Following one of Leflore County’s most infamous murders, Robert Rowland traded the possibility of the gas chamber for a minimum of 42 years in prison.
Now after three decades behind bars, he wants to cut his sentence short through an appeal pending before the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Rowland, then 20, along with two other Sunflower County men, Keith Ouzts, 19, and Donald Keeton, 18, admitted to shooting Paul Hughes and James Campbell at the Leflore County Country Club during an armed robbery of a poker game in 1979.
All three of the accused pleaded guilty to two counts of capital murder during the commission of an armed robbery. They also pleaded guilty to two counts of armed robbery involving two other men at the poker game, O.B. Singleton and Pat Bolton.
They received two consecutive life sentences each for the murder convictions, and two 24-year sentences for the armed robberies.
In 2007, Rowland appealed the armed robbery convictions, claiming double jeopardy.
Fourth District Circuit Court Judge Ashley Hines and then the state Court of Appeals denied the appeal, but the the state Supreme Court agreed on Feb. 18 to hear it.
Rowland is requesting the armed robbery convictions be dismissed. If those charges are cleared from his record, Rowland would be eligible for parole on the murder counts.
“It will do an injustice if they ever get out,” said Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks, who investigated the case as a deputy in 1979. “They should have gotten the death penalty, in my opinion.”
Rowland, Ouzts and Keeton had heard about high stakes dice games at the country club because Rowland’s sister had a boyfriend who played, according to Banks.
They plotted the robbery for about two weeks, purchasing ski masks from a Greenville sporting goods store and sewing the mouths together to further hide their identities.
After staking out the building, located along heavily traveled U.S. 82 two miles west of Greenwood, they traveled to the club just after midnight on Feb. 16, 1979.
Parking on an unpaved road about 1.5 miles away, they walked through a cotton field and some woods wearing Army-type fatigue uniforms, combat boots and the ski masks.
It was cold that night, and rain mixed with sleet and a hint of snow. To steel their resolve, the three men took some narcotics.
After entering a side door, Rowland, Ouzts and Keeton found no high-stakes craps game but merely a friendly card game with less than $300 on the table.
Holding shotguns, they ordered the nine people inside to stand up and go to the nearest wall, remembers Estelle Carpenter, who was tending bar.
When Campbell stood up, Keeton shot him in the back. The 45-year-old branch manager of Commercial Credit Co. of Greenwood died almost instantly.
Keeton claims the shotgun went off accidentally as he picked money off the table.
Carpenter isn’t buying his explanation.
“That’s bull****,” she said. “I was there.”
After Campbell was shot, Carpenter said she and the others believed they would be killed, too.
Hughes, 59, the Greenwood area engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ran toward a hall. Rowland shot him in the back, and Hughes later died on the way to the hospital.
Rowland, Ouzts and Keeton took the keys to Bolton’s car from him and fled in it to where they had parked earlier.
Singleton and another of the poker players, Joe Floyd, followed them but the three suspects escaped.
A serial number from a combat boot thrown from the car helped lead investigators to Ouzts. He took a lie detector test and failed, Banks said. Ouzts then confessed, but in the meantime the other two took off to Canada.
While trying to come back into the United States on Feb. 23, 1979, their bus was stopped on a routine customs check. Authorities plugged their names into a National Crime Information Center computer and discovered Keeton and Rowland were wanted for murder in Mississippi.
Banks and Ronnie White, a state trooper who later became Greenwood’s police chief, flew to Malone, N.Y. and picked them up.
Campbell’s son, Jim, then 18, had just finished writing his senior term paper when the call came in about his father’s death.
Now a Leflore County Justice Court judge, Campbell said he’s put the murder behind him but that “you kind of don’t have a father like a lot of people have to give advice.”
Like most people who have connections to the case, Campbell said he believes the three men who pleaded guilty should not be eligible for parole for at least 42 years, as per the terms of the deal they agreed to. That would mean the earliest they could get out would be 2021.
Both his dad and Hughes were well-known and well-liked in the community, Campbell said, and the sentiment in Greenwood at the time leaned toward the death penalty.
“It was a pretty big deal certainly in Greenwood because everybody knew them,” Campbell said.
Along with several others involved in the case, Billy Floyd, one of the people in the room when the shootings occurred, was contacted about a month ago by someone from the Parole Board.
He said the case brings back old memories, and it’s not something he wants to discuss.
“I try to forget it,” Floyd said.
Carpenter, the bartender that night, said the murders were in cold blood and that Campbell and Hughes did nothing to deserve being shot.
“It was a very, very terrible thing. They killed two people for no reason, for no reason,” Carpenter said.
After Rowland filed the appeal in 2007, Judge Hines dismissed it because it came years after a deadline.
In a 6-4 split decision last year, the state Court of Appeals upheld the robbery conviction.
Writing for the majority, Judge Larry Roberts found Rowland waived his right to be free from double jeopardy when he pleaded guilty, just as someone pleading guilty to any crime gives up their rights to a jury trial or to confront their accusers.
“Rowland bargained to avoid two possible death sentences,” Roberts wrote. “He got exactly that for which he bargained.”
In a dissenting opinion, Chief Judge Leslie King argued that Rowland’s case should be sent back to circuit court for another hearing to decide whether he was subjected to double jeopardy.
“If Rowland is twice serving time for the same offense, as he alleges and the limited record before us appears to so indicate, then he has suffered prejudice,” King said.
For now at least, Rowland, 51, remains at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. He is representing himself in the appeal.
Ouzts, 50, is also at Parchman, while Keeton, 49, is imprisoned at the Marion County Correctional Facility.
Carpenter said she’ll travel to any parole hearing or court to ask they remain imprisoned for the rest of their lives.
The mother of two sons, she said if her own boys killed someone, she would feel the same way about them.
“These people did wrong,” Carpenter said. “Those men died for no reason. I don’t think they should ever get out of prison.”
