Death sentence switched to life in prison for KY man guilty in notorious 1985 slaying
One man convicted in a high-profile murder in Eastern Kentucky has worked out a deal to convert his death sentence to life without parole.
Roger Dale Epperson, 69, will die in prison under the agreement, but not in the electric chair or strapped to a gurney with lethal drugs pumped into his veins.
Epperson was convicted in the August 1985 murder of Tammy Dee Acker, 23, a University of Kentucky student who was stabbed to death during a robbery at the home of her father, Dr. R.J. Acker, in the Letcher County town of Fleming-Neon.
Benny Lee Hodge, now 68, and Harlan County resident Donald Terry Bartley also were convicted in the case.
Epperson has an appeal pending in federal court of his conviction and sentence. That court fight could have gone on until Epperson was in his 80s, according to a court document.
Instead, attorneys for Epperson and the state agreed on setting aside his death sentence.
The reasons they cited in a joint motion included Epperson’s age, the time until the case would be resolved, considerations of saving tax dollars by ending the court fight and “the victim’s family’s need for closure and their desire for the Commonwealth to settle this case.”
Epperson was appealing on a number of grounds.
Those included concerns that jurors were biased and that his lawyer, Lester Burns, failed to provide a good defense and didn’t investigate factors that could mitigate against a death sentence, such as beatings by his father.
Other courts had rejected his appeals, but federal judges could have ruled differently.
Epperson agreed to give up any further appeals of his conviction. If he reneges, a judge could reinstate the death penalty.
Circuit Judge Eddy Coleman approved a motion Friday to set aside Epperson’s death sentence and re-sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“In light of the allegations of significant Constitutional errors pending in the federal court system, this outcome was the best for Mr. Epperson, the commonwealth and the victims’ family,” said one of Epperson’s attorneys, David Barron.
Dr. Acker died in 2001, but his family supported the agreement, according to the motion from state prosecutors and defense attorneys.
The crime was the stuff of nightmares.
Two men posing as FBI agents said they needed to talk to Acker about a case in order to get into the house, then a third joined them.
Tammy Acker, who had been a UK student but took time off to stay with her father after her mother died, had returned home only hours earlier from a trip.
The assailants forced R.J. Acker to open a safe and then one choked him with the cord of a curling iron until he passed out. The robbers left him for dead, but he survived.
One man attacked Tammy Acker in her bedroom, using a butcher knife to stab her in the back repeatedly and with such force behind some cuts that the knife went through her body into the floor.
The robbers stole $1.9 million that Acker had accumulated over decades.
The three fled to Florida with their girlfriends, but were arrested a week later after a conspicuous spending spree on cars and jewelry.
Jurors decided that Hodge, who was from Tennessee, murdered Tammy Acker. He received a death sentence along with Epperson, of Perry County.
One witness said Epperson planned the crime, but the defense has argued he did not have the capacity to do that because of brain damage.
Bartley, now 61, testified against Epperson and Hodge to avoid a potential death sentence.
Bartley said he choked Dr. Acker at Epperson’s direction and that Hodge stabbed Tammy Acker.
Bartley received a sentence of at least 25 years in prison. The parole board turned him down for release and he’s still in prison.
The case helped bring down Burns, a well-known lawyer who had been a prosecutor and had run briefly for governor in the Republican primary in 1983.
He went to federal prison after admitting he transported $175,000 of the stolen money from Florida to Kentucky as his fee for representing Epperson.
He also admitted in a separate case that he filed a $1.1 million insurance claim for clients based on a phony car wreck.
Burns applied to get back his law license after prison, but the state Supreme Court denied his request. He died in 2015.
Epperson and Hodge also are under death sentences in the June 1985 murders of Edwin Morris, 65, and his wife Bessie, 69. The two were tied up in their home in Jackson County and shot to death during a robbery.
The deal to set aside Epperson’s death sentence in the Acker case does not affect the death sentences against him in the Morris case. Hodge remains under death sentences in both cases.
The state of Kentucky has executed three men since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a moratorium on capital punishment in 1976.
The last was in November 2008, when Marco Allen Chapman was put to death by lethal injection after being convicted of stabbing and raping a woman in Gallatin County and killing two of her children. Chapman had stopped his appeals.
This story was originally published November 18, 2019 at 10:48 AM.
