Indiana man convicted in gruesome slaying set for release

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — A southern Indiana man convicted in a Bloomington woman’s gruesome 1986 slaying and dismemberment is set for release this week from a state prison.

Robert Evan Lee is scheduled for release Thursday from the Branchville Correctional Facility near Evansville after serving 25 years of a 60-year sentence in the killing of Ellen Marks.

The 31-year-old former Indiana University graduate student in English was slain and dismembered by Lee in September 1986. Police never found her head or her hands.

Prison officials had planned to deliver the 57-year-old Lee to Bloomington’s Backstreet Missions, but the mission rejected Lee after learning about the brutality of his crime.

Department of Correction spokesman Doug Garrison tells The Herald-Times that now that Lee is being released he “has to be placed somewhere.”