Campbell and his attorney reported the body to authorities; Campbell was then taken into protective custody. After being placed in protective custody, Campbell fully confessed to his role in the murder and agreed to testify for the state in exchange for immunity, while Mercer and Gardner were taken into custody and held without bond at the Cass County Jail. After being taken into custody, Mercer was charged with the rape of the 17-year-old girl, which occurred in July 1978. While Mercer awaited trial, he was brought in for a hearing regarding the gang rape of another woman which occurred on August 17, 1978, weeks before Keeton's murder. The victim testified at a hearing in mid-October 1978 that Mercer forcibly removed her from her home and took her to a field near Belton, Missouri, where Mercer and several of his friends raped her. In 1979, Mercer and Gardner went on trial for first-degree murder. Campbell claimed during both a preliminary hearing and the trial itself that he thought Gardner was joking about killing Keeton and that Mercer took the supposedly facetious order seriously. Campbell also claimed that he did not interfere with the rape or murder because he was afraid of Mercer. The jury was presented with the option to convict Mercer and/or Gardner of capital murder, second-degree murder, or manslaughter. Both Mercer and Gardner were convicted of capital murder. In Gardner's case, the jury imposed a sentence of life imprisonment without parole until Gardner had served a minimum of 50 years of his sentence. Mercer was sentenced to death. As of June 2021, Gardner is still serving his sentence. Death row and appeals Mercer was admitted to death row on November 9, 1979. In an interview that Mercer gave in 1981, he claimed that he was innocent of the murder; he also declared that he had undergone a religious conversion while on death row. Prison officials claimed that the prison staff liked Mercer, who often helped newer condemned men adjust to life on death row since, at the time of his execution, Mercer was the longest-serving death row inmate in Missouri. Mercer's execution was once scheduled for October 20, 1988. On October 19, Mercer received a stay of execution from a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. On Friday, December 30, 1988, the same three judges lifted the stay of execution, allowing the Missouri Supreme Court