Stephanie Roper Murder

Stephanie Roper Murder

The Stephanie Roper murder involved a Frostburg State University student who on April 3, 1982 was kidnapped, repeatedly and brutally raped, tortured, shot, set afire, and partially dismembered. Roper was home on a college break, and she and a friend were returning from an evening with friends at a West End Washington, D.C. bar, the "Twenty-Second Amendment" late at night. After dropping her friend off in Brandywine, Maryland, Stephanie proceeded toward her own home in Croom, Maryland, but her car became disabled on a dark rural road. Two men stopped and instead of helping, kidnapped her at gunpoint. The two men, Jack Ronald Jones and Jerry Lee Beatty kidnapped Stephanie and took her to an abandoned shack in Oakville, St. Mary's County. There she was tortured and raped repeatedly. One of the men called the other by his first name. Afraid now that Stephanie knew his name, they decided to kill her. Stephanie made several attempts to escape and upon her last capture, her skull was fractured with a logging chain and she was shot to death. In order to hinder identification, the murderers burned her body and severed her hands. They were captured after the younger man bragged about his part in the crime. Both men were charged with kidnapping, rape and felony murder. The primary killer was convicted in Baltimore County while his co-defendant pled guilty to the same charges in Anne Arundel County. Both courts imposed relatively lenient sentences of two concurrent life sentences.