NORFOLK, Va. — Robert Gleason Jr. was already convicted of murdering two people and vowed to kill again if he wasn’t sentenced to death, but that didn’t bother his new prison friend or the man’s mother, who was confident her son would be safe in the state’s most secure prison.
Now, authorities say Gleason’s new prison buddy is his latest victim, and the inmate’s mother is questioning why prison officials didn’t take Gleason’s threat to kill again seriously.
So is Gleason.
“Now why did they put me outside with other inmates after I killed an inmate and I said what I said about if I don’t get the death penalty?” Gleason wrote to The Associated Press days after he killed Aaron Cooper on July 28. “This place doesn’t make sense.”
Gleason said he told investigators he killed 26-year-old Cooper because his prison lawyer told him he would not get the death penalty when he’s sentenced later this month. He said he also was frustrated that he had submitted motions and subpoenas to the court that had not been addressed.
Gleason signed the letter “The New and Improved Boston Strangler.”
“You knew this man threatened to kill, and you gave him the opportunity to kill my son,” the victim’s mom, Kim Strickland, said in an interview days after Cooper was killed.
Cooper told his mother he and Gleason talked about God and other things to pass the time in the segregation unit at Red Onion State Prison, a supermax facility in the mountains of southwest Virginia. Gleason gave him stamps and paper to write home, and Gleason wrote to Strickland asking her to be his pen pal.
“I don’t want you thinking that I’m talking with a Satan worshipper or the boogeyman,” Cooper wrote to his mother on June 24. “He’s just another guy locked up.”
Just over a month later, prosecutors say Gleason lured Cooper to the chain-link fence dividing their cages in the recreation yard saying he had a gift: a gang necklace. Instead, it was a noose fashioned from torn bed sheets that he used to strangle Cooper.
Gleason, 40, is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 31 for beating and strangling a cellmate, Harvey Watson Jr., last year. At the time, Gleason was already serving a life sentence for killing a man in 2007. Commonwealth’s Attorney Ron Elkins said he would wait until after the sentencing later this month to charge Gleason with Cooper’s death.
Strickland said she does not want Gleason to get the death penalty — not out of mercy, but because being executed is what he wants.
“If he wanted to die, why didn’t he commit suicide?” said Strickland.
“They’re going to have to make new provisions to keep that man, but he should rot in prison, die in prison.”
Strickland questions why guards didn’t stop her son’s death. Prisoners in segregation are isolated except for one hour a day, when they are in separate outdoor cages for recreation.
Prison officials refused to comment.