7. INMATES S–Z (SANBORN–ZEIGLER)

S

SANBORN, PARRAMORE LEE (KENTUCKY # 92000), DOB 3.8.1945

PARRAMORE LEE SANBORN kidnapped Barbara Heilman from her Henry home on the night of 12 October 1983. Then he compounded his crime in the most appalling way by sodomising and raping his terrified victim before finally killing her. When he was arrested, he was found to have the woman’s blood on his trousers, his shoes and in his car.

This particular piece of low-life was originally tried and found guilty of capital murder on 8 March 1984. In his summing up, the judge described Sanborn’s crime as ‘particularly vicious and shocking’.

The trial court imposed the death sentence on 16 March 1984, and the State of Kentucky thought that was the last of the matter. However, the State Supreme Court’s reversal of this man’s conviction in June 1988, on technicalities, resulted in a new trial, which took place in Louisville in October 1989.

Nevertheless, justice prevailed, and Sanborn was again found guilty of murder, kidnapping, rape and sodomy. He was again sentenced to death.

SELLS, TOMMY LYNN (TEXAS # 999367), DOB 28.6.1964

A former barber, mechanic and labourer from Alameda County, California, Tommy Sells had a long criminal record for auto-related crimes and violence. However, when he turned to the rape and murder of two young girls, an outraged court gave him a richly merited death sentence.

On Friday 31 December 1999 he entered a Del Rio residence. The only occupants at the time were a thirteen-year-old girl and her sister, aged ten. The repugnant Sells knew this and he had gone there with the specific intention of committing rape.

Before leaving the scene of his depraved and cowardly assault, Sells slashed the older girl’s throat and stabbed her several times. The teenager died. He then slashed the younger girl’s throat, but she survived to identify Tommy Sells as her assailant and the murderer of her sister.

SELVAGE, JOHN HENRY (TEXAS # 999652), DOB 7.8.1950

John Selvage committed his first murder on 30 July 1979. Up to that time he had confined his activities to bank robbery, conspiracy to commit bank robbery, some drug dealing and a few parole violations. However, all that changed when, with two accomplices, Selvage went to Ventura’s jewellery store in Dallas.

Albert Garza, a Harris County deputy sheriff, who was a friend of the owner of the store, had stopped by to use the phone. While he was passing the time of day, employee Steve Ventura approached him to say that he was suspicious of Selvage and his two companions.

Garza took off his coat to reveal his gun and shield, thinking that this would serve as a deterrent.

It didn’t!

Selvage opened fire, killing Garza instantly.

The three robbers fled the scene with jewellery valued at $10,000. A gun battle ensued as Steve Ventura fired at them, but they made good their escape.

About a week after the robbery/murder, Selvage and accomplice Wilbert Kelly, aged 24, were recognised by police in New Orleans. Selvage was arrested, but Kelly opened fire and died in a hail of bullets.

SHAMBURGER, RON SCOTT (TEXAS # 999167), DOB 11.11.1971

Convicted in the heinous murder of 20-year-old Lori A. Baker during the burglary of her home in College Station, former cashier and labourer Ron Shamburger now sits on Death Row.

On Friday 30 September 1994, Shamburger, a senior medical student at Texas A&M, who knew his victim as a fellow student, entered her home at 1008 Bayou Woods in an attempt to steal money. He shot the woman in the head with a 9-millimetre pistol after she had awoken to find him in her bedroom. He then kidnapped Lori’s roommate, Victoria Kohlar, when she returned home, by placing her in the trunk of a car after binding her hands with duct tape.

Shamburger drove only a few blocks from the house before abandoning Kohlar in the unlocked trunk. He then returned to the crime scene and, after probing Baker’s head with a knife in an attempt to retrieve the bullet, poured gasoline on her and set the body on fire.

The killer later walked into the College police station and surrendered, emptying the bullets from his pistol onto the floor.

SHEPPARD, ERICA YVONNE (TEXAS # 999144), DOB 1.9.1973

‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s car.’ Moses was not quite as specific as that, but nineteen-year-old Erica Sheppard should have known that it doesn’t do to covet things that are thy neighbour’s. In this instance the object of Erica’s covetousness was a brand new Mazda 626, the property of one Marilyn Meagher.

Sheppard, with her boyfriend, James R. Dickerson, spotted Meagher carrying clothing from her car to her apartment at 465 Wild Indigo, Bay City, Texas, and decided to rob her of the vehicle.

The two would-be car owners tackled their victim in her apartment, demanding the car keys at knifepoint. As the terrified women begged for her life, the pair slashed her throat several times. They then wrapped a plastic bag around her head before smashing her skull with a 10 lb statue.

Sheppard and Dickerson fled in the Mazda but were later arrested. Both were sentenced to death. However, on 10 September 1999, Dickerson died of AIDS on Death Row. His former girlfriend awaits her death by lethal injection.

SHIELDS JR, ROBERT ALAN (TEXAS # 999166), DOB 21.9.1994

Hailing from Howard County, Indiana, former salesman Robert Shields was convicted of the murder of Paula Stiner, aged 27, during the burglary of her Friendswood home in Texas. The young woman, who had lived in the house at 448 E Castleharbor for three months, was beaten with a hammer and stabbed 28 times after being confronted by Shields upon her return home from work on Wednesday 21 September 1994.

Shields had entered the premises earlier in the day, and waited for his victim so that he could steal her car. When Paula was dead, he stole her credit cards and used one at the Willowbrook Mall 90 minutes later. He was arrested three days later while driving the stolen car.

SHORT, TERRY (OKLAHOMA # 160219)

Forty-year-old Terry Short was convicted in 1997 for the 1995 death of Ken Yamamoto in Oklahoma County. Oddly enough, Yamamoto was not the intended victim, but that doesn’t go any way towards mitigating what was a most barbaric and vicious crime.

The mindless Short threw home-made explosives through the patio door of the apartment of Brenda Gardner, a woman he had been dating. Tragically, the fire caused neighbour Yamamoto’s apartment to collapse. Ken Yamamoto was horribly injured in the devastation and died later from burns to 95 per cent of his body.

SIMMONS, BEORIA A. (KENTUCKY # 32828), DOB 17.5.1954

In Jefferson County, on 13 May 1985, Beoria Simmons was sentenced to death for murder, rape and four counts of kidnapping, all of which, under Kentucky law, makes him eminently well qualified for execution.

Over a two-year period, he abducted Robin Barnes, Shannon House and Nancy Bettman at gunpoint. All three underwent the same terrifying ordeal as Simmons raped and killed them.

These crimes occurred on Friday 18 May 1981, Thursday 25 March 1982 and Friday 11 March 1983 respectively, making Mr Simmons a serial killer. On 11 June 1983, he ran out of luck when he abducted a fourth victim who managed to escape and identify Simmons to the police.

SIMMS, DEMETRIUS LOTT (TEXAS # 999184), DOB 27.2.1971

Simms had served just two years of a six-year prison term for indecency with a three-year-old child when he was released back into society on parole. Two days after he walked out of the prison gates, he committed murder.

Three-year-old Monique Miller was playing just outside her home when Simms lured her into a wooded area. There he raped the trusting infant before strangling her. To make sure that she was indeed dead, the depraved monster bludgeoned her with a tree branch. Three days later, on Tuesday 4 June 1991, he was caught while attempting to abduct another child.

After being questioned by police he led officers to Monique’s body. Fibres found on her clothes matched clothing Simms was wearing when he was arrested.

While Simms is on Death Row, awaiting an execution that he most certainly deserves, there is no doubt that those misguided buffoons who granted parole to this convicted paedophile should shoulder some of the blame. Their actions, in setting this man free, led to the death of little Monique and, had it not been for his timely arrest, there is little doubt that another similar killing would have ensued.

SIMS, TERRY MELVIN (FLORIDA)

On 23 February 2000, and for the first time in its history, Florida executed an inmate by injection following a high-profile struggle over the way in which the state’s condemned should be put to death. This is not surprising, in view of some of the terrifying spectacles that had occurred when Old Sparky, the electric chair, had chosen to malfunction.

Fifty-eight-year-old Terry Sims was given a lethal dose of chemicals shortly after 7 a.m., for the fatal shooting of a sheriff’s deputy during a drugstore robbery in the central Florida town of Longwood on Monday 19 December 1977.

Sims’ death marked the first time in almost 73 years that Florida had executed anyone by a method other than electrocution.

Florida State Prison spokesman, C. J. Drake said that the execution team was well prepared, having practised ‘well over a dozen times’. According to protocol issued by prison officials, after his final meal, Sims was showered and dressed in his funeral suit. A doctor offered him Valium to calm his nerves.

Out of view of the media and official witnesses, officers strapped Sims to a gurney in a small preparation room, placing an intravenous line into each of his arms and securing a heart monitor. An agent of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement observed, making sure the inmate was not mistreated.

An anonymous executioner wearing a black hood, in keeping with prison tradition, pushed a plunger sending two syringes filled with sodium pentothal in a dose strong enough to kill, into Sims’ arm. Next he injected a saline solution, followed by two syringes of pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant to halt breathing. Another saline solution followed, then two syringes of the lethal potassium chloride. The executioner earned $150 for the job.

On the day of the 1977 murder, George Pfiel, aged 55, who had become a deputy sheriff in Florida after retiring from the New York City Police Department, where he had served 22 years, was off duty. He had stopped to pick up a prescription for his wife, Florence. Sims and Curtis Baldtree were holding up the pharmacy, while two other accomplices waited in a car.

When Sims spotted Pfiel’s uniform, he opened fire. The fatally wounded deputy fired and hit Sims in the hip before dying from his wounds. Sims was not arrested until June 1978 after an attempted robbery in California.

SLAUGHTER, JAMES EARL (KENTUCKY # 89620), DOB 3.2.1963

After living up to his surname, James Slaughter is in residence in the Kentucky State Penitentiary after being sentenced to death on 1 June 1983 in Pike County.

During the afternoon of Friday 28 January 1983, bespectacled Slaughter entered a clothing store with the intent to rob it and, in the process, stabbed and killed the owner. He was arrested the next day. His trial and sentencing were concluded less than six months later.

SLAUGHTER, JIMMIE RAY (OKLAHOMA # 229799)

Jimmie Slaughter was into the occult and Satanism round about the time when he was charged with the murder of 29-year-old Melody Sue Wuertz and their daughter eleven-month-old Jessica. Both were shot dead with a .22-calibre pistol, and Melody was mutilated with a cult-like symbol carved into her stomach.

Slaughter, who was married to another woman and had two young daughters at the time of the killings, was angered over a paternity lawsuit filed against him by Melody, and he bragged that he ‘thought nothing of killing his own child’.

State prosecutor Richard Wintory told the trial court, ‘The death of the child was a good thing for Jim Slaughter. There is only one person who had any reason to want that baby dead … the man who would have to pay for it, Jim Slaughter.’

SLAWSON, NEWTON CARLTON (FLORIDA # 119658), DOB 10.10.1954

There is not a lot of background information concerning tubby, bald, bespectacled Newton Slawson, but whatever there is would make dull reading in comparison with the events of Tuesday 11 April 1989. For on that day, this 45-year-old homicidal psychopath erupted, like some long-dormant volcano, murdering an entire east Tampa family in a savage bloodbath, which in some respects echoed the Charles Manson killings.

