Neighbor breaks silence on eve of parole hearing
Jennifer Feehan, The Toledo Blade, July 21, 2004

DELPHOS, Ohio - Eighty-three-old Josephine Bockey has lived in the same white farmhouse for 59 years, and there's only one thing that will make her move.

"If he does get out, I'm out of here," the widow said without hesitation. "Then, I can't handle it anymore."

"He" is Robin Bender, a murderer who shot three of her neighbors - two fatally - in 1974, then broke into her home and threatened to kill her. Tomorrow, Bender will meet with a member of the Ohio Parole Board and a hearing officer from Madison Correctional Institution in London, where he is now being held, to ask for his release.

Bender, now 50, received two life sentences for killing Louis Youngpeter, 51, and his son, Kenneth, 27, when they discovered him breaking into Kenneth's rural Delphos home. Kenneth's wife, Judy, was shot as she tried to help her husband.

Bender chased after Judy when she ran to the Bockey home just down the road, ultimately kicking in the door, running upstairs, and putting a gun to the head of Louis Youngpeter's wife Mildred, who was already there. The gun misfired, and Bender fled out a rear window of the Bockey home as the sound of police sirens approached.

Despite the violence that invaded the quiet country road 30 years ago, Mrs. Bockey never moved out of the home she and her husband started their married life in when he returned from World War II in 1945.

"That question never came up," she said. "You can't let fear rule your life. You pray and you have to believe in what you're praying for and asking for, and don't forget to say thank you, God. That's what's helping us through this."

While Mrs. Bockey has accompanied the victim's widows to Columbus three times over the years to meet with a parole board representative to insist Bender remain in prison, she is speaking out publicly for the first time, fearful, she said, that this time he will be released.

"I'm living with this fear of him getting out because he threatened to come back and get every last one of us," she said.

A cancer survivor whose husband died in 1994, Mrs. Bockey can recount every detail of the July 17, 1974, murders. She had been canning cherries all day with her daughter when Mildred and Judy first ran into her house to ask her to call the police.

"It may have happened 30 years ago, but it's very clear in your mind," she said.

As a key witness in a case that ended with a plea bargain, Mrs. Bockey never spoke to the reporters who blanketed the area after the double murders and called her at home. She never spoke out until now.

"Because it's getting time - it's getting close to the time that he's a possible release, and I think now is the time when I should say something," she said.

Neal Youngpeter, who lost his father and brother in the slayings, called Mrs. Bockey "an oak tree. This woman is tough to the bone."

He said he appreciates the help of Mrs. Bockey and her six children who have been collecting signatures and encouraging a letter-writing campaign to the parole board. Two years ago when Bender was up for parole, they helped gather 1,992 letters or signatures from people opposed to his release.

"They're what you consider true friends and true neighbors," Mr. Youngpeter said. "Not everybody would get involved like they got involved that particular night. It would've been easy to lock the door and not let Judy in and not get involved. They literally put their life on the line for Judy."

Findmissingkids.com president Bret Vinocur, a victim's advocate who has taken up the Youngpeters' cause, said Bender should not be released.

"I'm not only worried for those families. I'm worried for the whole state," he said. "Of course he's a danger. The last words he said to these people was, 'I'm going to kill you.'."

Mrs. Bockey refused to have her picture published for fear Bender would find out what she looked like. She said she believes he would keep his promise if released.

"Probably not right away, but in his time and in his way he would come back here and finish it up," she said. "... He's never had any remorse of any kind, not even an inkling of it."