Just weeks before Roy Lee Ward’s scheduled execution, the Indiana Parole Board heard conflicting portrayals Monday of the man condemned for the 2001 rape and murder of 15-year-old Stacy Payne.
The five-member panel will make a recommendation to Gov. Mike Braun, who has the sole authority to decide whether to grant clemency and commute Ward’s death sentence to life in prison. His execution is currently set to take place before sunrise Oct. 10 at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.
Stacy Payne, who was murdered at her Spencer County home on July 11, 2001. (Photo provided)Ward declined to appear before the board or submit to a prison interview, however.
In a sworn affidavit last week, Ward told the parole board that he preferred for his attorneys to be his “voice” during the clemency process.
“My decision rests in part on my desire that the victim’s family not be put in a position where they feel compelled to travel to Michigan City,” Ward wrote in the Sept. 17 affidavit obtained by the Indiana Capital Chronicle.
Defense attorneys Michelle Law and Larry Komp instead spent about 80 minutes before the parole board during Monday’s hearing in Indianapolis.
“Roy is not a psychopath,” Law said. “His own attorneys labeled him as such before … but Roy has feelings, and he himself has recognized that he has disabilities and issues that he wanted help for.”
But for Payne’s family, decades of anguish remain.
“We will never hear her voice, never have the joy of watching her grow into the incredible woman she was meant to be. Grief doesn’t just break our hearts, it reshapes who we are, and we don’t get to go back,” Stacy’s mother, Julie Payne, said through tears. “We have to learn to exist in a world without Stacy.”
‘He showed Stacy no mercy’
Deputy Attorney General Tyler Banks urged the board to deny clemency, calling Ward “a murderer, a rapist, a predator and a manipulator.”
“Twenty-four conscripted Hoosiers from two different counties have seen who Roy Lee Ward is and what he did to Stacy Payne. And those Hoosiers made what was likely the toughest decision of their lives and decided that the death penalty was appropriate,” Banks said.
Ward pleaded guilty to rape and murder in 2022. He has twice been sentenced to death — first by a Spencer County jury in 2002, then by a Clay County jury in 2007, after the Indiana Supreme Court overturned the initial sentence. He remains the only person on Indiana’s death row to receive two death sentences from two separate juries, Banks noted.
"Granting clemency would not only negate the holdings of those state and federal courts and all the work done to litigate cases before those courts,” he continued. “Granting clemency would override the judgment of 24 Hoosiers for a person who committed the most horrific crime one could imagine, against a 15-year-old girl who was an honor student, cheerleader, member of her school’s student council and played in her school’s band.”
The state’s roughly 80-minute presentation included testimony from six witnesses: Dale Town Marshal Matt Keller, the first officer to respond to the scene and who took Ward into custody; Jane and Murray Stout, two Spencer County first responders who arrived shortly after and provided emergency medical care; Randy Cutrell and Rob Priest, both with the Indiana State Police, who worked on the case; and Julie, Stacy’s mother, flanked by her sister — Stacy’s aunt — Diane.
Banks detailed the attack, emphasizing how Ward bound Payne’s and “bludgeoned” her with a dumbbell, causing 18 blunt force injuries.
Ward raped the 15-year-old and cut open her abdomen and throat, “leaving her barely able to breathe and unable to talk.”
Keller, the first on scene, said he found Ward “standing in the threshold of the door,” holding a knife.
“I told Stacy I was a police officer … that she was safe and that people were coming to help her. Stacy was unable to speak, but I knew that she understood, because she seemed to relax a little bit.”
“Ward is pure evil,” Keller continued. “He absolutely deserves no mercy.”
Jane Stout, who attended to Stacy at the scene and on the way to the hospital, said she had “never seen anything this brutal in my life.”
“The whole time we had her, she was conscious and alert. She would try to answer you, but with her throat being slit in half, she couldn’t communicate,” Stout described. “She had tears in her eyes. A 15-year-old girl, beautiful … and here she is laying in the back of an ambulance with her body cut in half and her throat slashed. … The whole community was hurt by this, and it was devastating to everybody.”
Julie Payne remembered her daughter as “happy and full of life, always lifting everyone up … an extraordinary girl.”
“Now, our family gatherings are no longer whole,” she told the parole board. “Birthdays are sad reminders of what we lost, instead of celebrations of all the milestones that Stacy will never reach: graduations, a wedding, and children of her own. She didn’t even get her driver’s license.”
The Payne family, she added, “has endured emotional devastation for 24 years and two months. That is 8,839 days.” Denying clemency, Julie said, would show that “Stacy’s life mattered, that justice will stand for the innocent, and that Ward’s heinous crime will not go unanswered.”