Peggy and Gerald Wood had the terrible misfortune to be casual acquaintances of Slawson, and they, together with their son, Glendon, aged three, and their four-year-old daughter, Jennifer, were brutally gunned down in the apartment. Even more horrifying was the fact that Mrs Wood, who was eight and a half months pregnant at the time, was stabbed and had her stomach sliced open by the maniac. Remarkably, the dying woman managed to crawl in agony to where her mother lived next door. Drenched in blood, she gasped, ‘Newt did it,’ before she expired.

Not surprisingly, for the past few years, Slawson has wanted nothing more than to die, following his grisly crimes. However, this triple murderer’s execution has been delayed through wrangling over psychiatric reports.

He now lives out his days, consumed by mental torture, on Death Row at the Union Correctional Institute, Florida.

SMITH, DAVID (KENTUCKY # 32822), DOB 16.2.1948

During the early morning hours of Friday 5 September 1980, David Smith broke into the home of his estranged wife and shot to death Rebecca Church, her daughter, Amanda, her sister, Betty Maynard, and her mother, Mary Thompson.

Police arrested him at the scene and he was sentenced to death in Pike County on 1 June 1983.

SMITH, JOSEPH CLARENCE (ARIZONA # 36085), DOB 15.6.1949

It is not unfair to say that there is an evil component that dominates the mentality of those who can murder in cold blood, whatever the motive. However, there are some killers in whom there seems to dwell some darkly brooding malevolent presence which they are driven to serve and it is made manifest in the obscene excesses which characterise the way in which they plunder their victims’ lives.

Staring out from the photograph of inmate number 36085, taken by the Arizona Department of Corrections, is Joseph Clarence Smith Jr. The sombre, bearded features and piercing eyes are those of the last person to be seen by two terrified teenage girls when they were savagely murdered by this depraved, homicidal deviant.

Sandy Spencer, aged eighteen, worked in a fast food restaurant and, shortly before midnight on 30 December 1975, she finished work and began to hitchhike home. Very soon, she was offered a lift by Joseph Smith, aged 26 at the time. She climbed in and began the last journey she would ever make.

Smith drove his passenger out to a location in the desert north-west of Phoenix and stopped. At that moment, for Sandy, alone in a remote area, with a man she didn’t know, the worst nightmare she could have ever imagined began to happen to her. Smith leaned across and grabbed her, binding her hands and feet. Dragging her from the vehicle, into the cold night air, he forced dirt and sand into her mouth and nostrils before applying tape across them. The terrified girl died of asphyxiation.

To satisfy himself that Sandy Spencer was really dead, the maniac Smith stabbed her 20 times in the groin and pelvic area and embedded a two-inch needle in her breast. The girl’s naked body was found a day later.

Less than a month later, Smith picked up another girl hitchhiker, Neva Lee. She was only fourteen years old.

In what was almost a carbon copy of the murder of Sandy Spencer, the depraved predator again drove to a remote desert location with his adolescent passenger. Once more, he bound his victim and forced dirt into her nostrils and mouth before sticking tape over them. Neva, like Sandy, died as the result of this brutal treatment.

Neva’s naked corpse was discovered a few days afterwards and it is impossible to imagine the sheer terror she underwent during her last moments of life. The young girl had received stab wounds to her vagina, which was also torn internally, and her breasts had been jabbed with needles by the demonic, crazed beast that was Smith.

For these two appalling acts of murder Joseph Clarence Smith Jr was sentenced to death. But it is a tragedy that need never have happened, for the evil, menacing killer had previous convictions which included rape, rape in the first degree and murder in the first degree. All of his earlier crimes were, rightly, regarded as heinous, cruel and depraved and yet he had been considered to be of no danger to society and was released.

SMITH, LAROYCE LATHAIR (TEXAS # 999007), DOB 25.4.1971

A homicidal sociopath, Dallas labourer LaRoyce Smith joined his murderous brethren on Death Row on 7 August 1991, after being convicted of the murder of nineteen-year-old Jennifer Soto during the attempted robbery of a fast food restaurant in DeSoto, Texas.

Jennifer was closing the Taco Bell at 702 N Hampton, when Smith and several companions, including Kevin Shaw, knocked on the door. The victim knew Smith as a former colleague who had worked briefly at the restaurant in 1989, so she let the men in. Inside the Mexican eatery, Smith demanded that she open the safe. When she refused, he shot her in the back. Still Jennifer wouldn’t comply with his demands.

Subtlety having failed, Smith adopted what he considered a more persuasive tack by picking up a butcher’s knife from the kitchen and stabbing her five times while demanding the combination to the safe. Not surprisingly, Jennifer did not survive this inquisition and died forthwith. Smith escaped empty-handed, but he was arrested after one of his accomplices, Kevin Shaw, went to the police. Shaw received 85 years for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon.

SMITH, LOIS NADEAN (OKLAHOMA # 126453)

Sixty-year-old Lois Smith was convicted in 1982 for the shooting to death of Cindy Baillie, aged 20, in Sequoyah County in July that year.

Baillie and Smith’s son, James ‘Greg’ Smith, had had a relationship that had ended. However, Smith felt that Baillie had wronged her son and had threatened to tell law enforcement officials about his involvement with illegal drugs. She stabbed Baillie in the throat during a car ride, twisting the knife, and then took Baillie to a house, where she was repeatedly told that she was going to be killed.

Cindy Baillie was shot five times in the chest, twice in the head and once in the back. At one point, Smith jumped repeatedly on her victim’s throat, according to a witness’s testimony.

Court records indicate that Baillie may have threatened to kill Greg Smith. Lois Smith testified that she stabbed Baillie and fired shots at her but (unbelievably) did not mean to kill her. Greg Smith is serving a life sentence for his role in the slaying. Lois Smith was executed by lethal injection on 4 December 2001.

SMITH, RODERICK LYNN (OKLAHOMA # 1536394)

Thirty-three-year-old Roderick Smith killed his wife, Jennifer, and her four children, Shameka Nicole Carter, aged ten; Glen Edward Carter Jr, aged nine; Ladarian J. Carter, aged seven; and Kenesha R. Carter, aged six, in 1993 in Canadian County, Oklahoma.

Convicted in 1994, Roderick Smith was handed five death sentences. Prosecutors say he killed his wife during an argument and then killed the children because they were witnesses. Jennifer Smith and her sons were stabbed; her daughters were strangled.

During the sentencing phase, jurors heard from a former girlfriend of Roderick Smith’s who was stabbed by him about 30 times in 1986. For that crime, this madman had pleaded guilty to assault and battery and was sentenced to an ineffectual two years in prison. Defence attorneys say Smith has a brain disorder that triggers violent episodes. You bet he does!

SOSA, PEDRO SOLIS (TEXAS # 999788), DOB 27.12.1951

An auto mechanic from Atascosa County, Texas, Pedro Sosa was convicted of the November 1983 shooting to death of 55-year-old Ollie F. Childress Jr, a Wilson County deputy sheriff.

Sosa and his nephew, Leroy V. Sosa, abducted the officer on Texas Highway 16, and drove his patrol car, with the policeman in the trunk, to the LaVernia State Bank, which they robbed of $51,038.

The robbers then drove to Steinben Road, where Childress was shot once in the neck with his own .44-calibre revolver while handcuffed in the trunk.

Sosa and his nephew fled in their own vehicle, but returned a short time later because they had forgotten to wipe the patrol car clean of their prints. Finding Childress still alive, Pedro Sosa shot him a second time in the neck. Leroy Sosa told police his uncle drove to San Antonio after throwing the officer’s gun and a shotgun used in the bank robbery into a creek.

Pedro Sosa was arrested after his car was stopped on 1–35 on 4 February 1984.

SOTO, MIGUEL ANGEL (KENTUCKY # 137801), DOB 5.7.1972

Miguel Soto has the distinction of being the only Hispanic on Kentucky’s Death Row, and he arrived there because he is a very dangerous and unstable man indeed.

On 29 June 1999, Soto, using two weapons, a .38-calibre revolver and a .45-calibre semi-automatic pistol, shot and killed Armott and Edna Porter, who were his ex-in-laws. Then he shot and wounded his former wife, Armotta Porter, who had been living with her parents. Soto also loosed off shots in the direction of his three-year-old daughter, Brianna.

The killer was arrested shortly after the shootings and he was charged with two counts of capital murder, receiving the death sentence on both charges. The unhinged and murderous Soto was sentenced on 17 August 2000, in Oldham County.

SOTO-FONG, MARTIN R. (ARIZONA # 103247), DOB 6.10.1974

There are few things more disaster-prone than the designs of petty criminals who have aspirations above their ability. Influenced by what they read, or see on TV, these over-ambitious mediocrities consider that they are capable of emulating the exploits of those whom they perceive to be eminently more successful than they themselves have been. Fuelled by the wrong motives, often greed or revenge, they lay plans which are ill conceived and, almost always, destined to end in failure.

Martin Soto-Fong was not yet eighteen when he stepped out of his league and planned a robbery which resulted in three innocent people being murdered and two young men being sentenced to death.

Soto-Fong knew the El Grande Market, as he had previously worked there and, with two accomplices, Andre Minnitt and Christopher McCrimmon, he conspired to rob the place. The plan was, simply, to empty the cash register at gunpoint and make off with the money. However, the three resolved to eliminate any witnesses by shooting them. This, they felt, would ensure that they would never be brought to book for the crime.

On Wednesday 24 June 1992, the three drove to the market in a very distinctive car. Soto-Fong went in and gathered together two bags of produce before making his way to the counter. There, he drew out a .25-calibre pistol and instructed the owner of the store to hand over the contents of the till. He took all the money that was there and began shooting at the three people who were in the store at the time, Fred Gee, Ray Arriola and Zewan Hong. Minnitt, who was also armed, ran in and joined in the killing, while McCrimmon, with his handgun, stayed outside guarding the doorway.

The three victims were all shot in the head, and the price of their lives was a paltry $300, which was all the money this grandiose scheme yielded.

With their trifling amount of loot, the robbers fled the scene in their conspicuous car. People near by, alarmed by the sound of shots, were able to give a description of the vehicle to the police, who quickly found it and rounded up the three occupants. The car, and fingerprints left at the market, tied Soto-Fong and his accomplices to the robbery and the murders, and he, together with Minnitt, is now on Death Row. See also MINNITT, Andre Lamont.

SPEARS, ANTHONY M. (ARIZONA # 97352), DOB 2.10.1958

Jeanette Beaulieu was a 38-year-old single woman. She knew Anthony Spears, who lived near San Diego. She considered him to be her ‘boyfriend’, and she would talk about their future together. Spears, however, thought that she ‘wasn’t that great a looking girl’. But he did, however, visit her on several occasions, and she bought presents for him.

However, unbeknown to Jeanette, Spears was already living with a girlfriend named Joann in California.

Towards the end of 1991, Jeanette took leave from her employer and, on 31 December, she purchased a one-way flight ticket for Spears to fly to Phoenix on 2 January.

Spears accepted the ticket and boarded a flight which would take him to Jeanette. However, a lovers’ tryst wasn’t on the agenda as far as he was concerned, for in his bag he was carrying a 9-millimetre Beretta automatic pistol.

