So, at about 7:00 PM on the evening of September 29, 2000, when the Beech Grove Police Department received a call reporting that a white Chevrolet Astro van had been stolen from a local gas station, it is unlikely that police officer William Ronald Toney believed that it was anything more than routine. Of course, for any police officer, the risk of not coming home from work is ever present in the back of their mind, but it's unlikely that Officer Toney - a 31-year-old father and two-year veteran of the force - expected the day to end in tragedy.
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| Officer William R. Toney |
But Officer Toney would never come home from his shift that night.
At about 9:00 PM local time, another Beech Grove police officer, Lt. Matthew "Matt" Hickey was on his way to respond to a nearby traffic accident when he spotted a white Chevrolet Astro van driving past him on the other side of the road. Hickey, who had filed the initial stolen vehicle report only two hours earlier, immediately recognized the license plate as belonging to the white van that had been stolen from the gas station earlier.
Hickey immediately called for backup, turned his patrol car around, and activated his lights and siren. Rather than stop, the Astro accelerated and sped off. Hickey gave chase, and was quickly joined by fellow officers Robert Mercuri and William Toney.
The stolen van turned onto the 700 block of Churchman Avenue and stopped on a front yard. Two men jumped out and ran in opposite directions. Officer Hickey apprehended a third man inside the vehicle while Toney and Mercuri chased the other two suspects on foot.
Officer Toney ran after the driver of the stolen van - a heavy-set tattooed young white man. The man ignored Toney's orders to stop, running through backyards and climbing over fences. The foot chase continued onto Fletcher Lane, and as Toney closed in on the fleeing carjacker, the man suddenly spun around. Drawing a 9mm Glock pistol, he fired five rounds in quick succession at Toney. Four of the bullets missed, but one struck Toney inches above his bulletproof vest, hitting him in the neck.
Toney staggered backwards, bleeding profusely from his wound as his assailant turned back around and continued to run. The officer pulled his 9mm Beretta from his holster and fired a shot at the fleeing gunman, but missed. Fatally wounded, Officer William Toney collapsed to the ground and bled to death on the street. He was just one day shy of his 32nd birthday, and left behind a wife and two young children.
After a manhunt that lasted several hours, the gunman and his accomplice were arrested in a nearby house after a standoff with over 100 officers. The gunman was identified as 20-year-old Benjamin Donnie Ritchie, a man with a long history of violence and a criminal record almost as long as his short life. The 9mm Glock he'd used to kill Officer Toney had been reported stolen a few days earlier.
Benjamin Ritchie had lived a rough life. Born to a single mother whose drinking habit had left him with fetal alcohol syndrome, Ritchie was abandoned by his family at an early age and spent time in and out of foster care. He performed poorly in school, having to repeat both the first grade and the ninth grade, and his academic record was marred by multiple behavioral problems. Ritchie had been arrested for burglary as a teenager, and during his incarceration he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
In November of 2000, Ritchie was charged with capital murder for the killing of Officer Toney. With his accomplices testifying against him, Ritchie faced the death penalty if convicted, but the cop killer remained defiant as ever. He laughed at the widow of Officer Toney, mocked and insulted the judge and the jury, and declared that he would never go back to prison.
Ultimately, on August 10, 2002, the jury found Ritchie guilty of murder, rejecting his attorneys' defense of mental illness. Four days later, that same jury recommended unanimously, after deliberating for only three hours, that Ritchie be sentenced to death. The judge followed that recommendation, and on October 15, 2002, Benjamin Ritchie - at only 22 years old - became the youngest person at the time to join death row at Indiana State Prison. Upon hearing his death sentence, Ritchie laughed and mocked Officer Toney's widow as a "fucking bitch".
During his incarceration on death row, Ritchie's aberrant behavior continued. He had Officer Toney's badge number - 37 - tattooed on his neck with a lightning bolt through it. He would be cited for disciplinary infractions a total of 43 times, and even attempted to plot an escape with a female admirer from Sweden.
Even though Ritchie would later claim that the "stupid kid" he once was when he murdered Officer Toney was "gone" after spending over a decade on death row, he still seemed to acknowledge that the prospect of rehabilitation was well out of reach for him.
