Book review: 'Seventy Times Seven'

Alex Mar's immersive exploration of the death penalty for children offers deep meaning not only for the affected — but for all of us

On May 14, 1985, Paula Cooper killed Ruth Pelke. That is not in doubt and was never in doubt. There was no hunt for evidence, no coerced confession. You could lift Kevin Bacon’s line from A Few Good Men: “These are the facts of the case, and they are undisputed.”

Four girls break into Ruth Pelke’s home. Cooper lifts a glass paperweight and smashes Pelke’s head. Moments later, Cooper picks up the knife from a tabletop.

“She stabs the woman in her chest; she pulls out the knife, she stabs her again,” writes Alex Mar. “Her hand comes down more than thirty times before she stops, leaving the blade in Mrs. Pelke’s stomach.”

After hiding for two days, Cooper is captured without incident. She is brought to a room for questioning. “Paula tells them everything,” Mar says.

Normally and sadly, this explosion of brutality would have been disappeared into the ledger of tragedies in the murder-filled city of Gary, Indiana. Pelke is Gary’s 24th murder victim of 1985. Indeed, it’s plain to see that the only thing that would have made it less newsworthy beyond Gary is if Cooper had been White and Pelke had been Black, instead of the reverse.

Except for this: Paula Cooper is 15 years old when she kills Ruth Pelke, and a judge sentences Paula Cooper to death.

Mar’s new book, Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy, is the best non-fiction book I have read in some time. In a supremely researched, fact-based work that reads like a novel, Mar examines whether the death penalty is ever justifiable for any crime, no matter how horrible — particularly those committed by children. And Paula Cooper, even though she committed as gruesome a crime as you might ever encounter, was a child.

You would expect Mar to explore Cooper’s life, and so she does, with sensitivity but without fear or favor. While Cooper is the centerpiece of the book, Mar’s story offers a panoply of true-life characters (judges, lawyers, activists, relatives), each bringing their own beliefs and baggage to a story that traverses decades to the present day. Accompanying her exhaustive research, Mar’s genius is in depicting wholly rounded but relatively anonymous individuals who do nothing less than influence the course of the death penalty in the United States, from Ruth Pelke’s living room to the Supreme Court.