The face of his watch was broken and the hands stopped at 6:24 a.m. The portion of the jail where the killing took place is no longer in daily use. A three-story annex was built 25 years ago and serves as the main booking and cell block area.

As officers investigated the jail scene and others combed the city, off-duty police Sgt. Keith Little joined in the search for the fugitives. Little worked part-time at a Ford dealership on Clay Street and was on his way there.

“That morning I was driving to work at the car lot, and I saw policemen gathered around,” Little said. “I asked them what was going on and they said Arthur Lee killed the jailer and escaped.

“So I joined the search.”

A nine-year police veteran who was 46 at the time, Little began searching cars on the dealership’s lot when a man told him about a vacant house on nearby Farmer Street, about five blocks from the jail.

“I went in, and I heard movement upstairs and I eased on up there,” said Little, who is now 76, retired and living in Church Hill, near Natchez. “I saw (Mitchell), and I motioned for her to come here.

“I said, You’re not the one I’m looking for, but you know where he is.'”

She pointed to a center room.

“I told him to come on out and give up, and he did.”

The two were cuffed about an hour after the slaying, and taken back to the jail from which they’d fled. As a trusty, Stevenson had not been confined to a cell. He has been, however, from the moment of his arrest until today.

Later that morning, Stevenson was charged with murder and arraigned by Justice of the Peace Pauline Sheffield.

A grand jury that had recessed earlier in the week was recalled to hear the case the following Monday by Circuit Court Judge Ben Guider.

Four days after the slaying, Stevenson was indicted for capital murder, which at the time carried a mandatory death sentence upon the conviction of killing a peace officer in the line of duty.

Stevenson’s Warren County trial began July 23, but jurors declined to return a verdict and a mistrial was declared.

Next came the first in a series of appeals, trials, hearings, motions and reversals that would span 20 years.

The second trial came the week after the first.

That panel, also in Warren County, found Stevenson guilty. Vicksburg resident Martin Hebler was a juror. He said last week the jury voted unanimously for Stevenson to die for Koerper’s death. Guider ordered the execution required by law.

For Hebler, there was no doubt that Stevenson had killed the jailer.

“An eyewitness testified that he was telling Stevenson to quit, and he kept on,” Hebler said. “There wasn’t nothing else for me to say at that point. It didn’t take long for us to decide.”

Stevenson, who’d been arrested and charged with crimes dating to 1965, went to state prison after that conviction, but the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the verdict, saying Stevenson should have been granted a psychiatric examination and that the trial should have been moved out of Warren County.

The third trial, in 1976, was in Tupelo. That jury also voted for Stevenson’s execution, in the electric chair, but the Supreme Court overturned that conviction as well, citing the facts that one of the jurors was not old enough to serve.

On the day in 1978 that Stevenson’s fourth trial would have begun, in Sharkey County, he pleaded guilty. The death sentence was off the table, but Stevenson agreed to spend his life behind bars without parole.

Nineteen years later, however, in response to another appeal, the high court found that a sentence of life without parole did not exist in Mississippi when Stevenson and his attorney, Eugene Perrier of Vicksburg, agreed to it. That sent Stevenson back to court in 1997.

After a three-day trial, Stevenson was again convicted in Warren County by a sequestered jury of Brookhaven residents bused in for the case. That jury found Stevenson guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

But because he’d already served 23 years, Stevenson had already served enough time to be considered for parole. He and lawyers did not apply, however, and instead filed appeals. Two years later, the high court upheld the 1997 conviction.

In December 2003, Stevenson was denied release from the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

He remains there today, and each year the state parole board hears his appeal. Also each year, members of Koerper’s family, including great-niece Lisa Counts of Vicksburg, appear before the board to ask that he be kept in prison.

This year, Stevenson’s parole hearing will be in October, and Counts said she will be there.