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‘Pure Evil’: Ohio Man Denied Parole In ‘Brutal’ 1986 Rape Killings Of Two College Students
Clinton Dickens and Richard Cooey abducted Wendy Offredo and Dawn McCreery before torturing, sexually assaulting and ultimately killing them.
An Ohio man who was convicted of murdering and raping a pair of university students more than three and a half decades ago was denied parole last week, according to officials.
The Ohio Parole Board blocked 53-year-old Clinton Dickens’ petition for parole, Summit County prosecutors announced on Friday.
Dickens, who has been behind bars since the age of 17, carried out the 1986 rape and murders of 21-year-old Wendy Offredo and 20-year-old Dawn McCreery, along with his now-dead co-defendant Richard Cooey.
Dickens was initially not eligible for parole until 2071. However, a new Ohio law, passed in 2021, allows those who committed crimes under the age of 18 to apply for parole after spending between 18 and 30 years behind bars.
“This was a horrible crime, which is still being felt to this day nearly 36 years later,” Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh said in a statement on April 22. “Wendy and Dawn were loved by everyone who knew them. It absolutely sickens me to think about what they went through. “[Richard] Cooey and Dickens are pure evil and Dickens should never be let out of prison. We will continue the fight to keep him locked up and to keep the community safe.”
On Aug. 31, 1986, McCreery and Offredo, both University of Akron students who also worked as waitresses, were driving home from their restaurant jobs when they first encountered Dickens, Cooey, and a third teenager, who were hurling rocks off a highway overpass, prosecutors said. As the two women drove underneath them, the teens threw a sizable chunk of concrete, which smashed through their windshield.
Dickens and Cooey later drove the two Akron women to a nearby payphone where Offredo called her mother. Afterwards, the two men abducted McCreery and Offredo, and transported them to an isolated wooded area in Norton, Ohio, where they sexually assaulted, beat, and tortured them for several hours. The third teen didn’t participate in the double killing, prosecutors said.
McCreery was fatally stabbed in the neck, while Offredo was strangled to death, officials said. The two men ultimately carved ‘X’s’ into both McCreery and Offredo’s stomachs, before disposing of their corpses in a nearby clump of bushes, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.
Dickens was originally sentenced to 95 years in prison on Jan. 12, 1987, online state jail records obtained by Oxygen.com show.
In 2008, Cooey was executed by the state for his involvement in the double murders after a series of legal battles seeking clemency.
''You motherf---ers have not paid attention to anything I've had to say for the past 22 years,” Cooey said when asked if he had any last words prior to his execution. “Why would you pay attention to anything I have to say now?''
Cooey had previously attempted to block his death sentence on the grounds that lethal injection was inhumane due to the fact that he was “morbidly obese,” CNN reported. He had weighed 267 pounds.
Dickens won’t be eligible for parole again until November 2026, prosecutors said.
