A parole hearing is scheduled Tuesday in Deer Lodge in the case of a 59-year-old Oklahoma man convicted in the 1979 murder of a Polebridge man.
J.R. Fletcher was convicted of stabbing Roy Cooper to death and sentenced to 100 years in prison. His most recent parole hearing was in 2006.
Fletcher, his wife and another man were attempting to flee to Canada when their truck became mired in mud in Cooper’s Polebridge-area driveway in April 1979.
Fletcher, Teresa Fletcher and Ronald L. White conspired to steal his horses, then held him at gunpoint while they broke into area homes. Before they left, Fletcher and his co-defendants held Cooper hostage while they robbed and tortured him. Fletcher stabbed Cooper in the neck.
All three were arrested after a shootout with law enforcement in Idaho.