Following his arrival, Jeanette purchased a sleeping bag, withdrew $1,700 from an ATM, and had the title to her truck notarised. She later used a charge card for a cash advance of $500.

On Saturday afternoon 4 January, Spears telephoned his other girlfriend, Joann, and told her that he would be driving back to California. When he arrived there, he had five guns that had belonged to Jeanette. He was also carrying two sleeping bags, almost $1,000 in cash, and was driving Jeanette’s truck.

On 19 January, Jeanette’s body was discovered in the desert, having been shot through the head with a medium- or large-calibre bullet. Near the body, officers found a shiny 9-millimetre shell casing, which was later identified as having been fired by Spears’ Beretta pistol.

The victim was soon identified and details of her car were circulated to police agencies. This led to the killer’s arrest.

Spears’ defence team threw in the kitchen sink in order to mitigate his crime. It was shown that he had no prior criminal history, his mother loved him and that his demeanour and conduct in court and while on remand was good. All of this, and the fact that he was a former serviceman with a clean sheet, did nothing to endear him to the jury. He was sentenced to death on 31 March 1993.

SPENCER, CLINTON LEE (ARIZONA # 82989), DOB 2.7.1958

At about 9 p.m. on Friday 19 May 1989, on the outskirts of Phoenix, Shandora Johnson-Marrow and her friend closed up shop and headed out for a local nightspot in separate cars. En route, they stopped off at a Circle K so that Shandora’s friend could get some money from the ATM. Shandora waited outside in her car and she had been there only a minute when Clinton Spencer walked up to her and struck up a conversation. For some inexplicable reason, the young woman gave Spencer, a total stranger, a ride to the club. He explained that he was not dressed to go clubbing and for the next two hours sat in her car.

Sometime later, Shandora’s friend left the club. He asked her for a lift but she refused and drove off with Spencer. Just before 1 a.m. on 20 May, Spencer and Shandora pulled up at a Mesa bank and tried twice to withdraw $140 from her savings account. They were unsuccessful because the machine was not working; however they were able to withdraw the money at another location.

Around 3 a.m. on 20 May, a man on his way to work saw a fire and discovered that it was a burning body. The charred corpse turned out to be that of Shandora. Analysis revealed Shandora had been sexually assaulted and stabbed twice in the back, and that the fire was caused by a liquid accelerant, probably gasoline, with which the killer had doused her before setting her alight.

The ensuing police investigation revealed Clinton Spencer to be the murderer and, after being tried and convicted, he was sentenced to death on 27 December 1990.

SPREITZ, CHRISTOPHER JOHN (ARIZONA # 110047), DOB 10.6.1966

It was the night of 19 May 1989 and Christopher Spreitz was driving around in a car which was leaking oil and throwing out a lot of smoke. Police had seen the car on its fume-laden way earlier that night and, curiosity aroused, decided to pull it over. On seeing the driver, Spreitz, close up, the officers noticed that the man had blood and faecal matter on his hands, his arms, and the front of his clothing. It isn’t everyone who drives around with that sort of mess plastered about their person, so the policemen asked a very obvious question. In reply, Spreitz explained that he had been in a fight.

Using their radio, they asked colleagues to check out the location of the alleged fight but there was nothing to indicate that any incident of that sort had taken place there. So, with nothing more to go on, they photographed the malodorous Spreitz and his eco-hostile car, gave him a traffic citation and let him go. And, in fairness to the police, given the unhygienic and pungent body adornment favoured by Spreitz, it is not surprising that they were less than enthusiastic about detaining him any longer than they had to.

It was barely three days later when, out in the desert, a horseback rider came across the body of a woman, later identified as Ruby Reid. Autopsy revealed that the murdered woman had suffered a broken jaw, five broken ribs, numerous bruises, and that the fatal wound was a skull fracture consistent with her having been struck by a V-shaped rock.

The woman’s body and its immediate surroundings were covered in blood and excreta, and this struck a nostalgic chord in the memories and noses of the police, who recalled, not without some humour, the condition of Spreitz’s person and clothing when he had been stopped. He was picked up again and taken in for more detailed questioning about the fight he had claimed to have had.

Smelling a lot fresher than when he had been pulled over in his car, Spreitz admitted having been with the murdered woman on the 19th. He said that he had picked her up at a convenience store and that he had driven her out into the desert. What is more, he insisted that Ruby Reid had gone with him of her own free will. Whether or not that is true, she most definitely did not stay with him voluntarily.

When they had reached the spot where Ruby’s body was later found, there had been a struggle as she had tried to resist Spreitz’s sexual advances. Her resistance only angered the man and he began to hit her with some ferocity.

With her jaw and ribs broken, Ruby was no longer in any condition to put up a fight and, with no one to hear her cries for help, she had had to endure the rape that followed.

Throughout her appalling ordeal Ruby had screamed loudly and, in order to stifle the noise, Spreitz had finally crushed her skull with a rock.

There is nothing that can be offered in mitigation of this cowardly, evil act and that is precisely the way that the jury saw it too. On 21 December 1994, Christopher John Spreitz was sentenced to death.

STALEY, STEVEN KENNETH (TEXAS # 999006), DOB 30.7.1962

Steven Staley was obviously unhappy with his meal and the service at the Steak and Ale restaurant on Saturday 14 October 1989. However, instead of registering his complaint in the accepted way, he and his two dinner guests expressed their dissatisfaction by pulling out an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons and rounding up the restaurant’s entire clientele (30 customers), along with all six staff.

The trio ordered everyone to hand over their wallets, and then Staley commanded the 35-year-old manager, Robert Dorsey Read, to open the safe and deposit the takings in a briefcase.

An employee who managed to escape alerted police, and squad cars soon surrounded the building at 7101 Highway 80 West, but the three robbers took Read hostage. They hijacked a car and fled with the police in hot pursuit.

All three criminals were arrested after a high-speed chase However, Robert Read had already been shot dead. He had been killed by the mindless Staley the moment he was dragged into the car.

The bill for this extravagant night out was extremely high. Staley received the death sentence. His guests for the evening, Brenda Kaye Rayburn and Tracey William, were given 30 years and life respectively.

STANFORD, KEVIN (KENTUCKY # 32700), DOB 23.8.1963

During the night of Wednesday 7 January 1981, Kevin Stanford and two accomplices raped, sodomised and abducted Barbel Poore, who worked at an all-night gas station in Louisville. Stanford later shot and killed the terrified woman before returning to the gas station to steal 300 cartons of cigarettes.

Police arrested Kevin Stanford six days later and, on 24 September 1982, in Jefferson County, he was sentenced to death. His accomplices drew life.

STANLEY, MILO (ARIZONA # 64794), DOB 11.3.1963

Twenty-five-year-old Milo Stanley lived in Cottonwood, Arizona, with his wife, Susan, his five-year-old daughter, Seleste, and his son, aged twelve months. Milo Stanley also had a drinking problem and it was causing major difficulties at home.

On the evening of Thursday 19 June 1986, Milo and Susan were having a bitter argument over his drinking. He loaded the children into his car, Susan got in beside him and they drove a few miles out of town, arguing all the way. Stanley stopped the car at a remote spot and brought an abrupt end to the argument by shooting his wife three times in the head.

It is not possible to imagine how little Seleste must have felt during the second or so that followed. She may not have fully grasped the fact that what she had just witnessed was her mother being murdered by her father. In any event, she herself had only a moment of her young life left, for her father, the one man on Earth whom she should have been able to trust above all others, pressed the muzzle of the gun to his child’s head and pulled the trigger. Seleste died instantly.

Mercifully for the infant boy, Stanley reasoned that his son was too young to have understood what he had just seen happening and, in any case, would be unable to tell anyone as he could not yet talk. This saved the child’s life.

Stanley dumped the bodies of his wife and daughter away from the road and drove home with his baby son. There, he put the child to bed and, after a few hours, called the police, reporting his wife and daughter as missing.

After receiving Stanley’s call, the police began a wide-ranging search. This ended on the following day, when the killer confessed to the murders.

Stanley’s trial began almost exactly a year after the killings and, on 25 September 1987, he was sentenced to die by lethal injection.

STEPHENSON, JOHN MATTHEW (INDIANA), DOB 31.7.1963

Although he committed a triple murder, for which he received the ultimate sentence, John Stephenson’s notoriety was earned for a different reason: at 140 days, his was the longest trial in Indiana history. And, with costs in excess of half a million dollars, it was, by far, the most expensive.

The details of the murders are, on the face of it, quite straightforward and uncluttered by sophistication. Jay and Kathy Tyler, both aged 29, picked up Brandy Southard, aged 21, from her work in Evansville and were chased by Stephenson. When he caught up with them, at an intersection near Yankeetown, Stephenson emptied thirty rounds from an SKS assault rifle into their pick-up truck and their bodies. He finished off the job by stabbing each one several times. To add to his involvement he was also charged with the earlier burglary at Southard’s home.

The trial began on 24 September 1996 and the jury delivered its verdict on 8 May 1997. The death sentence was passed by Judge Edward Campbell on 20 May, the culmination of 140 trial days.

The cost of this, to the State, amounted to some $556,000 and the meter is still ticking over on this one at the rate of $60 per day, which is how much it costs to keep a prisoner in Indiana.

It is worth noting that the defence team was afforded every facility and seems to have taken the fullest advantage of the State’s generosity in amassing the highest costs to date in their endeavours to get their client off the hook. In his defence, Stephenson was allowed two attorneys, two investigators, a paralegal, a professional photographer, a civil engineer, a forensic scientist, a jury consultant, a neuropsychologist and a mitigation expert. His sister was also flown in to testify at the sentencing hearing. The State of Indiana unflinchingly picked up the tab.

STERLING, GARY LYNN (TEXAS # 999931), DOB 25.7.1967

As guilty as sin, Gary Sterling, a farm-worker from Navarro County, was convicted of the May 1988 robbery and murder of 72-year-old John Wesley Carty. Carty and 52-year-old Deloris June Smith were abducted from Carty’s home and driven to an isolated field where they were savagely beaten to death with a bumper jack.

A car, a television, a shotgun and a lantern were stolen from the victims’ home.

Sterling confessed to police and led them to the bodies. Later, he also admitted his involvement in the 17 May 1988 murders of William Manuel Porter, aged 72, and Leroy Porter, aged 70, in Hill County.

STOKLEY, RICHARD D. (ARIZONA # 92408), DOB 9.9.1952

There are few phrases more emotive than ‘sex offender’. The words invoke more public condemnation than any other criminal activity, especially if the victims are children. In prison, a man convicted of such crimes is set apart from his fellows in the way that a leper would have been during medieval times. This is done for the man’s own safety, as retribution in prison can be terrible. However, there are some who, after engaging in a crime motivated by their sexual lust, go on to murder their innocent victims, and for these pariahs they can be only one form of punishment: death.

Richard Stokley was two months short of his thirty-ninth birthday when, on 8 July 1991, he and his friend, Randy Brazeal, kidnapped two thirteen-year-old girls near the town of Elfrida, Cochise County, Arizona. The motive was purely sexual. They took their terrified captives to a remote area and raped them.

