(WBBM NEWSRADIO) - Current and former State’s Attorneys from downstate Macoupin county are joining about 2,000 people in opposing clemency for a man convicted of the 1985 rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl from Downer’s Grove.
Bridgett Drobney was in downstate Gillespie for a wedding when she was pulled over by men posing as police and was raped and stabbed to death in a cornfield.
Robert Turner was sentenced to die.
“She would not shut up, so I stuck her,” Turner was quoted as saying.
Bridgett Drobney’s sister, Kelly Drobney Weaver, was 12 at the time of her sister’s murder.
“People say, ‘does it feel like it’s ripping a scab off?’ It feels like someone’s taking a scalpel and digging the wound deeper, you know, memories pop up that you buried a long time ago,” she said.
Her mother is still alive.
“My mother is 88 and when we showed her all of the comments, this outpouring of love and support, my mom just read them all and said, ‘I guess they didn’t forget our Bridgett.'”
Nearly 2,000 people have signed a change.org petition calling for the clemency hearing to be called off.
Some have written letters to the Prisoner Review Board.
The family encourages that.
“(We) just continue to try to keep this monster in jail because it’s starting to really scare me that this is a reality that he might actually get out,” Kelly Drobney Weaver said.
Turner is supported by an organization called the Illinois Prisoner Project, which has suggested that the family meet with him to see “the person that he has become after nearly 40 years in prison.”
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Two former state’s Attorneys involved in the case, Ed Rees and Vince Moreth noted the “tragic and heinous” facts and they said Turner “should never be returned to society."
A clemency hearing that has been scheduled and then canceled twice is back on for January 10 before the Prisoner Review Board in Chicago.
The family and the former state’s attorneys will be testifying.
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