Miriam Shehane, who founded a Montgomery-based crime victims advocacy group after the 1976 kidnapping, rape and murder of her 21-year-old daughter, Quenette Shaheen, died Monday at 91, the organization said.

Miriam Shehane died following a recent illness, according to Victims of Crime and Leniency, or VOCAL, the organization she started in 1982.

“Miriam was a true hero who touched so many lives,” said CJ Robinson, district attorney for the 19th Judicial Circuit of Alabama and chairman of VOCAL’s board. “Out of a tragedy she found the grace to institute change so that others would walk an easier path. Her legacy will live on in the impact she had on us all.”

Quenette Shehane graduated from Birmingham-Southern College in 1976, but had stayed in Birmingham before heading home to Barbour County to cook out steaks with her boyfriend. She ran to a nearby convenience store to get salad dressing where she was kidnapped by three young men.

The case remains one of the highest-profile killings in Jefferson County.

“I can’t stand the thought of Quenette being forgotten. That is what has given me such drive,” Miriam Shehane told the Associated Press in a 2012 interview.

Wallace Norrell Thomas, Eddie Bernard Neal and Jerry Lee Jone kept her for hours, torturing and repeatedly raping her before they shot her to death while she tried to run away from them. Her body was found the following day.

All three men were eventually convicted. Thomas was executed by electric chair in 1990, and gave a lengthy statement as he was dying still proclaiming his innocence. “Let my death serve as an instigator that will awaken a nation to fight and adopt the philosophy of the late, great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’’

Neal was sentence to life in prison without parole. He started his sentence in June of 1979 and remains in lockup at St. Clair County Correctional Facility. Jones twice was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair, but those convictions were overturned on appeal. In his third trial, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison, which allows him to be considered for parole.

Jones began his life sentence in March of 1982, and is being held at Staton Correctional Facility. He was last denied parole in 2013, and comes up for parole again in September of 2018.

Miriam Shehane was a bank employee in the small southeast Alabama town of Clio at the time of her daughter’s murder.

Her frustration with the justice system — and the reluctance of legislators in Montgomery who rebuffed her and other crime victims’ advocates pleas to end a trial system that allowed a defense attorney to strike, or remove, two potential jurors for each one the prosecution got to remove in exchange for equal strikes — led her to form VOCAL.

When Shehane first talked to legislators about providing an equal number of strikes, she was told over and over, “’Mrs. Shehane, you don’t understand the judicial system.’

“I said, ‘The heck I don’t,’” she told the AP, “I’m living it.’”

Following Shehane’s passing on Monday, VOCAL Executive Director Wanda Miller said: “It is difficult to consider a world without Miriam Shehane. She was a force, a mother who had experienced more than many could bear, yet she harnessed that tragedy into a positive light that would forever shine in Alabama. Her vision will not end today but will continue in her honor and in remembrance of her daughter Quenette.”

Nine years ago, shortly before her daughter’s case was featured on national cable television, Shehane told AL.com that she hoped her daughter’s memory would endure and that girls exercise caution when they go out alone.

“That is the very one thing after she was killed I was determined I would not let happen and I think I have succeeded after 38 years,” she said.

VOCAL said it will release Shehane’s funeral arrangements once they are received from her family.