After having satisfied their depraved and barbaric desires, the two men began to consider the consequences and possibility of arrest. It was agreed that they should kill the girls and so they strangled them.

To ensure that both victims were dead, the appalling Stokley stomped repeatedly on their bodies and stabbed each of them in the right eye before he and Brazeal threw the mutilated corpses down a water-filled mineshaft.

It is unsurprising that, at Stokley’s sentencing, there was nothing offered by way of mitigation of his crimes.

T

TANKERSLEY, BOBBY LEE (ARIZONA # 105378), DOB 28.5.1952

The world of drug dealing is the domain of sordid, degenerate people. In this seedy underground marketplace, the customers are addicts who stoop to the lowest level, robbing, selling their bodies in prostitution and even killing to raise the money for the drugs to feed their addiction. On the other side of the counter, when the money is slow in appearing, the dealers will go to any lengths to ensure that they receive payment in full. In the same way that a farmer will hang a dead crow on his fence to scare the other birds, a dealer will often kill in order to serve as a warning that default on debts will not be tolerated; for this is a world in which the weak go to the wall.

Bobby Lee Tankersley, aged 39, was one such dealer. He lived at the Post Park motel in Yuma, Arizona. Also living there was 65-year-old Thelma Younkin, who suffered severe lung disease; she was almost housebound, requiring continuous use of an oxygen tank for her breathing.

Thelma’s grandson owed Tankersley money for drugs and the dealer was determined to be paid. He told Thelma’s daughter that her son would ‘live to regret it’ if he didn’t come up with some undertaking concerning payment. The young man ignored the warning, and in doing so he condemned his grandmother to an appalling death at the hands of a ruthless, brutal and sexually depraved killer. She was to be the ‘dead crow’ on Tankersley’s fence.

On 17 November 1991, Tankersley went looking for Thelma Younkin. He asked a neighbour for her room number and, as the door was not locked, he entered, with a strange look on his face.

Inside the room, Tankersley raped and killed the elderly invalid woman, subjecting her to an attack of monstrous, frenzied depravity, before strangling her with her oxygen tubes.

When it was found, her body was naked except for her bra, which had been ripped aside, exposing her breasts. She had suffered severe trauma to her vagina and faecal matter was smeared on her legs, around the bathroom sink and on a washcloth. The savagery of Tankersley’s assault was made emphatically evident by the revelation that there were numerous deep bite marks on the deceased woman’s face and breasts. Even more horrifyingly, her right ear lobe had been bitten clean off.

Michael Younkin found his mother’s body a few hours later. As he staggered from the room in shock, the first person he encountered was Tankersley, who asked, ‘What’s the matter, Mike?’

Convicted on dental and DNA evidence found at the crime scene, for what was classified as ‘especially cruel, heinous and depraved behaviour’, Bobby Lee Tankersley was sentenced to death on 18 May 1994.

THOMAS, DANNY DEAN (TEXAS # 999710), DOB 30.8.1955

Danny Dean Thomas was born under the sign of Virgo, but nowhere among the list of Virgoan characteristics will you find a tendency to impersonate a police officer. All the same, that’s what Danny Thomas enjoyed doing when he wasn’t involved in his day job as a labourer, and it got him three years imprisonment in 1977.

On 18 July 1981, long after his release, civically minded Danny and his pal, Zendol Peels, stopped to assist Sylvia Hamson, whose car had broken down. After repairing the vehicle, the chivalrous pair followed the woman to make sure that she arrived home safely. However, on arrival, they kept on following her – into the house, where Peels gallantly hit her over the head with a pistol.

Assuming that she was dead, they placed her in her vehicle and spent the next three hours driving around Houston debating what to do with her body. But Sylvia was not dead! Like Lazarus, she regained consciousness and bit Danny Thomas. Peels reacted to this by again hitting her on the head, but this time with the handle of a knife.

The poor women began crying and said, ‘God, help me.’ Touched by her plea, police impersonation specialist Thomas then shot her in the head, killing her. Both men tied bricks to her body before dumping it in the San Jacinto River, only for it to rise to the surface a few days later.

For this crime, the wannabe cop Danny Thomas was sentenced to death.

THOMPSON, WILLIAM EUGENE (KENTUCKY # 91746), DOB 26.7.1951

On Thursday 12 January 1995, William Thompson entered a plea of guilty to the following charges: capital murder, robbery in the first degree, and escape in the first degree, all of which occurred on 9 May 1986.

Thompson, of Pike County, was sentenced to death on 18 March 1998, for the 1986 murder of Correctional Officer Fred Cash at the Western Kentucky Farm Centre in Graves County. Thompson was then serving a life sentence for wilful murder-for-hire. While working with an inmate crew, he struck Officer Cash repeatedly in the head with a hammer, dragged the body into a barn stall, and fled in the prison van.

Police arrested the escapee at a bus station on his way to Indiana, and he subsequently received the death sentence.

TOWERY, Robert C. (Arizona # 51550), DOB 20.7.1964

Murder often occurs during the course of a robbery, but seldom is it carried out in such an unnecessarily sadistic manner as that which Robert Towery inflicted on his victim on 4 September 1991.

On the day in question, Towery and his accomplice, Randy Barker, went to the home of Mark Jones with the intention of robbing him. Jones knew Towery, so he let both men into his home without question.

Once inside, Towery pulled a pistol on Jones and handcuffed him. The two robbers then took valuables from the house and loaded them into their victim’s own vehicle. That completed, Barker took Jones into the bedroom, where Towery told the bemused man that he was going to inject him with something that would make him sleep.

Jones, for some reason, trusted Towery, and didn’t struggle as the hypodermic needle pierced his skin. His trust was supremely and tragically naive, for the liquid which was being injected into his veins was not a mild sedative, but battery acid.

To hasten his wretched captive’s death, the brutally callous Towery sought to strangle Jones and after one bungled effort, which left the man in agony, he succeeded in choking the life out of his handcuffed victim.

Towery and Barker made off in Jones’ car leaving the murdered man behind in his apartment. They drove to their own home, where they unloaded the proceeds of the robbery. Later, they abandoned the car in a nearby lot. The following day, Jones’ body was discovered and, a week later, police found his car.

The case featured on a Silent Witness programme on TV, and this resulted in someone phoning in with information which led police to the killers, who were arrested. Some of the murdered man’s stolen property was recovered from their homes.

To inject battery acid into another person requires a particularly vicious and depraved mentality, and the State of Arizona responded to this, providing the only punishment suitable for such an act, when Towery was sentenced to death on 20 November 1992.

TRAN, SON VU KAI (TEXAS # 999372), DOB 11.5.1980

Born in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Son Tran, a labourer, was convicted of capital murder for his participation in the deaths of four people. Tran, and three others, including Truc Thanh Hoang and Dung Than, lured a man to a club in Houston and murdered him because of his relationship with a woman who worked there. Tran and the others involved then learned that another woman at the club was aware of their identities, so he and two of his accomplices drove her to a secluded beach and shot her in the head, killing her.

The killers then became concerned that their fourth accomplice, who was involved with the first murder, might not keep their secret. This man was invited to a meeting under false pretences, but he brought a friend along as well. Tran and one of the others shot and killed their former partner-in-crime and his associate. Tran received the death sentence in 1990, three years after the killings.

TRICE, EDDIE LEROY (OKLAHOMA)

Forty-eight-year-old Eddie Trice raped and beat to death 84-year-old Earnestine Jones and bludgeoned her 54-year-old mentally retarded son, Emanuel Jones, during a 1987 robbery in Oklahoma County. He was convicted later that same year.

Trice had once dated Jones’ daughter. Defence attorneys argued that Trice had drunk wine and used PCP before the attack and could not form the intent to kill in his intoxicated state. They also threw in that well-worn excuse that his stepfather had abused him during his childhood.

Nevertheless, Trice was given a death sentence for the murder and three 999-year sentences for the rape, the robbery and the beating of Emanuel Jones. He is in the seventh – final stage of appeal – and if this fails, he will ‘go the journey’.

TUCKER, KARLA FAYE (TEXAS # 999777), DOB 18.11.1959

Karla Tucker was 25 years old, attractive, a drug addict and a prostitute when, on Monday 13 June 1983, after a weekend orgy of methadone, heroin, Dilaudid, Valium, Placidyls, Somas, Wygesics, Percodan, Mandrax, marijuana, rum and tequila, she, with her accomplice, Daniel Ryan Garrett, 37, broke into an apartment on Watonga Drive, north-east Houston.

The apartment was the home of 27-year-old Jerry Lynn Dean, a former lover of Tucker’s, and the reason for the burglary was the intended theft of motorcycle parts. To the burglar’s surprise, Dean was in bed asleep. Beside him, also asleep, but hidden from view under the bedclothes, lay his 32-year-old girlfriend, Deborah Thornton. What ensued was an orgy of blood-soaked violence and brutality on a sickening scale.

On seeing Dean, Garrett began hitting him about the head with a hammer, and this caused the victim to emit a gurgling sound. To put a stop to the noise, Tucker grabbed a pickaxe, which was lying in the room, and plunged it into Dean’s back. She carried on raining blows on him until she became aware of Deborah Thornton cowering in terror in the bed and turned the pickaxe on her with an equally frenzied intensity.

Both victims died outright under the onslaught and their bodies were each punctured more than twenty times. Police had no trouble finding the murder weapon, as the pickaxe, covered with Tucker’s fingerprints, was embedded in Thornton’s chest.

Witnesses testified that Tucker had later boasted that she had been sexually aroused by what she was doing and had experienced an orgasm each time she struck her victims.

What had begun as petty burglary had escalated tragically into a depraved slaughter. It also resulted in both Tucker and Garrett being sentenced to death for their gruesome crimes. Garrett, however, cheated the executioner when he died of liver disease on 15 June 1993.

Karla Faye Tucker went on to spend more than fourteen years on Death Row. During that time she underwent a conversion to Christianity and became a model prisoner. Nevertheless, despite a widely publicised plea for mercy to Governor George W. Bush, she was executed by lethal injection on 3 February 1998, becoming the first woman to be executed in Texas since the Civil War.

TURRENTINE, KENNETH EUGENE (OKLAHOMA # 238316)

Forty-seven-year-old Kenneth Turrentine shot his estranged girlfriend Anita Richardson and her children, 22-year-old Tina Pennington and thirteen-year-old Martise Richardson, in 1994 in Tulsa. He also murdered his sister, Avon Stevenson.

Turrentine confessed to the killings when he was arrested outside Anita Richardson’s home. Testimony during his trial indicated that he suspected her of seeing other men and thought his sister knew about it. Prosecutors said Richardson was shot while pleading for her life, and Martise Richardson was killed after he came to his mother’s defence. Defence attorneys claimed that Turrentine was using drugs and alcohol and snapped under the stress of the break-up of the relationship. This cut no ice with the court, however, and he received the death sentence for his act of jealous rage.

V

VACA, MATTHEW (OHIO)

On the evening of Tuesday 23 May 2000, two girls, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Reiser and Brandi Hicks, aged eighteen, were at a video-rental store in New Philadelphia. A man named Matthew Vaca, aged 27, told them that he had no way to get to his home. He said he would pay them $20 if they would give him a ride.