“There is a quote that says time heals all wounds. But that absolutely is not true in this case, where a child is brutally murdered and dies a horrific death because of evil,” she said. “You carry the pain every single day.”
Defense argues autism, remorse, false narrative at jury trialIn the morning session, Ward’s attorneys sought to dismantle the narrative of their client as a psychopath.
“What we are here to tell you today is that is not true, that Roy is not a psychopath,” Law said.
She cited Ward’s new autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Law told the board that Ward’s language-processing impairments and social difficulties — now recognized as symptoms of autism — had been misunderstood for decades, leaving jurors with a distorted picture of who he was.
Komp said Ward’s trial counsel “became advocates for a death penalty, telling the jury years ago that “Roy has no conscience, no empathy, no feelings.”
“That is not true,” Komp emphasized. “Psychopaths don’t feel guilty, and they don’t feel they should be punished. Roy wanted help in the worst way.”
Law and Komp returned to the affidavit Ward submitted to the parole board last week.
In it, the death row inmate cited “concerns that due to my learning disability and language impairments, the messages I mean to convey are sometimes difficult for me to accurately express. My disability, specifically autism spectrum disorder, also affects the way I am perceived by others. I want to avoid any misinterpretation of my remorse.”
Pressed by Board Chair Gwen Horth on why Ward avoided an interview, Law said, “It’s not because he isn’t remorseful.”
Larry Komp, a defense attorney for death row inmate Roy Ward, speaks before the Indiana Parole Board on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025, at a clemency hearing in Indianapolis. (Casey Smith/Indiana Capital Chronicle)
“It’s because he has trouble expressing his remorse and finding the words,” she told Horth. “He just didn’t feel like he could use the word sorry — that the word sorry to him just sounded fake, and that it wouldn’t be believed.”
When asked what Ward would say to the Payne family, Komp told the board that Ward would say “that he realizes all the shame he brought to his own family — it’s 1,000 times worse for the Payne family.”
“He would hope he could live out his life, but … if the board does not grant clemency, he deserves to be punished,” Komp continued.
Law, pitching in, said Ward would tell the Payne family “that he does deserve for (the execution) to be carried out. … And Roy’s preparing himself for that.”
Komp also described Ward’s faith on death row, but acknowledged that Ward’s expressions of faith are difficult to capture because of his difficulties with communication. Even so, he said Ward regularly prays, discusses scripture with spiritual advisors, and has “grown more” religious during his years on death row.
What happens next
Ward’s clemency filings submitted to the parole board additionally stressed his remorse.
His defense counsel pointed to a letter to his first trial judge, in which he wrote: “I never did much for my life, but she was going to do a lot with hers. I’m terribly sorry for what I did. … I can’t ask for their forgiveness … I do ask for God’s forgiveness and can only hope he is willing to listen to me.”
The filings also outlined Ward’s history of mental health struggles, including treatment at Central State Hospital years before the crime.
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Attorneys emphasized that Ward sought help even as a teenager, telling doctors, “I want to find out what is wrong with me.” Ward’s counsel argued that such statements reflect remorse and self-awareness inconsistent with the “psychopath” label used at his trial.
The lawyers further highlighted Ward’s efforts to maintain relationships with family, fellow inmates and even a pet cat over the years as evidence of empathy and emotional capacity.
Ward’s clemency petition is one of the final steps available to avoid his death sentence.
The parole board hears arguments from attorneys, victims’ families and execution supporters before issuing a recommendation to the governor.
The governor alone has the power to commute a death sentence to life in prison, grant a reprieve or deny clemency altogether.
Earlier this year, the board followed the same process for another death row inmate, Benjamin Ritchie, ahead of his scheduled execution. But unlike Ward, Ritchie appeared before the panel at the state prison.
Following several hours of hearings, the parole board ultimately — unanimously — recommended against clemency for Ritchie, and the governor allowed his execution to proceed.
There is no timeline for the board’s recommendation. Deliberations happen behind closed doors.
In Ritchie’s case, the board issued a recommendation one day after the second and final hearing. Braun rejected the clemency plea the following day.
Three clemencies have been granted in Indiana since 1976.
The most recent was in 2005, when then-Gov. Mitch Daniels commuted the death sentence for Arthur Baird, who killed his pregnant wife and her parents in 1985. Although the parole board denied his petition for clemency, Daniels granted Baird clemency one day before the scheduled execution, citing questions about Baird’s sanity.
Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.