonged period of time.  They had an X carved into their bodies.  But it all came unstuck due to the fact that Cooey could not stop bragging about what they had done and soon they were arrested by Police.  Then the finger pointing began, with one claiming the other was the instigator.  But it did them no good.  Cooey was sentenced to death in November 1986, whilst Dickens, classed as a minor, received life.  Soon Cooey was saying that he was an innocent man, but later admitted the attacks on the victims but claimed "duress" and had consumed drugs and alcohol.

    In an attempt to stave off his execution, he claimed he was too fat to be humanely executed.  Not by the chair, but by lethal injection.  His appeals process eventually ran out and he lay on the gurney in October 2008.