The girls were members of a church group that taught them that they should always help others in need, so they agreed to give Vaca the ride. Once in the car, Vaca provided varying directions on where he wanted to be dropped off. The girls, sensing something wrong, stopped the car and asked Vaca to leave. Unfortunately for the girls, they had acted too late: they should never have allowed their strange passenger into the car in the first place. He pulled out a gun, pointed it at the girls and ordered Brandi Hicks to drive the car to an isolated field.

When they arrived at a suitably deserted spot, Vaca tied Brandi to the steering wheel before leading Elizabeth Reiser into the field. Using a linoleum-cutting knife, he slashed the teenager’s neck at least three times. He then took the blade and cut a ten-inch-long, 2½-inch-deep wound across her throat, severing her trachea. He also stabbed her in the neck, the back, and five times in the scalp.

Back in the car, Brandi could only wait, rigid with terror, imprisoned in the living nightmare that had enveloped her.

Shortly afterwards, the predatory monster returned. Roughly, he dragged Brandi from the car, walked her into the woods and made her see for herself that her best friend was dead before taking her back to the vehicle. From there he drove to a spot on a railroad track near New Philadelphia. He ordered her to carry a six-pack of beer for him, and they walked to a railroad car, where he attempted to sexually assault her. When the rape failed, he dragged her on to a trestle above the Tuscarawas River, where he attempted to snap the girl’s neck. Brandi Hicks passed out. When she revived, she pretended that she was dead.

Convinced that he had indeed killed Brandi, Vaca pushed her off the trestle and into the river. For what seemed like an age, she floated in the water, not wanting her attacker to believe that she was still alive. She could see him on the trestle, kicking stones into the water and smoking cigarettes. Eventually, after making sure Vaca had left the area, an exhausted Brandi Hicks crawled out of the river and managed to flag down a passing car.

Brandi’s courageous action not only ensured her survival but also ensured that the evil Vaca was brought to justice. In at attempt to avoid the death penalty, this 27-year-old killer and rapist pleaded guilty to an eleven-count indictment. Nevertheless, the sheer savagery and callous brutality of his crime was such that he was sentenced to death.

Thelma Short, grandmother of Brandi Hicks, as she finally looked into Matthew Vaca’s eyes, said: ‘Nearly every day since the murder, his face has been in the back of my mind.’

VALDEZ, ALBERTO (TEXAS # 999906), DOB 29.8.1955

Having already spent twelve of his miserable 32 years behind bars did not deter Alberto Valdez from carrying out the murder of Corpus Christi police officer Joseph Bock in September 1978.

Bock was shot to death with his own revolver after he stopped Valdez’s vehicle, following a high-speed chase. While attempting to arrest Valdez, Bock was stripped of his weapon and shot four times, twice in the abdomen and twice in the left temple after he fell to the ground. At the time he was stopped, Valdez had a federal warrant out on him and he was carrying stolen property from four recently committed burglaries.

Valdez, an Hispanic construction worker from Nueces County, Texas, was sentenced to death by lethal injection.

VANDERBILT JR, JIMMY PAUL (TEXAS # 999560)

‘THE MURDEROUS COP’

A former probationary police officer, Jimmy Vanderbilt was convicted of the April 1975 abduction and murder of sixteen-year-old Katina Moyer of Amarillo: Six days before the monstrous crime, Vanderbilt had been fired from his job for striking a motorist with a flashlight.

On the day of the killing, Vanderbilt forced his way into Katina Moyer’s car near Palo Duro high school, where she had driven to pick up her mother, Nancy, who was a teacher there.

He then handcuffed Katina and drove her to his north Amarillo home with every intention of raping her. For some reason, he did not carry out the rape, but fearing she would identify him as her abductor, at 4.30 p.m., he drove his female captive, the daughter of former senator, Hudson Moyer, north on the Dumas Expressway.

At an isolated area, six miles north of the city on Gluck Pens Road, he shot Katina Moyer in the head with a .357 Magnum pistol he had bought from an Amarillo police officer a month earlier. A Potter County deputy sheriff found Katina’s body the next day.

Witnesses reported seeing Jimmy Vanderbilt near the crime scene, with one woman testifying she had picked him up and given him a lift back to the city. Very soon afterwards, Vanderbilt was given another lift, but this time he was taken to police headquarters and he was under arrest for murder.

During questioning, Vanderbilt told police that three days before the Moyer murder, he had abducted a 21-year-old Amarillo woman called Jerrie Kris Tucker, and forced her to drive him around before releasing her unharmed.

His 1976 capital murder conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals because of prosecutor misconduct. He was tried a second time in Beaumont on a change of venue, and in August 1979, despite his plea of insanity, a jury convicted him and sentenced the ex-cop to death.

VANDIVER, WILLIAM (INDIANA #13155), DOB 26.8.1948

William Vandiver became the 72nd prisoner to be executed in Indiana during the twentieth century. His crime was the murder of his father-in-law, whom he stabbed more than 100 times with a fish-filleting knife. Thus ended an almost farcical tale of bungled murder attempts carried out by a family who wished to rid themselves of a tyrannical, drunken martinet of a father.

Paul Komyatti Sr, when he drank to excess, became loud and violent. He was disliked by his immediate family, which was comprised of his wife, Rosemary, his son, Paul Jr, and his daughter, Mariann, though disliked is clearly not strong enough a word to describe the family’s feelings for this patriarch, considering the events which led up to his death.

Mariann was married to William Vandiver, and her father, Komyatti, had demanded that she divorce him because of his criminal past. He threatened to inform the police on Vandiver who, not surprisingly, was persuaded to join in a family conspiracy to kill his father-in-law.

Initially, poisoning was selected as the preferred means of assassination. However, either the poisoners were plain inept, or Komyatti had the constitution of an ox. In any event, like Rasputin, he survived several toxic assaults.

Dispirited, but not beaten, the family finally decided to anaesthetise him with ether and inject air into his veins. On the fatal night, 20 March 1983, Vandiver and Mariann waited outside the home for a signal from Paul Jr that his drunken father was asleep. The signal came and they entered the house but, at the last moment, they changed their plan due to a lack of ether. Instead, they chose the more subtle approach of leaping on the somnolent drunkard and trying to suffocate him.

Not surprisingly, Komyatti awoke and began to fight hard for his life.

Seeing yet another bungled murder attempt on the verge of failure, Vandiver, in desperation, produced a fish-filleting knife with which he stabbed Komyatti in the back more than a hundred times. He then struck him five or six blows on the head with a pistol.

Astonishingly, when the dust settled, the victim was still breathing, so Vandiver administered the coup de grâce by cutting off his head. The job done, Vandiver and the family then set about sectioning the body, all the while telling jokes.

What goes around comes around: and so it was in the manner of Vandiver’s own death. There was an ironic aspect of black humour to the story of his execution. The irony was that this man, who had made so many botched attempts to despatch his father-in-law, eventually ending the man’s life in protracted and brutal mayhem, underwent similar treatment at the hands of the state executioner, who demonstrated a level of glorious incompetence that Vandiver would have surely admired had he not been on the receiving end.

The execution took place at 12.20 a.m. on 16 October 1985, and was a farce. After the first 2,300 volts were fired through his body, Vandiver was still, incredibly, breathing. It took five more jolts, over seventeen minutes, to complete the job, which Vandiver’s attorney, Herbert Shaps, described, not without some justification, as ‘outrageous’.

Once the smoke and smell of burning had dispersed, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Corrections sheepishly admitted that the execution ‘did not go according to plan’.

VAUGHN, ROGER DALE (TEXAS # 999029), DOB 16.10.1991

Roger Vaughn, a former electrician, was convicted of the strangulation murder of 66-year-old Dora Leveille Watkins at her home in Vernon, Texas, on Wednesday 16 October 1991. The elderly woman was sexually assaulted and then strangled with a piece of cloth after Vaughn broke into her residence at 2529 15th Street,

Cheques and rings were taken from the home and the killer’s fingerprints were later found on the woman’s wallet.

At the time of the murder, Vaughn was an escapee from the Lubbock County Jail. He escaped after being charged with forgery and robbery in a separate incident. On the same day as the murder, he also burgled the home of his aunt, who lived four blocks from Dora Watkins.

He was scheduled to die on 18 February 1998, but US District Judge Joe Kendell ordered a stay to allow Vaughn time to get a court-appointed attorney to represent him at a new appeal. In the meantime, this hugely unpleasant character remains on Death Row.

VICKERS, BILLY FRANK (TEXAS # 999087), DOB 30.7.1945

Would you buy a used car from this man?

Well, in Billy Vickers’ case it would be a foolish person who divulged his name and address to this car-salesman-turned-murderer from Hunt County, Texas. Chances are that Billy would have burgled your home before you arrived back there in the car that you had just bought from him.

Besides his day job, selling autos, Billy pursued a second career, as a burglar and arsonist, which resulted in a string of convictions stretching back over almost twenty years. However, he branched out into murder when, with two accomplices, he turned his attention to fifty-year-old Phillip Kinslow.

Owner of the Arthur City Superette store, Kinslow was carrying a moneybag inside his truck when he arrived home from work. As he opened the driveway gate, he was shot three times from behind. Although seriously wounded, Kinslow drew his own gun and fired back at the gunman, Vickers, hitting him three times, before driving himself to hospital, where he collapsed and, unfortunately, later died. The cowardly Vickers was arrested at the scene of the shooting.

Accomplices Tommy Perkins and Jason Paul Martin received life sentences.

VILLARREAL, RAUL OMAR (TEXAS # 999125), DOB 25.9.1975

There are few on Death Row who come across quite as unpleasantly as Raul Omar Villarreal from Harris County, Texas. This erstwhile carpenter was convicted, with others, of the kidnapping and killing of fourteen-year-old Jennifer Ertmann and sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Pena in north-west Houston.

On Thursday 24 June 1993, the two young girls had taken a shortcut home after attending a social gathering at the Spring Hill Apartments. Unfortunately for them they met seventeen-year-old Villarreal and several other members of the so-called ‘Black and White Gang’.

What happened next ensured that the gang members all received death sentences, for both girls were repeatedly raped and then strangled.

Villarreal later bragged that he had stepped on Jennifer Ertmann’s neck because ‘the bitch wouldn’t die’ after being strangled with a belt.

VODOCHODSKY, KENNETH (TEXAS # 999377), DOB 16.8.1980

Kenneth Vodochodsky took an active role in helping his accomplice, Jeremiah Engleton, plan and carry out the murders of three peace officers. He had even bailed Engleton out of jail the day before the incident. Upon his release, on a charge of assault, Engleton said that he intended to retaliate against the police for locking him up and, on the day of the shooting, he went to a gun shop and bought $200 worth of ammunition.

On Tuesday 12 October 1999, both men called 911, requesting police assistance. The phone calls triggered off what turned out to be a bloodbath, which resulted in four men dying and another, Vodochodsky, being sentenced to death.

An Atascosa deputy arrived at the property, where the two men lived, and as he got out of his patrol car he was shot dead. Moments later, another deputy pulled up and he met the same fate. When the radio despatcher lost contact with the two police officers, she radioed a Texas Department of Public Safety Officer to check on the welfare of the two deputies. When he arrived at the scene, he reported ‘an officer down’ situation and requested assistance. As he attempted to reverse to safety, he, too, was shot and killed in his car.

