September 16, 2010
Deborah Pooley’s family, friends remember a ‘sweet girl’
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Debbie Pooley left Miami for the suburbs of Cincinnati in the mid-1980s looking for a safer place in a smaller city near home.
To her family and friends, her kidnapping and murder in 1987 about two years after she moved home proved a cruel irony.
"She was a sweet girl," said Kathy McBurney Salce, who worked with Pooley at a restaurant and bar in suburban Miami. "To lose her like that, we're still not over it."
Pooley's sister, Bonnie Shinkle, and several friends spoke to The Associated Press in recent days as the Kentucky Supreme Court weighed whether to let the execution of the man convicted of her killing go forward. It's the first time many have spoken publicly about Pooley since her death.
Gregory Lee Wilson, 53, had been set to die by lethal injection at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville on Thursday before a judge halted the proceedings because of concerns about the inmate's mental state and how Kentucky execution method. The high court was considering whether to lift the stay of execution.
Wilson was convicted in 1988 of kidnapping Pooley from the parking lot of her apartment complex in Covington, Ky., raping her while a co-defendant drove, then killing Pooley, 36, in 1987. Investigators found Pooley nearly three weeks later in a field in Indiana.
When Gov. Steve Beshear signed a warrant setting Wilson's execution date for Sept. 16, memories of Pooley and the way she died 23 years ago came rushing back for her family and friends.
"It's just opening old wounds for all of us," said Salce, who now works at the University of Miami.
Pooley, a native of Hamilton, Ohio, moved in with her sister in South Florida in the early 1980s and went to work as a bartender at Dalts, a popular eatery and bar in Kendall, a suburb of Miami. She joined a group of young employees, including Salce, in an atmosphere veterans of the establishment describe as "flamboyant" and "family-oriented."
The group became a tight-knit circle of friends that shared holidays, spawned lasting connections and several marriages.
"We used to always eat Thanksgiving dinner together like family," said Maria Doria Perez, who also worked at Dalts and is now a teacher in the Miami area.
In the middle of this group was Pooley, who earned the nickname "Mom" from co-workers who turned to her for advice about relationships, college and the future.
"If Debbie had not been murdered, she's still be my friend," Salce said. "We were robbed of that because of this heinous murder."
Pooley also doted on her two nieces, who would sit in a booth at Dalts eating homemade potato chips under her watchful eye. Shinkle, who took her sister in after the move to south Florida, said Pooley would read to the children, who couldn't get enough of their aunt.
"She made the stories come alive," said Shinkle, 62. "I think she would have loved to have had a family."
Perez recalls Pooley buying large amounts of "Hello Kitty" paraphernalia for the girls.
"They were the world to her," Perez said.
Pooley moved back north to be near her parents, Walter, a pressman at the Hamilton, Ohio, Journal-News who died in May, and Anne, who is now in poor health, in the mid-'80s. She settled in northern Kentucky and went to work at Barleycorn's Yacht Club in Newport, across the Ohio River in Cincinnati. Within two years, Wilson and Brenda Humphrey, a former prostitute now serving life in prison, would kidnap and kill Pooley.
The pending execution date has brought back the horror of the days when no one could find Pooley and the sadness they felt at her death.
"We were all young and it hit everyone hard," said Donna Lovell of Miami, who worked at Dalts.
Shinkle said her parents stopped putting up a Christmas tree and kept all of Pooley's things at their home.
"They've still got her clothes in a drawer, like she still lives there," Shinkle said. "You think she's going to come walking in the door someday."
More than 23 years after Pooley's death, her friends still miss her some speak of her in the present tense and remain angry at Wilson.
"If he's found God, he should be willing to meet his maker," Perez said. "I don't think he should be seeing any sympathy."
http://www.kypost.com/dpp/news/state...-girl%E2%80%99
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