"I'm the kind of guy that does need to be in prison", Ritchie said when interviewed in a documentary in 2014. "I'm the kind of guy who, if I get fired from a job and I can't find a job, and I can't pay my bills, I'm gonna go get a gun and go pay my bills, and I won't think nothing about it."
But in Indiana, the wheels of justice moved slowly. The lack of availability of lethal injection drugs would impose a 15-year moratorium on executions in Indiana between 2009 and 2024, and even after his appeals were rejected in 2004, Ritchie remained on death row for year after year with no execution date in sight. It wasn't until late 2024, when Indiana finally obtained a source of pentobarbital for lethal injection, that the state was able to resume executions, putting to death convicted murderer Joseph Corcoran in December of that year.
With Corcoran's execution, Ritchie would be next in line to receive an execution warrant. And, ultimately, he did. A series of final requests for clemency were denied, first by a clemency board and then by Indiana governor Mike Braun.
And early on the morning of May 20, 2025, Benjamin Ritchie's 25-year wait for justice finally came to an end.
Shortly before midnight, with his appeals denied and his clemency requests turned down, Ritchie was strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. It seems that Ritchie's earlier assertions that he wasn't rehabilitated were true; he didn't even use his last moments to apologize to the family of the police officer he senselessly murdered. When asked to make a final statement, Ritchie only said "I love my family, my friends, and all the support I've gotten. I hope they all find peace."
Specific details about the cop-killer's last minutes are scarce; no media were present at his execution. But according to the Indiana Department of Corrections, at around 12:36 AM, a lethal dose of pentobarbital began to flow down the IV tubes into Ritchie's arms. The convicted murderer heaved violently, raising his head and craning his body against the gurney's restraints, before slowly relaxing back down, his breathing gradually coming to a halt as his life ebbed away.
At 12:46 AM, Benjamin Ritchie was formally pronounced dead. His short life - which had been punctuated by little more than failure, lawlessness, and senseless violence - ended in a sterile, clinical fashion, a far cry from the violent death he had inflicted upon Officer Toney nearly 25 years earlier.
I am an ardent supporter of the death penalty, and so it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with my work how I feel about Ritchie's execution. Certainly, Benjamin Ritchie was failed a lot in life by people who could have and should have been there for him, even before he was born. Ritchie's upbringing - even by his own admission - made him an unlikely candidate to assimilate into civilized society. But at the end of the day, I do believe justice was served through his execution. In my opinion, there is no greater assault on the justice system than to kill a police officer. It is a direct attack on the concept of law and order itself, and thus I believe it warrants the ultimate punishment.
Indiana has not handed down a death sentence in 11 years, and with Ritchie gone, they now have six inmates remaining on death row. As I commented following the execution of Taberon Honie last year in Utah - another state which recently ended a nearly 15-year moratorium on executions - I hope that the execution of Ritchie will be a catalyst for Indiana to once again start taking its death penalty more seriously.
The lack of executions in the state has led to a growing reluctance among prosecutors in Indiana to seek the death penalty in cases where I believe it is not only appropriate, but is arguably the only just sentence for particularly depraved crimes.
A recent and notable example comes to mind; the horrific 2017 slayings of two young girls in Delphi, Indiana. Two teenage girls - 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German - were abducted on a hike at gunpoint by a man later identified as Richard Allen. Allen forced the girls to walk into the woods, take off their clothes, and then attempted to sexually assault them before slitting their throats. It was a case so heinous in its barbarity that I was almost certain the state would seek Allen's execution. Yet, at trial, the district attorney did not even seek a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. And while Richard Allen still received a sentence of 130 years in prison, I cannot help but feel that, in this case, justice was only partially served.
As with Taberon Honie in Utah, I hope the recent resumption of executions in Indiana may change the situation in this state. I do not, of course, take the imposition of the death penalty lightly in any way, but it exists so that the most heinous and depraved crimes in our society are punished to the fullest extent of the law. When prosecutors shy away from seeking the death penalty - as they did in Delphi - I believe it cheapens the value of innocent life and the barbaric nature of the crimes it is meant to punish.
I hope that with the execution of Ritchie, and with Indiana now once again becoming an active death penalty state, Indiana once again becomes willing to impose the harshest punishment for the worst crimes, not out of a sense of vengeance - as the anti-death-penalty crowd so often likes to claim - but out of a sense of justice and ensuring that the worst offenders in our society receive the harshest consequences possible for their actions.