Man who dismembered woman to be released from prison

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) -- A friend and a relative of a Bloomington woman who was stabbed to death and dismembered in 1986 say they were shocked to learn that her murderer is days from leaving prison having served less than half of his 60-year sentence.

Robert Evan Lee, 57, is scheduled to be released Saturday from the Branchville Correctional Facility, near Evansville, after serving 25 years for murdering 31-year-old Ellen Marks, whose head and hands were never found. Lee obtained early release by earning good-time credit and obtaining two vocational degrees and two college degrees behind bars.

Marks, a former Indiana University graduate student in English, was killed and dismembered in September 1986. In court documents, police said her internal organs, including her heart, were cut from her body in the attack.

Marks' cousin, John Stein, told The Herald-Times (http://bit.ly/OYR6w1 ) that he was stunned when he recently received notice from the state Department of Correction that Lee would be released.

"It's horrible," he said.

Stein, who retired 10 years ago as deputy director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance in Virginia, attended Lee's 1987 murder trial and called Marks' murder "an act of barbarism." He also said that "a human monster" lurks inside Lee's brain.

Stein and his family oppose the death penalty and didn't want it pursued. When Lee was sentenced in 1987, Stein said a long prison term wouldn't avenge his cousin's death, "but it might protect the rest of us from him and from being his next victim."

Bloomington resident Marc Haggerty, a friend of Marks who discovered parts of her body buried on a wooded lot a half a block from the boarding house where Lee lived, said he was shocked to learn that Lee would soon be released.

"I never expected him to be released -- not after that kind of crime, which indicates a permanent disconnection with society, a permanent disconnect with compassion," Haggerty told The Herald-Times.

Lee was 31 years old when he stabbed Marks to death, cut her body into pieces and stuffed them into trash bags. The crime closely matched a one-page description of how to kill and mutilate a woman that Lee had written in tiny print in a spiral-bound notebook.

After a two-week trial, jurors convicted Lee of murder, and a judge sentenced him to the maximum time allowed.

"There are some that should be prohibited from walking with society," Monroe Circuit Judge Kenneth Todd said to Lee at his October 1987 sentencing hearing.

Lee reduced his sentence by getting good-time credit for time served and by taking advantage of educational opportunities while serving time for murder.

He got a year shaved off his sentence for earning two vocational degrees, one as an assembly technician and the other in commercial housekeeping. Lee got another year off his sentence for earning an associate's degree in business management in 2011, and two additional years off for earning a bachelors' degree in the same field in January.

The Indiana Department of Correction asked Bloomington's Backstreet Missions if Lee could serve his year of parole at the rescue mission, but it declined. The group's executive director, Linda Kelley, said it did so after learning about the brutality of Marks' murder and about Lee's conviction in 1973 for an attempted rape at knife point in New York.

"Because of the extremely violent nature, and the rape, everything combined here is just too much," she said.

DOC spokesman Doug Garrison said Wednesday that the agency was still looking for somewhere that Lee could serve out his probation.

"This guy has to be placed somewhere," he said.
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Information from: The Herald Times, http://www.heraldtimesonline.com