INDIANAPOLIS – The United States Supreme Court announced Monday it will not review the case of Jerry Russell Jr., an Indiana man serving life imprisonment without parole for the 1995 torture and murder of Pamela Foddrill in Greene County.
Russell, who was twice sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The trial court also imposed consecutive sentences of fifty years for conspiracy to commit murder, fifty years for criminal deviant conduct, and twenty years for criminal confinement.
Russell’s attorney, C.J. Shepard of Sullivan, Boehm, and Rucker, had petitioned the high court to overturn his sentence, arguing he should be ineligible for life imprisonment due to an “intellectual disability.”
The case stems from the brutal August 1995 abduction of Foddrill, 44, of Linton, who was walking home from a grocery store on August 18th when Russell and two accomplices kidnaped her. Foddrill was intellectually disabled with the mind of a seven-year-old. She was a tiny woman standing 5 feet tall and weighing 100 pounds.
According to investigators, the victim was held captive in an attic storage space for more than a week, during which she endured repeated sexual assaults. The perpetrators ultimately beat her with a baseball bat and stabbed her.
On December 3, 1995, two hunters found skeletal remains wrapped in a sleeping bag along a county road northeast of Lawrenceville, Illinois, near the Wabash River.
More than two years after her death, police arrested 45-year-old Roger Long, who was being held in the Lawrence County Jail on a probation violation and had confessed to two other inmates he had a part in Foddrill’s murder.
During the investigation, investigators arrested John Redman, 41, Jerry Russell Jr., 36, and Wanda Hubbell, 36.
Hubble admitted they had seen Foddrill walking home and convinced her to enter their vehicle. They took her to Redman’s house, not far from Foddrill’s home, and all four of them sexually assaulted her repeatedly for days. When they tired of her, they attacked and stabbed her to death. They stored her body in a shed in Bedford for about a week before dumping her body in Illinois.
Hubble was a star witness in the criminal trials and was sentenced to 20 years for her part in the crime. Long, Redman and Russell were all convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole,
The Indiana Supreme Court had previously rejected Russell’s appeal in June 2024. In the court’s 4-1 decision, Justice Derek Molter acknowledged the complexity of the case, writing, “This issue is a close call because Russell introduced Dr. Dennis Keyes’s expert opinion that Russell is intellectually [disabled], the State concedes Russell’s intellectual function is diminished, and Russell is near the line for substantial impairment of his adaptive behavior.”
However, the state court ultimately upheld the resentencing court’s finding. “We must affirm the resentencing court’s finding that Russell did not satisfy his burden to prove intellectual disability because that finding is supported by the evidence in the record, and it is not clearly erroneous,” Justice Molter concluded.
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case, Russell’s life sentence without parole remains in effect.
