Before sunrise on Friday, October 10, the State of Indiana is scheduled to carry out the death sentence of Roy Lee Ward at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. It would be the state’s third execution since Indiana resumed capital punishment in 2024, and the second this year. The crime that set the course for the last twenty-four years happened on the morning of July 11, 2001, in Dale, a Spencer County town just northwest of Perry County.

Prosecutors said Ward approached the Payne home pretending to look for a lost dog, then attacked 15-year-old Stacy Payne inside.

Her younger sister awoke to screams. The brutality of the assault and killing shook the region and still defines local memory of that summer. Ward was convicted and sentenced to death in 2002, but the Indiana Supreme Court later overturned that conviction and ordered a new trial on venue grounds. On remand, Ward pleaded guilty in 2007, a jury again recommended death, and the trial court imposed that sentence.

The conviction and sentence were affirmed on appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in 2010. In recent months, legal attention shifted from guilt to how Indiana conducts executions. The Indiana Supreme Court issued the warrant on August 27 setting the execution “before the hour of sunrise” on October 10.

Since the state resumed executions after a fifteen-year pause, the use and secrecy around the drug pentobarbital have drawn scrutiny. Indiana is one of two death-penalty states that bar media from witnessing executions except by invitation, a policy that news organizations are challenging in federal court. State law limits attendance to corrections officials, spiritual advisers, up to five friends or relatives of the condemned, and up to eight members of the victim’s family. Two late developments cleared the way this week.

The State Parole Board recommended against clemency and Governor Mike Braun denied it on September 29, and on October 8 Ward withdrew his remaining federal challenges, effectively ensuring the execution proceeds on the schedule set by the court. In Dale and across neighboring Perry County, remembrance focuses on Stacy.

Local reporting has long noted that she was a Heritage Hills High School cheerleader, an honor-roll band member, and a student council voice, the kind of teenager who showed up for classmates and for her town. That picture has carried through two decades of hearings and anniversaries. As Friday approaches, the region again sits with a hard truth. For some, the scheduled execution promises long-deferred closure.

For others, questions about secrecy and protocols remain unsettled. For everyone who remembers a bright fifteen-year-old from a small Indiana town, the loss is permanent.