MAHOMET, Ill. (AP) - Darla Dees shuddered when she saw recent news reports that two men had been arrested for the murder of University of Illinois student Vicente Mundo.
She knows what’s ahead for his family.
“It never ends. It’s not over after the trial,” said the 59-year-old Mahomet woman, a member of a club that no one wants to join - survivors of murder victims.
It was 23 years ago that her younger brother was killed.
“No family deserves to have to go through this kind of tragedy. It affects a lot of people in many, many ways.”
Dees, her 81-year-old mother, her four siblings and their spouses will soon make the familiar trip to a Missouri prison to tell parole authorities they cannot fathom one of their brother’s killers being released.
“I would do this every year if that’s what it took. I promised my little brother,” Dees said.
Murder plot exposed
Ronald “Ronnie” Dees, a Champaign native, was a 27-year-old railroad worker living in Excelsior Springs, just north of Kansas City, Mo., when he was fatally shot in March 1992 by a teen acting on the orders of Mr. Dees’ wife of almost four years.
Debra Dees, then 32, was having an affair with her 18-year-old boyfriend, Richard Waring, whom she’d met several months earlier. They worked together at a local grocery store. Waring is now 41. Debra Dees is now 55.
Debra Dees told Waring that her husband refused to divorce her and claimed he was abusive so the two made plans to have him killed. They eventually enlisted 17-year-old Jonathan Lair for their dirty work after several unsuccessful attempts to hire another hit man. Lair is now 40.
“He knew both boys. He gave them rides to work,” Darla Dees said, adding that her unsuspecting brother even allowed Waring to live with them.
Inside Mr. Dees’ car, Lair shot him three times in the head as Mr. Dees watched Waring approach.
Despite their efforts to distance themselves from the killing, it didn’t take long for Darla Dees’ and Waring’s plan to unravel.
A jury rejected her claims of innocence, convicting her of first-degree murder and armed criminal action. She was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. She’s in a prison in Chillicothe, Mo.
Waring and Lair pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for life sentences plus 100 years each. Those carry the possibility of parole.
’I fight harder every time’
It was 2005 when Ronnie Dees’ family members made their first trip to a prison in Cameron, Mo., for a parole hearing for Waring.
Between hearings for him and Lair, they’ve made the drive from Champaign County four times and are now about to make their fifth. There will be another about this time next year for Lair.
They take three days out of their lives for the hearings, an exhausting experience for all of them.
“As a rule, we go the day before. We don’t want to have car trouble. (The hearing) drains you. We end up getting a hotel room that night, too. Then, we have to wait several weeks to find out if they are granted parole,” Darla Dees said.
And as the convicted killers age, the frequency of their hearings will likely increase.
They take place in a small room in the prison.
“We write letters and we give those to the parole board. You can read your letter and get up and leave and then the board talks to the prisoner. My brothers have always opted to leave the room,” she said.
But Darla Dees said she stays.
“The only way you can find out what the prisoner is doing is to stay in the room while (parole officials) are talking to him. I wanted to know, were they bettering themselves, taking any classes?” she said.
Despite the familiarity of the setting, Dees said it gets no easier to be there for any of the family.
Her brothers pace, and “it’s horrible to watch my mom in that room,” she said.
Her father, Harold, who once owned a construction company in Champaign, died seven years ago.
At Lair’s last hearing, she said, he was asked how he would support himself if paroled.
“He laughed and said, ’I’d do anything,’ ” Dees said. “You already proved that. You took a life with no money exchanging hands.”
The plan was for the shooter to be paid $6,000 from Ronnie Dees’ life insurance proceeds.
In addition to her letter and oral testimony to the parole board, Dees will present petitions signed by friends and family supporters, all urging a denial of parole for Waring.
Based on his comments, she feels he’s never really accepted responsibility for his role in the murder.
“That’s why I fight harder every time. I have no doubt they have not grown at all,” she said.
’I will be his voice’
All these years later, Darla Dees still misses her brother terribly and thinks about how he died.
“There’s a part of you, every time these hearings come up, you relive it. It doesn’t seem like 23 years,” she said.
She laments that her children, nieces and nephews have grown up without their fun uncle.
“My little brother was one of the most kind, generous men. I don’t want to remember the bad. I concentrate on going jug fishing with him, all the fun he had with my kids,” she said.
Still, the parole hearings give her some measure of control over a situation that was beyond her control in 1992.
But closure? “I don’t think so,” she said. “If it comes to every year to keep them in, I will go. Obviously, neither one of them are going to come out and be a productive member of society.
“For my brother, I will be his voice as long as I’m alive.”
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Source: The (Champaign) News-Gazette, https://bit.ly/1Fg8g46
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Information from: The News-Gazette, https://www.news-gazette.com
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