UPDATE | Watkins, Fife expect to see justice in Hill case

WARREN — Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins and retired Trumbull County Victim-Witness Office Coordinator Miriam Fife have worked together to see justice done in the murder of Fife's son, Raymond, since September 1985.

That's when Raymond, 12, was brutally murdered as he rode his bicycle to a Boy Scouts meeting in the city.

At a press conference this afternoon, the two explained a United States Supreme Court ruling today that put the death penalty back on the table for Danny Lee Hill, 51, one of the two killers.

Hill's case has dragged on 34 years, one of the longest such cases still pending in Ohio.

If Hill is executed some day, Fife, now 78, says she will go there to watch it, even if she has to do it in a wheel chair, she said.

Watkins said he's "not far behind" in age and quipped that he might need the the same type of help to witness the execution, if it ever happens.

"I'm not going to be around forever. Let's get on with it," Fife said of Hill's execution.

It's the first time in Trumbull County history that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a case to support a Trumbull County verdict, Watkins said.

The top court said the Cincinnati-based U.S. 6th Circuit Court of appeals erred when it took away the death penalty in Hill's case and sent it back to the panel to decide the matter based on only proper rulings.