1989 STRUTHERS MURDERS Competency evaluation delays execution of Vrabel

He killed his wife and daughter and refrigerated their bodies.
By JEFF ORTEGA
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
COLUMBUS -- Killer Stephen Vrabel's date with death, scheduled for later this month, has been postponed by the Ohio Supreme Court pending an evaluation of his mental competency.
The high court, in an unsigned ruling Tuesday, ordered the delay of Vrabel's scheduled Sept. 30 execution.
The high court also ordered Mahoning County Common Pleas Court to have a competency hearing for Vrabel, convicted in the 1989 fatal shootings of his common-law wife and daughter in Struthers, after he filed a motion seeking to waive all of his appeals.
Vrabel's public defenders requested the stay of execution.
"The court of common pleas is directed to promptly hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the defendant is mentally competent to forgo any and all challenges to his conviction and death sentence," the supreme court's ruling said.
"The court shall further determine whether the defendant has in fact decided to forgo such challenges, and whether such decision was voluntarily, knowingly, and intelligently made," the ruling added.
Neither lawyers for the state nor Vrabel's lawyers could be reached to comment late Tuesday.
Hearings
In July, the high court ruled 4-3 to uphold Vrabel's conviction and death sentence after Vrabel's lawyers had sought a new trial, claiming that Vrabel was mentally incompetent during his 1995 trial.
During oral arguments before the high court in February, Vrabel's lawyers said Vrabel had believed that his lawyers in his original trial were part of a conspiracy against him.
At one point during Vrabel's original trial, Vrabel's lawyers told the court, Vrabel even tried to seek a "change of venue to the spirit world." Lawyers for the state, however, told the high court that Vrabel was competent enough to know what was going on and that his punishment should stand.
Vrabel was convicted of two counts of aggravated murder in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court and sentenced to death.
Grisly case
Court papers say Vrabel told police he fatally shot Susan Clemente, his common-law wife, and Lisa, his 3-year-old daughter, and placed their bodies in the refrigerator and freezer, respectively, of their Struthers apartment.
Clemente's brother-in-law found the bodies when he went to the home to check on Clemente, court papers say.
After the bodies were discovered, Vrabel surrendered to investigators in the Cleveland suburb of Parma.
Vrabel had been committed to the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital in Columbus from 1990 to 1994 but was convicted of the aggravated murder counts in October 1995.