Victims afraid of Leamon, released after killing pregnant Niles teen in 1993, living so close to them

The man who plotted in 1993 as a teenager to kill and bury a 15-year-old Niles girl pregnant with his baby was paroled from prison Thursday and will live with his mother and stepfather in Granger.

Parole for Robert Eugene Leamon III, who is now 44, was approved in October, a Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman confirmed Friday morning.

Meanwhile, in a rare move, Cass County Prosecutor Victor Fitz said Friday his office plans to file a motion early next week to appeal the parole board’s decision after Cass Circuit Court Judge Mark Herman denied a stay on Wednesday.

Leamon was 16 when he killed his Brandywine High School classmate Becky Stowe, whose murder went unsolved for more than two years. He was not charged in the case until after a girlfriend reported to authorities that he had confessed the crime to her and Becky’s body was discovered.

Leamon was convicted in 1997 of first-degree, premeditated murder and sentenced to mandatory life without the possibility of parole. But Michigan officials have re-examined the cases of some juveniles who have been sentenced to life sentences, and Leamon was resentenced a year ago, making him eligible for parole.

The offenders — “juvenile lifers” — are receiving re-sentencing hearings that could include a chance for parole because of rulings in recent years by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court — citing science that says juvenile brains are not fully developed for adult decision-making — has decided that automatic life-without-parole sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional, and also ordered new sentencings in states where such punishments are mandatory. Unlike Michigan, Indiana is among the states that does not have such mandatory sentencing requirements for juveniles.

Life without parole might still be an option at new sentencings, the court said, but only for offenders whose crimes indicated “irrevocable corruption.”

But Becky’s sister, Cindy Slates of Niles, and Prosecutor Fitz say Leamon especially should not have been allowed to return to the community in which his victims live.

Slates, who along with Leamon’s ex-girlfriend testified in recent hearings that they objected to his resentencing because of the crime’s heinous nature, said they are worried about running into him. Slates said GPS coordinates show he will be living only 18 minutes from her Niles home; Leamon’s ex-girlfriend lives even closer, in South Bend.

DOC parole conditions include that he must stay away from them during the two years he’s on parole and that if he accidentally encounters them, he must be the one to leave the area. But even the possibility of coming face to face with him angers Slates when he originally was given the option of being paroled to housing in Battle Creek, Mich.

“We lived in peace before he was resentenced. We lived like it was over, and we went on with our lives knowing he would never be an issue again,” she said. “Now we’re living in turmoil with this.”

Why should he have the pleasure of living with his family when Becky’s sister — her only living relative — was denied the same? she asked.

Their mother, Diana Farris, died of cancer in 2015 and was cremated and buried over Becky’s grave in Silverbrook Cemetery in Niles.

“I’ve missed out on so much of her life,” Slates said of her sister. “I loved Becky as if she was my own.”

Slates was nearly 11 years old when Becky was born, and the elder sister helped their single-parent mother raise her. She regrets not ever getting to know any of Becky’s children, including her unborn baby. Becky would be 44 now.

Becky was found more than two years after she went missing. She was buried in a shallow grave under a woodpile on Leamon’s uncle’s rural property, where the then-16-year-old football player would have parties, before and after her death. As part of the earlier investigation, he had passed a polygraph test and repeatedly denied knowledge of where she was.

Slates wants to believe people can change and that Leamon has changed. But she worries this is just one more way Leamon has “bamboozled” the system, again.

He had plotted out her sister’s murder in a cold-blooded manner, including having someone else clock in and out at his job, dug the hole in which he buried her the day before, decided to strangle her rather than use a knife to avoid the blood that would result. Slates wonders whether moving back to this area is just another example of his manipulating the system.

DOC spokesman Chris Gautz said there is typically a waiting period when a prisoner is granted parole to leave time for appeals and to wrap up details. Leamon had not completed an anti-violence program when he was first denied parole in March of last year.

Gautz said such factors as accepting responsibility for his crime and having family support are important considerations for the parole board.

The DOC prioritizes necessary programming based on when a prisoner is slated to be released, so the parole delay allowed Leamon to take the class, Gautz said. In fact, Leamon acted as a tutor for other prisoners, as veteran prisoners often do, indicating his prison behavior record had been good.

Fitz said Leamon’s prison record contained some modest infractions. But Fitz’s objections, which he stated in court earlier, have more to do with the nature of Leamon’s actions, and Fitz said he regrets that the correctional tide seems to be turning more to “a messiah complex” toward offenders and away from protecting victims.

Not many juvenile offenders are “the central character in a heinous murder,” Fitz said. Justice should include a message to murderers that “you have forfeited your right to walk among the free society of men and women.”

Leamon said in his resentencing hearings that he did not want to cause Stowe’s family more pain, but his actions have belied that, Fitz said, including his return to the area.

“Before, during and after (the murder) he was certainly deliberate in his actions,” Fitz said of Leamon. “This was not a 13- or 14-year-old kid who was the getaway driver in a spur-of-the-moment crime. … This is the type of case where the mandatory life sentence should have been affirmed.”

Leamon’s mother, Kathy Opick, testified in a resentencing hearing that she wanted a second chance for her son.

“He’s not that same person,” said Opick, who visited her son every two weeks during the decades he spent in prison. “He’s taking responsibility, and he’s trying to better himself.”

Slates is skeptical of whether Leamon is capable of change.

“He could have gone to Battle Creek,” she said, and she urges him and parole officials to reconsider his placement. “He’s not thinking of the victims. That’s all he’s thinking about is himself, not us.”

Fitz said he has never before been involved in appealing a parole decision in his 37 years on a prosecutor’s staff, including his 17 years in Cass County.

But this case was different, he said: “We’re saddened that in January the court gave the defendant the key to the prison door.”