Julie Madere, Charlotte Murray Pace Memorial Scholarship Recipient

Panel Picks Recipient for Pace Scholarship

December 6, 2003

When a committee of eight staff and faculty from LSU’s business school began mulling to whom to award the first annual Charlotte Murray Pace Memorial Scholarship, its members began to cry.

“It was very, very emotional,” said Wendy Luedtke, director of alumni and recruiting relations for the E.J. Ourso College of Business Administration. “We all think about her every day.”

Pace, 22, was slain on May 31 by a still at large Baton Rouge serial killer. The other known victims are Gina Wilson Green and Pam Kinamore, whose slayings have all been linked by DNA. Pace was Luedtke’s graduate assistant for two years and had graduated from LSU’s MBA program a week before her death.

Shortly after the slaying, friends and family announced a scholarship fund to honor Pace. Though only half of the $75,000 needed to fully endow the scholarship has been raised, the first award was given in November to Julie Madere, a 23-year-old second-year student in the MBA program. Madere was given $500. Future scholarships are expected to pay a full year of tuition.

Luedtke said the ideal applicant will resemble Pace – ideally female, from Mississippi, have attended Milsaps College, participated in soccer at the collegiate level and have majored as an undergraduate in accounting. Luedtke said six MBA students matched two of those qualifications. Madere was chosen because she owned the best academic record.

Scholarship winners are given a plaque with Pace’s photo and an inscription of her life achievements. They are required to write letters of gratitude to Pace’s parents, Ann Pace and Casey Pace. The partial scholarship was awarded this year because both the committee and Ann Pace wanted the first recipient to have known Murray.

“I didn’t know Murray really well, but what I did know I liked,” Madere said. “I know it was important to her mom that it be given to someone who knew her, so I was really glad to be selected.”

Though Madere said she would obviously prefer a year’s tuition to $500, the amount of the award wasn’t so important. “It didn’t matter how much it was for,” she said. “It was about what it meant.”