Friday's parole hearing for the infamous duo of Myron Lance and Walter Kelbach won't be the first time the pair have pleaded for their freedom. They've been denied parole twice since being convicted of murder in connection with a 1966 killing spree that claimed six people.
But it will be the first time Edith Lillie and her family have had a chance to express in public how the shooting death of her son more than 25 years ago has affected their lives."Every holiday and birthday we feel cheated. He was our youngest son, and we never got a chance to enjoy him," Lillie said.
Christmas was approaching and Fred Lillie was five days away from turning 21 years old when he and his mother chatted about news accounts of two recent murders that had terrorized the community, she recalled.
In separate incidents, two 18-year-old service station attendants had been abducted, stripped and stabbed five times. The body of Steven Shea was found near a lone dirt road in Tooele County. The next day, Michael Holtz's naked corpse was discovered off the highway in Summit County.
"He (Fred) mentioned that those service station guys better watch out, and then he left to play pool down at Lally's" Tavern, Edith Lillie recalled.
Several hours later, the Lillies received a call from the hospital concerning their son. He had been shot in the back of his head when prison parolees Lance and Kelbach opened fire on tavern patrons and robbed the till. He died the next day.
Others killed during the robbery were James Sise-more, 47, and Beverly Mace, 34.
Police captured the pair without incident at a roadblock in Parleys Canyon three hours after the robbery. A few hours before the bloodbath at Lally's, Lance and Kelbach had shot a cabdriver, Grant Strong, in the back of the head and killed him. They also had killed the two service station attendants found the weekend before.
In April 1967, Lance and Kel-bach were convicted and sentenced to die for the murders of Sisemore and Lillie. Lance chose a firing squad and Kelbach opted for hanging. The charges brought in Summit and Tooele counties were dismissed.
But following a series of routine appeals delaying the executions, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 ruled the death penalty unconstitutional and the sentences of Lance and Kelbach were commuted to life in prison.
After Utah's capital punishment statute was reinstated, state Attorney General Robert Hansen hoped to secure a death penalty by filing murder charges against the pair for the Holtz stabbing death. But a 5th Circuit Court judge found filing charges 13 years late would violate Lance and Kelbach's constitutional rights, and he dismissed the case.
Although it is usual practice of the Board of Pardons to notify victims of parole hearings, neither Kenneth nor Edith Lillie recall ever being notified of past hearings.
"When I got the notice, I was shocked," she said. "I thought they were in prison for life."
Since 1988, victims have been allowed to address the board. The Lillies' daughter and son-in-law will read statements to the board. Family members and relatives of Steven Shea, Grant Strong and James Sisemore will attend or have just submitted written statement, a board administrator said.
The board will give Lance, 51, and Kelbach, 53, either a parole date or schedule rehearing in the future. Their last parole hearing was in 1982.
Although Edith and Kenneth Lillie don't expect their son's killers to get a parole date, they would prefer that Lance and Kelbach don't get another rehearing either.
"They shouldn't even give them a chance" to get out, she said. "I thought life in prison meant life in prison."
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In prison but not out of limelight
For more than two decades behind bars, Lance and Kelbach have continued to make headlines:
- Lance's wife was arrested in 1967 and imprisoned for smuggling a gun, shells and an escape-route map to her husband. The couple would divorce then remarry while in prison.
- Lance attacked a prison guard in 1968 with a spoon he had shar-pened on the concrete floor of his cell.
- Lance and Kelbach escaped with seven other maximum security inmates in 1968 but were captured in Idaho after three days on the lam.
- The courts rejected Kelbach's attempts in the late 1970s to adopt a younger male inmate on parole and sue for Social Security benefits while incarcerated.