COVINGTON - The killer had acne. Blood-red splotches on a full-moon face.
He was 14, and the hand he raised when he swore to tell the truth was thick still with baby fat.
''I went into Jean Wilde's house without permission, I stole money from her and I stabbed her, causing her death,'' Clifford Stoup told Kenton Circuit Judge Steven Jaeger on Friday. His voice was flat, his face blank.
Clifford was in court to change his plea in the murder case to guilty, thereby avoiding an emotionally charged trial - one he was likely to lose.
But a jury of his peers had been assembled anyway. Julie Bedford's kids filled the courtroom. Ms. Bedford, a teacher and senior adviser at Calvary Christian School, had brought her government class. Their verdict:
''It's sad,'' said 18-year-old Mandy Oursler.
Mandy was one of more than 30 teen-agers at the hearing. The crowded courtroom had become a classroom. Once, a news photographer shoved aside a bunch of metal coat hangers on a rod near the jury box. It sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Judge's note
It jangled the nerves, this proceeding. Clifford's legs were shackled, his hands cuffed. Ms. Bedford's students were spellbound.
The judge had seen the class sitting in on a civil trial earlier in the day and, there on the bench, had taken a moment to scrawl a note to Ms. Bedford. The bailiff delivered it.
''If the class will still be here at 2 p.m. a 14-year-old boy will be pleading guilty to a murder,'' Judge Jaeger had written. ''The class is welcome to return. ...''
''What better lesson for them,'' the judge said later, ''than to make it real?''
It was real, all right. When the boy in the shackles is being sentenced next month, the young men and women from Room 31 at Calvary Christian will be in Florida, on their senior-class trip.
''We'll have our freedom,'' Mandy said.
''And he won't.''
Judge Jaeger's courtroom is the end of the line for Clifford Stoup. The boy faces between 20 years and life in prison for killing Jean Wilde. Besides the murder charge, he pleaded guilty to burglary. He faces 10 to 20 years for that.
She knew him
One day last fall, Clifford went home, changed into a black sweat shirt and black jeans, pulled a black, knit mask down over his face and set out to rob the 67-year-old Ms. Wilde in her house on West 13th Street.
Despite the mask, Ms. Wilde recognized him. This was a neighborhood boy. He had played basketball with her great-nephews. She knew the sound of his monotone voice. She saw the cast on his arm.
She admonished him.
He cut her throat.
Because Clifford Stoup was 14 when he murdered Ms. Wilde, the case might have played out under a cloak of secrecy in juvenile court. That's what happened with another 14-year-old boy charged in the crime.
Brandon Neal was sentenced Wednesday to the custody of the state in a residential treatment facility. But there were no reporters there, no kids in baggy pants or sun dresses. No teachers.
Juvenile court proceedings are not open to the public, and that's too bad. What lessons can be learned if the classroom's locked? Clifford Stoup ends up in juvenile court, Ms. Bedford's out of luck.
'Quite depressing'
Fortunately, the final chapter of this grisly story was written in the public glare of adult court, and the kids from Room 31 learned a lesson they won't soon forget.
''Stay out of trouble,'' 17-year-old Darah Vater said.
On the elevator, headed down and out of the Courthouse, a classmate of Darah's rode in silence. ''I found it quite depressing,'' William Dean said of the hearing. He was short and compact, like Clifford Stoup, and his face was pale and round. But, there, the similarities ended.
William Dean, 17, has his life ahead of him. He wants to go into law enforcement when he grows up. Or maybe computers. His options were unlimited, his horizons free and clear, as he walked out of the Courthouse into the bright April day.
Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.
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