Richard Cooey is convicted of and sentenced to murder for the 1986 murder, robbery, assault and kidnapping of two University of Akron students, Wendy Offredo and Dawn McCreery. Cooey and his friend, Clint Dickens, dropped a concrete chunk off of an I-77 overpass in Akron, Ohio, just as the girls were driving underneath. The two men went down to the street to see if the girls were alright, and offered to drive them to a payphone. Cooey drove his two friends and the two victims to a near-by pay phone so that Offredo could call her mother and McCreery called the Akron police. One of the young men spotted some cash in Offredo’s wallet and suggested to the other two that they should rob the girls before returning to their car. The girls were taken to a remote area where they were robbed and raped. Dickens then determined the girls must be murdered, since by this time, the girls were familiar with their names. Cooey maintains that he did not have forcible sexual intercourse nor did he cause the blows to the girls’ heads that killed them. The crime occurred on September 1, 1986, while Cooey was on a 30-day leave from the U.S. Army after six months of training.

A three judge panel convicted Cooey of four counts of aggravated murder, two counts of rape, two counts of kidnapping, two counts of aggravated robbery and one count of felonious assault, all while Cooey maintained his innocence. During the trial, Cooey attempted to prove that he could not have committed the crime, based on his level of intoxication and drug use. The panel refused to allow expert testimony into the trial. Mitigating evidence was introduced during the sentencing phase of the trial, showing that Cooey had suffered severe mental and physical abuse, abused alcohol and drugs, and had a mental disorder that was aggravated by the drug and alcohol use. Another mitigating factor brought into the trial was the Cooey’s youth at the time of the offense and his lack of criminal record. The three judge panel weighed the evidence against the mitigating factors and sentenced Cooey to death.