Inside the house, Jeremiah Engleton then turned his gun on himself, committing suicide with a shot to the head.

While the foolish Vodochodsky was proven not to be at the scene when the murders took place, he was convicted under the ‘Law of Parties’, which holds a person responsible for assisting or encouraging a felon to commit a crime. He is now on Death Row.

W

WALKER, JACK DALE (OKLAHOMA # 180072)

The always smiling 34-year-old Jack Walker fatally stabbed seventeen-year-old Shelly D. Ellison and her uncle, Donald Epperson, in 1988 at a mobile home near Bixby in Tulsa County. He was convicted in 1989.

Shelley Ellison had an infant son who was fathered by Walker, and the stabbings occurred after an argument about custody. The teenage mother was cut and stabbed at least 32 times by the frenzied Walker and Don Epperson had eleven wounds. Both victims died as a result of the savage attack.

Jack Walker received two death sentences plus prison sentences totalling 40 years. The latter sentences were for felony assaults involving other members of Shelley Ellison’s family. The murderer is in the sixth stage of appeals and he is running out of time.

WALLACE, JAMES GRANVILL (ARIZONA # 53811), DOB 28.4.1950

Although we live, supposedly, in enlightened times, domestic violence is, sadly, a growing menace. Often, the consequences are relatively minor and the protagonists regain their self-control before matters escalate. However, for some people the issues involved are too great for them to resolve in a rational way. Unable to suppress their resentment, they erupt like some long-dormant volcano creating devastation all around them. This is precisely what happened to James Granvill Wallace when events moved beyond retrieval, and he reacted by wiping out an entire family.

Wallace, aged 34, lived with Susan Insalaco and her two children, sixteen-year-old Anna, and twelve-year-old Gabe. On the night of Tuesday 31 January 1984, he and Susan fell out, and this resulted in her telling him to leave the next day.

On the following morning, the two children left for school and Susan went off to work, leaving Wallace to pack his bags and go. He didn’t. Instead, he stayed at home brooding on his situation, during which time he decided to kill Susan and her children.

The first victim was Anna. That afternoon, when she arrived home from school, Wallace was waiting for her with a baseball bat. The girl walked into the house and was attacked with a rain of blows to her head, so savage that the bat was broken. Still in a frenzy, the now uncontrollable Wallace pushed the broken end of the bat through the girl’s throat.

Dragging his young victim’s corpse into the bathroom, Wallace cleaned himself up. Then he went outside to the shed and selected a steel pipe wrench, before returning to the house to wait for Gabe’s return.

The boy arrived home shortly afterwards. Anna’s body was out of sight in the bathroom so, unaware of his sister’s fate, Gabe made his way to his own room. Wallace followed the youngster and killed him by hitting him on the head with the wrench.

With the two children dead, Wallace sat in the silent house waiting for their mother. Susan arrived two hours later and was surprised to see that Wallace was still there. On her way to the kitchen, she asked him why he had not left as she had requested. The reply she got was a blow to the head and Wallace killed her with the same weapon with which he had murdered her son, Gabe.

For his afternoon of carnage, Jim Wallace was duly sentenced to death.

WALTON, JEFFREY ALAN (ARIZONA # 61210), DOB 29.1.1966

Thomas Dale Powell woke up in Hell. He had been shot in the head, blinded and left for dead in the unforgivingly hostile Arizona desert. Unaware of where he was, alone and in agony, the terrified man floundered in this desolate wilderness for a week before dying of exposure and pneumonia.

The nightmare that was Powell’s last days on earth had begun on 2 March 1986. On that date, Jeffery Alan Walton, Sharold Ramsey and Robert Hoover were hanging around outside a bar in Tucson, looking for someone to rob. When Thomas Powell left the bar, Hoover signalled to Walton that a victim was on the way. As the unsuspecting Powell approached, Walton pulled a pistol and ordered him to lie down and empty his pockets. Powell complied, hoping that his assailant would then leave him alone. It was not to be, for the three villains bundled him inside his own car, and drove out to the desert west of the city.

When they reached a suitably desolate spot, Powell was tied up. He was then dragged away to be executed. A few yards from the car, Walton forced the man to his knees and cold-bloodedly fired a single shot, at point-blank range, into his head.

Unaware that their victim was still alive, the thugs drove off, leaving Powell to his appalling death. For this heinous crime Walton was sentenced to death by lethal injection, which, considering the tortuous death that his victim suffered, seems almost too humane an end. Ramsey and Hoover, his two accomplices, received lengthy jail terms.

WARDRIP, EDWARD FARYION (TEXAS # 999331), DOB 6.3.1959

On Friday 21 December 1984, at the home of a white female, Edward Wardrip committed burglary and murder. He used a knife to stab his victim to death after gaining entry. When he was arrested, he told police that he ‘had been screaming at the stars’, while walking off a bout of sleeplessness in a residential area of Wichita Falls, Texas.

The murder victim had heard the commotion Wardrip was making and had ventured outside to see what was going on. Wardrip charged at the woman, who slammed her door shut. However, she was not safe, for, moments later, a berserk Wardrip smashed the door down. Once inside, he committed murder for no apparent reason, other than that he was in a rage. He then left the scene and the murder remained unsolved for nearly fifteen years until he came forward and admitted his culpability.

Since being sentenced to death Wardrip has admitted to several other murders, including his having killed a 21-year-old girlfriend by beating and suffocation.

WARNER, CHARLES FREDERICK (OKLAHOMA # 273669)

A 33-year-old black, Charles Warner raped and murdered eleven-month-old Adrianna Waller in 1997 in Oklahoma County. The victim was the daughter of Warner’s live-in girlfriend.

At the sentencing phase, jurors heard nauseating testimony that the loathsome Warner had previously sexually and physically abused his ex-wife and a five-year-old girl. Indeed, Warner’s seven-year-old son testified for the prosecution that he had witnessed his father abusing Adrianna on previous occasions.

During the fatal attack, Adrianna, the infant, had been sexually molested and had suffered a six-inch skull fracture, a broken jaw, three broken ribs, bruised lungs and a lacerated liver and spleen.

Warner is in the first stage of appeals, but there is no doubt that this process will grind slowly towards his much-deserved execution in the years to come.

WEBB, DANIEL (CONNECTICUT # 124596), DOB 1961

Daniel Webb was sentenced to death for the murder of bank vice president Diane Gellenbeck, whom he kidnapped from a car park on Thursday 24 August 1989.

Webb took his victim to a nearby area, raped her and then shot her five times when she attempted to escape.

At trial, Webb was generally uncooperative with his defence attorneys. He refused to express remorse for his crimes and did not attend court on the day the jury’s verdict was announced.

Though Webb had served a previous prison sentence for a similar crime, he maintains his innocence for the murder of Diane Gellenbeck.

Connecticut has ceased using the electric chair, and today executions are carried out by lethal injection.

WEEKS JR, LONNIE (VIRGINIA)

Minutes before convicted murderer Lonnie Weeks Jr, died by lethal injection at 9.04 p.m. on Thursday 16 March 2000, he apologised and thanked his victim’s family, two of whom had asked that he not be put to death.

Weeks was convicted and sentenced to die by lethal injection for the shooting of Virginia state trooper Jose M. Cavazos on Wednesday 24 February 1993.

It was night, and 20-year-old Weeks was riding as a passenger with his 21-year-old uncle, Lewis J. Dukes Jr, when Cavazos stopped the car for speeding on Interstate 95 near Dale City. After pulling the car over at an off-ramp in Prince William County, the trooper asked Weeks to step outside, and the North Carolina man complied. However, he was carrying a pistol fully loaded with hollow-tipped bullets commonly known as ‘man stoppers’.

According to court records, Weeks fired at least six times at Cavazos, with two bullets striking the trooper despite his bulletproof vest. The policeman died at the scene within minutes, his gun still in its holster.

For his last meal, Weeks chose the dinner offered to the prison’s general population – Salisbury steak with gravy, steamed rice, a tossed salad and gingerbread cake with lemon sauce.

As he was escorted into the death chamber at 8.45 p.m. Weeks walked calmly, staring at the gurney and then glancing at those present to witness his death. He wore the prison uniform of dark blue pants, a light blue short-sleeved shirt and flip-flop sandals.

Seven Greensville Correctional Center guards, referred to as ‘the team’, strapped his arms, legs and chest down. He paid little attention to the dozen prison officials also present in the small room. His hands remained limp.

A blue curtain was pulled to conceal the medical technicians who inserted the IVs into his right arm.

At 9 p.m., the curtain was pulled back and Weeks, connected to plastic tubing, made his final statement. ‘I want to say sorry for everything I’ve done to the Cavazos family, to my family and to everybody around the world. And, I just thank the Cavazos family for what they’ve tried to do for me and I love them and God bless them.’

After the first dose was administered, Weeks lifted his head for several seconds and looked at the witnesses seated in the warm, auditorium-like booth separated by glass and concrete. He laid his head down and licked his lips twice.

As the liquid flowed down the tube connected to the cop-killer, he sighed heavily three times before his breathing turned shallow, barely noticeable. Four minutes after his final statement, Weeks was declared dead.

WELCH, FRANK DUANE (OKLAHOMA # 168528)

At the time of writing, 39-year-old Frank Welch is one of the 122 inmates on Oklahoma’s Death Row. He was convicted for the sexual molestation and killings of two women in 1987 in Cleveland and Grady counties.

The convictions, based in part on DNA evidence, occurred more than ten years after the killings. Welch killed Jo Talley Cooper of Norman, who was twelve weeks pregnant, and Debra Stevens in Tuttle three months later. Welch had been in those counties at the time, for court appearances on forgery charges, but was not held in jail.

Both women had been gagged, bound, sexually molested and strangled. Jo Cooper’s eight-month-old son was crying in his crib near her body.

Frank Welch received a death sentence for Cooper’s murder and a no-parole life sentence for Stevens’ murder.

WHEAT, JOHN L. (TEXAS # 999222), DOB 22.5.1944

‘Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb,’ seems to have been the maxim adopted by 51-year-old ‘good-ole-boy’ John L. Wheat, when, on 30 July 1995, he ran amok in the Fort Worth apartment complex where he lived.

Looking much older than his true age, the balding welder and mechanic from Erath County, Texas, was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of an infant, Lacey Anderson, at the Les Jardins apartments at 2901 Travis Avenue. However, the child was just one of six people shot by him that day, when her six-year-old sister, Ashley Ochoa, and eight-year-old brother, Edward, also died during Wheat’s frenzied rampage.

According to records, Wheat had had an argument with Angela Anderson, the mother of the three children, over her accusation that he had sexually fondled Ashley the day before. The girl claimed that he had put his hand down her shorts and her mother had sent a note to Wheat saying that she would be reporting him to the police.

Wheat had argued with the mother on the stairs of the complex and, realising that he had to failed to persuade her to overlook the matter, chased her into an apartment where he shot her three times as she hid in a closet.

