He Duct-Taped a 5-Year-Old and Set the House on Fire. Now He Wants Gov. Braun's Mercy.

Gov. Mike Braun in his 2019 official U.S. Senate portrait. Braun alone decides whether Jeffrey Weisheit's death sentence is commuted.

Jeffrey Weisheit wept when he talked about the Bible. He had nothing to say about the road flares.

For 64 minutes Friday inside Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, the man a jury sent to death row for murdering 8-year-old Alyssa Lynch and her 5-year-old brother, Caleb, asked the Indiana Parole Board to let him spend the rest of his life behind bars instead, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported. His execution is scheduled for Nov. 5. Whether it happens comes down to one man: Gov. Mike Braun.

Weisheit's own account to the board was brutal. He acknowledged binding Caleb with duct tape and putting a rag in the boy's mouth to keep him from screaming on the night of April 9, 2010. He described setting a phone book on an electric stove burner, turning it on, and driving away from the Evansville house with both children inside. At his 2013 trial, court records show, he denied setting the fire at all.

Then came the flares. Board members asked about road flares found under and around Caleb's body. Weisheit admitted buying flares and keeping them in the house but denied placing them near the boy. At one point he suggested police or emergency responders might have put them there. He offered no evidence for that, the Chronicle noted.

"I don't understand why I got so mad. I just, I don't know, I don't know why, why I can't explain it." (Jeffrey Weisheit, to the Indiana Parole Board)

The court record cited by the Chronicle does not read like a man who simply snapped. Before the killings he stopped payments on an engagement ring, told the jeweler he was leaving the country, quit his job and drained his bank account. Afterward he fled to Kentucky, where police caught him after a high-speed chase. He told the board he could not hurt the children's mother, Lisa Lynch, because she was pregnant with his child.

Braun's signals so far

The five-member board's recommendation is nonbinding, and the board doesn't expect to issue it before Oct. 23. After that, the state's own hearing notice says, the governor makes the final call: commute the sentence to life or let the execution go forward.

Braun has not been coy. Asked this week about Tennessee's failed Sept. 30 execution of Christa Pike, who survived two doses of pentobarbital, the same drug Indiana uses, he told WFIU that "it does give you pause." Then he added: "At this point, it's scheduled. Unless something pops up out of the ordinary in terms of access to it and all of that, I think it'll probably be in motion to go forward."

On the brain-scan evidence Weisheit's lawyers want, Braun said his office would look at it without stalling the clock: "We're not going to dismiss it. We're not going to try to slow it down."

His record points the same direction. The board recommended against clemency for Benjamin Ritchie last year and Braun let that execution proceed; he also turned down Roy Lee Ward. Weisheit would be the fourth man Indiana has executed since it ended a 15-year pause in December 2024.

The split inside the GOP supermajority

The push to blink isn't coming only from the left. Republican state Reps. Bob Morris and Chris Judy signed a letter asking Braun to halt executions until the General Assembly returns in January, WTHR reported. Morris, who calls himself a pro-life legislator, told 21Alive he's ready to file a bill abolishing the death penalty next session.

Rep. Jim Lucas, R-District 69, wants the opposite fix. "Those people have earned their place on death row, and we need to carry out those sentences," he told WTHR, and he plans to bring back his firing-squad bill, arguing the drugs are scarce and expensive.

Indianapolis Democrat Ed DeLaney goes further than Morris and wants Braun to commute every death sentence until lawmakers act. But one of his complaints, made to WDRB, lands with anyone who distrusts government secrecy: "We hide the costs, we hide details of the injection process." Whatever Braun decides, the Department of Correction owes taxpayers a straight answer on what this drug costs and how the state gets it.

A father's forgiveness, and a cooler in a cell

The children's father, Steven Lynch, has signed an affidavit backing life without parole. "What good does it do the memory of my children to put this man to death?" he wrote, closing with "Jeffrey, I forgive you." Weisheit's attorney, Joseph Perkovich, has stressed that Lynch speaks for himself, not for every relative.

Board members spent much of Friday on a blunt question: would this man be safe around other inmates and guards if he left death row? Chairwoman Gwendolyn Horth raised a disciplinary incident involving fecal matter; Weisheit said he kept it in a cooler in his cell out of fear of another prisoner and denied throwing it. He also disputed write-ups for a broken squeegee handle and cardboard jammed in his cell lock. Board member Mia Kelsaw pressed him on why he never took the mental health help the prison offered.

His lawyers want MRI and PET scans and a two-week delay, to Nov. 19. U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker approved money for the testing Sept. 16 but refused the transport request Oct. 7. The Indiana Supreme Court set briefing deadlines on the delay request and, as of Friday afternoon, had not ruled.

What's next, per the Parole Board's public notice and court filings:

• Monday, Oct. 19: Public testimony at the Indiana Government Center in Indianapolis, conference rooms 1 and 2. Supporters of clemency speak 9 to 11 a.m.; opponents 1 to 3 p.m.

• Monday, 4:30 p.m.: Weisheit's lawyers' reply is due at the Indiana Supreme Court on the delay request.

• Oct. 23 at the earliest: The board's recommendation to Braun.

• Nov. 5: Scheduled execution at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.

Written by Hoosiers for Hoosiers.