Bio

Ronald Lee Hoke Sr. was born in 1957 in Hagerstown, Maryland. By 1985, he had a documented history of mental health treatment; court records confirm he was confined at Central State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Petersburg, Virginia, from late September 1985 until October 4, 1985. On the day he was discharged, hospital staff gave him a bus ticket back to Hagerstown along with approximately two dozen pills to manage anxiety.

Murder Story

Rather than taking the bus home, Hoke cashed in the ticket and went to a bar in Petersburg, where he began drinking and taking pills. There, he encountered Virginia C. Stell, a 56-year-old woman. According to court records, the two were together at the European Restaurant in Petersburg on the evening of October 4, with Stell arriving first and Hoke joining her, the two left together around 6:00 p.m. and went to her apartment.

Hoke gave police three separate confessions over the following days, and his account of what happened remained broadly consistent across them: he and Stell had vaginal and anal sex, which he claimed was consensual and that the anal sex had been her idea. He said that Stell later began cooking, setting off a smoke alarm; when he smashed the alarm, she slapped him, and he responded by binding her wrists with a blue electrical cord taken from a clothes iron, gagging her with her own underwear, and stabbing her in the back and stomach. Before fleeing, he searched the apartment and stole a bottle of her prescription pills and other items; the contents of her purse and dresser drawers were found emptied onto the floor. The only significant inconsistency across his three confessions concerned premeditation: in his final confession, given October 17, Hoke stated he had decided to kill Stell before they ever reached her apartment, while in his earlier statements and later trial testimony, he described flying into a sudden rage after being slapped.

Stell's body was discovered in her apartment on October 7, 1985, bound and gagged, lying face down. Physical evidence at the scene, including the position in which she was found, contusions on her arms, and other forensic findings, supported the prosecution's argument that the sexual contact had been forced rather than consensual, contrary to the defense's account. Hoke ultimately surrendered on October 15, 1985, flagging down a police officer in Hagerstown, Maryland, at 3:25 a.m. and confessing to the killing; he repeated the confession to Petersburg police later that day, and gave a third, more detailed confession from the Petersburg jail two days later.

Hoke was tried and convicted of capital murder in the commission of robbery, rape, and abduction, and was sentenced to death in 1986. The Virginia Supreme Court affirmed both the conviction and the death sentence on direct appeal, rejecting his challenges to the constitutionality of Virginia's death penalty statute and finding the evidence sufficient to establish that the killing was willful, deliberate, and premeditated.

Hoke's case took a significant turn during federal habeas corpus proceedings: a U.S. District Court initially agreed with defense arguments, vacated his death sentence, and ordered a new trial. The Commonwealth of Virginia appealed, and on August 22, 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed that decision, reinstating Hoke's death sentence over a dissent from one judge on the panel.

A few hours before his scheduled execution, Governor George Allen denied Hoke's request for clemency, specifically citing that Hoke had confessed to the killing three separate times. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a final request for a stay of execution that same day, though Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg went on record stating they would have granted one.

Ronald Lee Hoke Sr. was executed by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Center in Virginia on December 16, 1996, at age 39, the eighth person executed in Virginia that year, the most in a single year since the state resumed executions in 1982. His final statement was largely inaudible to witnesses, but corrections officials reported he expressed remorse to Stell's family and a message of love to his girlfriend, Dawn. He was pronounced dead at 9:19 p.m.