Imagining Angela to be dead, Wheat then made his way to the victim’s own apartment where he found her three children in a rear bedroom and fatally shot them all. After killing the children, Wheat retrieved a rifle from his own rooms and discharged it into the apartment of Jessie Cranfill, the complex’s 33-year-old security guard, wounding him in the back and leg. Very soon after that, Fort Worth police began arriving, and Officer Angela Jay was struck several times. As other officers converged on Wheat, he put down his weapon and surrendered.

John Wheat was executed by lethal injection on 13 June 2001. For his final meal he asked for liver, mashed potato, onions in gravy and a pint of milk. His last words were, ‘I deeply regret what happened. I did not intentionally, or knowingly harm anyone. That’s it and didmau [Vietnamese for “let’s get out of here”].’

WHEATFALL, DARYL KEITH (TEXAS # 999020), DOB 13.12.1990

Over a trifling $50 debt, Daryl Wheatfall committed a double homicide and earned himself a place on Death Row when he shot James M. Fitzgerald, aged 62, and his 64-year-old wife.

Wheatfall, a labourer and mechanic from Harris County, and accomplice Mack Terrell went to the Fitzgeralds’ home to collect the debt and, when the elderly people could not pay up, Wheatfall shot each victim three times in the head with a .22-calibre pistol. The couple’s son, James, was shot in the stomach but survived to identify the suspects.

Records show that two days before the murders, Wheatfall had entered a crack house and shot three people in the head, one of whom died. He then went to the garage at the rear of the premises and stabbed another man 25 times. This man also died.

Terrell received a 50-year sentence for testifying against his murderous accomplice.

WHITAKER III, GEORGE H. (TEXAS # 999196), DOB 21.11.1970

Convicted in the shooting to death of seventeen-year-old Shakeitha Shanta Carrier of Crosby, Texas, George Whittaker had been dating the victim’s sister, who had recently left him because of his abusive behaviour.

On Wednesday 15 June 1994, Whitaker drove to his former girlfriend’s parents’ home and told her mother, Mary, that he was returning some of her belongings. Mary told him to leave them on the porch. He pulled out a .45-calibre pistol and forced his way inside, ordering Mrs Carrier and her five-year-old daughter, Ashley, into the living room, where he shot the woman once in the chest.

Whitaker then followed the fleeing Ashley upstairs, where he confronted Shakeitha, the teenage sister of his ex-girlfriend, and shot her once in the head. He pistol-whipped Ashley, fracturing her skull in two places.

Returning downstairs, Whitaker saw Mrs Carrier trying to escape through the front door. Retrieving more ammunition from his car, he loaded his gun and cornered the wounded woman in her backyard, where he shot her a second time in the chest.

Almost miraculously Mrs Carrier and Ashley survived their wounds, although the woman suffers from partial paralysis in her right arm and hand. Shakeitha died at the scene.

This killer was traced to his apartment, where he attempted to elude police by jumping out of a window, and he was shot in the hip when he appeared to be reaching for his pistol.

WHITE, MELVIN WAYNE (TEXAS # 999317), DOB 21.1.1950

During the night of 4 August 1997, Melvin White kidnapped a nine-year-old girl in Ozona, Texas. He took her to a roadside park out of the city limits and attempted to rape her. The terrified victim resisted, but he taped her hands behind her back with black electrical tape.

During this time, a car pulled up behind him so White drove off to another deserted area, where he beat the girl to death with a tyre iron.

After his arrest a few days later, White took law officers to where the body had been hidden. At his trial he was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death.

WHITE, MICHAEL RAY (ARIZONA # 68895), DOB 10.10.1951

Michael White (36) and Susan Minter (33) were lovers. Both divorced, they had met in January 1987, when they worked at a care home in Prescott, Arizona. Of the two, Susan was the one with the brains and ambition. She was also enjoying a relationship with David Johnson, a miner, who lived in Bagdad, Yavapai County, where he worked for the Cyprus Bagdad Copper Company of Boulder Creek.

White knew of the affair and eventually he and Minter conspired together to kill Johnson and collect on his insurance policy.

The plan, which was masterminded by Susan Minter, was simple. She would marry Johnson, have him name her as his beneficiary and then the unsuspecting man would be killed.

Accordingly, on 20 November 1987, Susan Minter became Mrs David Johnson and, almost immediately, had herself and her children made beneficiaries, as planned. The sum involved was $65,000.

The two conspirators were not the sort to let the grass grow under their feet. On the day before the wedding, White bought a .357 Magnum revolver from a pawnbroker in Bagdad and, three weeks after the ceremony, on the night of 12 December, stationed himself outside the newlyweds’ home, armed with the gun and waiting for Johnson to return from work.

Johnson arrived and, using a potato for a makeshift silencer, White shot the man in the face and back. Bemused neighbours, alerted by muffled gunshots, saw a man run to a green Oldsmobile, climb in and drive off into the night.

Despite the calibre of the bullets, fired at point-blank range, Johnson wasn’t yet dead. Bleeding badly, he called out for help. Inside their home, his bride of three weeks locked the doors to make sure that her fatally wounded husband could not get in. He staggered to a neighbour’s house, where he managed to describe his attacker as ‘a masked man with a gun’ before finally expiring.

Somehow, the now widowed Susan Johnson managed to convince police that the man whom they were seeking was her ex-husband, Clifford Minter. She claimed that Johnson had managed to tell her that fact (despite her being on the opposite side of a locked door). In any event, the police believed her and a description of Clifford Minter and the green Oldsmobile was broadcast on the police radio to all units. This resulted in White being stopped shortly afterwards by a patrol car, but he gave a plausible alibi and was allowed to go free.

Nevertheless, police investigators eventually discovered the full extent of the relationship which existed between Michael White and ‘The Widow Johnson’, and both were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. More damning evidence turned up in the form of the murder weapon, and it was revealed that White had sold it to a pawnbroker in Phoenix a week after the shooting. When the gun was recovered, traces of potato starch were found on the barrel: Moreover, a bag of potatoes was found in White’s car along with ammunition, and traces of potato were found at the murder scene.

The evidence was conclusive and the two murderous lovers were convicted of the killing of David Johnson. Instead of a handsome payout from the insurance company, Susan Johnson was rewarded with a life sentence. For White, the penalty was to be even greater: he was sentenced to death on 8 August 1988.

Interestingly, he has been offered a choice in the method of execution, with the unattractive options of dying by gas or by lethal injection.

This case has aroused much debate, which has been largely centred on the perceived injustice of the disparity of the sentences handed out. Some argue that there was a strong case for Susan Johnson receiving the death penalty, given that she was the instigator and played a significant role in the killing. The controversy will undoubtedly continue long after White has been despatched.

At his appeal before five justices at the Yavapai Superior Court, Michael White’s sentence was affirmed. However, Chief Justice Thomas A. Zlaket, who dissented, said, ‘I believe that Susan is more culpable than White.’ He went on to say, ‘This case does tend to make a mockery of equal treatment under the law. She lives, he dies.’ Justice Stanley G. Feldman concurred with this view.

WILKERSON, PONCHAI ‘KAMAU’ (TEXAS # 999011), DOB 15.7.1971

‘MADDER THAN HELL’

Ponchai Wilkerson was a condemned killer who tried to break out of Death Row at least twice and, with Howard Guidry, held a guard hostage during a thirteen-hour stand-off a month before his execution, which took place on Tuesday 14 March 2000.

Wilkerson, aged 28, fought until the very end. He refused to leave his holding cell near the death chamber and guards used additional restraints to bind him to the gurney.

The killer declined to make a final statement, but as the lethal drugs began taking effect, he spat out a key he had been holding in his mouth.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Larry Fitzgerald described the key as a universal handcuff and leg restraint key. ‘It’s not known how he got it,’ he said. The key fell from Wilkerson’s mouth onto the side of his face, and a shocked warden picked it up.

Wilkerson then gave a gasp and fell unconscious. He was pronounced dead at 6.24 p.m., seven minutes after the flow of lethal drugs began.

A former labourer from Harris County, the 140 lb, five-foot-eight-inch-tall Wilkerson was convicted of the 28 November 1990 robbery and shooting to death of Chung Myong Yi, a Houston store clerk.

Wilkerson watched accomplice Wilton Bethany buy pieces of jewellery at the Royal Gold wholesale store at 9,889 Harwin. The two returned later with a pistol and shot Yi once in the head. He and Bethany smashed the jewellery cases, grabbed rings and necklaces and fled. At the time of the murder, Wilkerson, the son of a retired sheriff’s deputy, was on probation.

This killing capped a month-long crime spree that included numerous auto thefts, robberies and burglaries – including one in which guns worth $40,000 were stolen – and drive-by shootings that left at least one person dead and three others wounded.

While on Death Row, Wilkerson, armed with a sharpened piece of metal fashioned from a typewriter part, slipped from his cell on 21 February, and with Howard Guidry held a female prison guard hostage before surrendering. The two men were protesting against prison conditions.

On Thanksgiving night 1998, Wilkerson and six other condemned prisoners fled their cells in another escape bid. One of the convicts drowned after scaling a pair of razor wire fences that surrounded Ellis Unit, north-east of Huntsville. The other five gave themselves up when guards started shooting at them.

Wilton Bethany, Wilkerson’s accomplice in the robbery, was sentenced to life.

WILLIAMS, ARYON (ARIZONA # 972490), DOB 24.8.1966

On 28 January 1990, Pinal County sheriffs were despatched to Ellis Road, approximately one mile off Sunland Gin Road, where a hunter had discovered a body. The victim was identified by her Arizona driver’s licence, which was found in the dirt near the corpse.

Examination of the crime scene indicated that a struggle had taken place near the west side of the road, and that the victim had fallen over a berm down to a pond. Drag marks indicated that the victim had then been dragged from the pond to where she was discovered. She had been shot three times, beaten on the head with a sharp instrument and repeatedly run over by a car.

The victim’s car was found parked in the Casa Grande high school maintenance yard. There was blood on the left rear wheel cover, rear tyre whitewall, side panel, the front wheel cover and the left side front spoiler.

While an officer was securing the evidence from the car, he noticed someone writing down the licence plate of the vehicle. This person identified himself as Aryon Williams, who told the officer he wanted to assist them in finding his lost girlfriend.

Williams became a suspect after the Phoenix PD reported that several of the victim’s friends related that he was abusive to her. He was eventually charged with the murder. At his trial he was convicted and, on 7 April 1993, Judge Robert R. Bean sentenced Williams to death.

WILLIAMS, JEFFREY LYNN (TEXAS # 999154), DOB 15.10.1971

If any of our Monsters of Death Row had an abysmal criminal record, it is Mr Jeffrey Williams. In trouble as soon as he could walk, he graduated to Texas’ adult prison system at the age of seventeen in September 1989, to serve seven years for aggravated assault. A year later, he was paroled. Six months later, he was back inside to serve another ten years for violence and theft. However, due to the vagaries of the parole system, a year later he was back walking the streets. Less than a year after that he was again behind bars to serve 25 years for auto theft. Unbelievably, this man was released again, on parole, in October 1994. Over a four-year period, Williams had been sentenced to a total of 42 years. In reality he served a mere three years behind prison walls. It is astonishing that Williams, a recidivist by any standards, should receive such leniency from a naive parole board time and time again.

On 26 October of that very same year, Williams went inside again, but this time it was not to prison. He entered the Houston apartment of Barbara Jackson Pullins. He forced his way in at knifepoint, ordered her to undress and raped her. He then tried to suffocate her by placing a plastic bag over her head. When this failed, he strangled Barbara with a telephone cord and, in order to make sure she was dead, he attempted to set her body on fire. Williams then walked into a bedroom, where he found Barbara’s nine-year-old daughter. The little girl was raped and beaten, but survived and was later able to identify her mother’s killer, who had been arrested while driving Mrs Pullins’ car.

Now on Death Row, there is surely no risk of Jeffery Williams being granted parole. Or is there?

WILLINGHAM, CAMERON TODD (TEXAS # 999041), DOB 9.1.1968

Released from prison boot camp in 1990, Cameron Willingham was 23 years old when he killed his three young children in a house fire at 1213 West 11th Street, Corsicana, on Christmas Eve 1991.

Amber Louis Kuykendall, aged two, and one-year-old twins, Karmon and Kameron, were burned to death, and this cold-blood murderer was arrested and charged in connection with the deaths on 8 January 1992.

When questioned by detectives, this native of Oklahoma claimed he was asleep when the fire started. ‘That was the only thing I was guilty of, being asleep in my own house,’ he asserted with wide-eyed sincerity.

However, investigators found evidence to the effect that Willingham had started the fire intentionally with an inflammable liquid. His claims of having made heroic attempts to save the girls were belied by his having escaped virtually unscathed with little smoke in his lungs. The proceeds of a life insurance policy on his dead children were later used to buy a pick-up truck.

At his trial, this cowardly man introduced another element to his story, arguing that his ex-wife’s boyfriend started the blaze. Nevertheless, the jury remained unpersuaded and delivered a guilty verdict and the death penalty.

WILSON, GENO CAPOLETTI (TEXAS # 999340), DOB 24.5.1981

Geno Wilson mindlessly shot a man to death on the streets of Houston on 2 December 1998. The victim was selling bottles of cleaning solution and was approached by Wilson and three companions. Wilson said that he wanted to buy a bottle. However, he then produced a handgun and demanded that the vendor hand over his money. When the man argued that he had no money, Wilson shot him once, execution-style, in the back of his head.

WOOD, DAVID LEONARD (TEXAS # 999051), DOB 20.6.1975

If there was ever a candidate for chemical castration it is the priapic David Wood. This labourer, trainee gravedigger and homicidal sexual psychopath graduated through sex crimes, including indecency with a child and various rapes, to become a serial killer.

Wood was convicted in the abduction and stabbing to death of 24-year-old Ivy Susanna Williams of El Paso. The tragic young woman was one of six female murder victims whose bodies were found in the desert around El Paso during the summer of 1987. He was also indicted in the other five murders and now awaits his execution.

WOOD III, JOSEPH R. (ARIZONA # 862679), DOB 6.12.1958

When an armed man has committed a crime and finds himself confronted by armed police, he has to make a choice. The first, and most rational, option open to him is to comply with police instructions, lay down his weapon and surrender in the face of superior odds. The alternative is to defy the demand to disarm himself and, instead, to open fire on the police, knowing that there is an absolute certainty that they will retaliate with lethal force and he will be cut down in a blitzkrieg of bullets.

This latter option, often the fulfilment of a death wish, has come to be known as ‘suicide by cop’. Seldom does anyone survive such incidents but, every so often, there emerges a man who somehow cheats death in these most unlikely circumstances, and Joseph R. Wood III is such a man.

Wood was born on 6 December 1958. In his mid-twenties he began a relationship with Debbie Dietz, a girl slightly younger than he. The relationship lasted five years but was marred by numerous break-ups and several incidents of domestic violence. Eventually, the two parted company, and Debbie went to work in an auto body shop that was owned by her family.

The pain of separation proved to be too much for Wood and, on 7 August 1989, he armed himself with a .38-calibre revolver and went round to the body shop. There, he marched resolutely onto the premises and shot Gene Dietz, aged 55, in the chest, killing him. Dietz’s 70-year-old brother was near by and tried to stop Wood, but he was brushed aside.

The killer made his way into another section of the workshop, where he found Debbie. He grabbed her and discharged two shots into her body, one in her chest, and the other in her abdomen. She died instantly.

Wood left the building to be confronted by two police officers, who ordered him to drop his weapon. The double killer placed his gun on the ground, but moments later, he bent down, picked up the pistol and pointed it at the police. With no real choice in the matter, the two officers opened fire, striking Wood several times.

Astonishingly, James Wood was still alive, and he was rushed to hospital where he underwent emergency surgery.

The supreme irony for Wood is that surgeons battled successfully to give him back the life that he seemed intent on losing, only for him to receive a death sentence for the lives of those whom he had snuffed out in cold blood.

WOODALL, ROBERT KEITH (KENTUCKY # 127513), DOB 19.3.1974

No son to be proud of and quite fearsome to look at, Woodall committed murder most foul on Saturday 25 January 1997. His victim was pretty Sarah Hansen, whom he abducted from the Minit Mart parking lot in Greenville, Kentucky. He drove her to Luzerne Lake, where he proceeded to rape her. When the poor girl resisted, this 200 lb monster beat her and used a Stanley knife to inflict cuts in her throat to silence her screams.

After satisfying his sexual urges, he dragged the young girl to the lake’s edge and threw her into the water. Results of an autopsy revealed that water was found in her lungs. She had died as a result of drowning.

In Caldwell County, on 4 September 1998, Robert Woodall was condemned to death.

WRIGHT, FREDDIE LEE (ALABAMA)

Freddie Wright, who came within one vote of being acquitted in his first capital murder trial 22 years ago, only to be convicted and condemned to die in a second trial a month later, was executed in Alabama’s electric chair at Holman Prison on 3 May 2000. He was 48.

Wright, convicted of the murders of a popular Mount Vernon couple in a hardware store in December 1977, was pronounced dead at 12.11 a.m. It took eleven minutes to ‘fry’ him, and he made no final statement before the switch was pulled.

According to the evidence, Warren Green, aged 40, and his 37-year-old wife, Lois, were shot once in the head as they sat tied back-to-back in a rear room of their Western Auto store, about 30 miles north of Mobile.

Wright claimed he was innocent throughout.

Y

YARRIS, NICOLAS (PENNSYLVANIA # AM-6841)

Nicolas Yarris was convicted of the rape and murder of 33-year-old Linda Craig, whom he kidnapped from a shopping mall on Tuesday 15 December 1981.

When Linda failed to return home on time, her husband and a police officer began to search for her, and they found her car parked along a desolate roadway. Early the next morning, Linda’s badly beaten body was found in a church parking lot. She had been stabbed six times.

Sentenced to death, Nicolas Yarris managed to escape from Death Row after serving two years. He eluded a police helicopter and the tracker dogs that were sent on his trail. It was February and it was cold, so he made his way to Florida, where he basked on the sunny beaches, amazed at his new-found freedom.

After a month of staying one jump ahead of the law, he was arrested while sitting in a stolen car with a gun on the seat beside him. He freely admitted his identity and was soon back on Death Row. He has since married and is, at the time of writing, working his way through the appeal procedure.

YOUNG, KELVIN (OKLAHOMA # 265456)

Thirty-five-year-old Kelvin Young was convicted of the 1996 shooting to death of Joseph Sutton at an alleged gambling house in Oklahoma County.

Young and another man went to the alleged gambling operation with the intention of robbing the patrons. Testimony indicated that Sutton, a patron, pulled out a handgun and started firing at Young and his companion. Young returned Sutton’s fire, hitting him four times. In the process, Young was wounded and left blood on the floor, blood that was used as DNA evidence against him during his trial.

In 1998, Kelvin Young received a death sentence for the Sutton murder and a combined sentence of 50 years for convictions related to the wounding of a second patron and attempted robbery with a firearm. His alleged accomplice, Antwuan David Jackson, was acquitted of all charges because no witness could identify him and no evidence linked him to the crime.

YOWELL, MICHAEL J. (TEXAS # 999334), DOB 25.1.1970

On 22 February 1997, Michael Yowell was released from prison after serving just three months of an eight-year sentence for possession of drugs. Then, on Tuesday 19 May 1998, in Lubbock, Texas, the former cook and labourer went to visit his father with a male accomplice and two women.

During the call, Yowell shot his father, strangled his mother with a cord and set fire to the house, leaving behind his grandmother to burn to death as she was disabled and could not escape the inferno.

Z

ZEIGLER JR, WILLIAM THOMAS (FLORIDA # 053948), DOB 24.7.1945

In 1997, the television programme Unsolved Mysteries devoted a segment to the Zeigler case. Before they would do so, however, Mr Zeigler had to undergo a lie-detector examination by world-renowned polygraph expert, John Palmatier Ph.D. of the Michigan State Police Department. The test results showed that Tommy Zeigler was telling the truth about what happened on the night of the murders. Dr Palmatier became a supporter, and appeared on the programme to broadcast the favourable results. Today, even the former Chief Deputy of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Leigh MacEachern, believes in Zeigler’s innocence. Nevertheless, he still sits on Death Row, awaiting execution.

The case of William Thomas (Tommy) Zeigler is a complex one and a classic whodunit, worthy of the pen of Agatha Christie. It is case of a bungling, if not corrupt, detective, a thoroughly biased judge, a crooked undercover agent for the Beverage Commission, an investigative farce, a litany of forensic errors, lost and mislaid evidence, lying witnesses and juror bullying, all designed to send an innocent man to his execution.

In 1975, at the age of 30, Tommy Zeigler was a successful businessman, a leader in his community, and by all accounts, a dedicated husband and son. However, all that was to change when tragedy struck at the W. T. Zeigler furniture store, in Winter Garden, Florida.

On Christmas Eve 1975, a party was in progress in Winter Garden. Two of the invited guests, Tommy and Eunice Zeigler, were not present. Don Ficke, Winter Garden’s Chief of Police, and his wife, Rita, had arranged to drive to the party with Tommy and Eunice that night. When, however, the Zeiglers failed to materialise, Don and Rita attended the party anyway.

Around 9.18 p.m., Tommy Zeigler phoned the party and asked to speak to Don Ficke. There had been a robbery at his store, Zeigler said, and he had been shot and was badly wounded. He needed help. Later, surgery revealed that a bullet had passed within a centimetre of his liver.

Detective Donald Frye of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) lost no time in examining his first major crime scene, which resembled a shooting gallery. Inside the store there were four bodies, later identified as Eunice Zeigler, Perry and Virginia Edwards (Eunice’s parents) and Charlie Mays, an African-American orange picker who ran a team of migrant workers and, one might say, the only rotten item in this basket of otherwise good fruit.

All four had been shot, some with more than one gun, and the two men had been beaten. Pools and trails of blood were in various locations throughout the store. Tracks of bloody footprints led everywhere, there were separate locations for each body, and several discarded guns were found lying around. It was obvious, even to the medical examiner who attended the scene, that the victims had been shot with more than one gun, and that several killers had been at large that evening.

Thomas Zeigler came under suspicion from the outset. To the detective, it seemed to be a simple open-and-shut case of murder for profit, as Eunice was insured for $500,000 on her life. But, there was a snag: Tommy Zeigler was already a wealthy man and money was the least of his problems.

Now without a peg to hang his theoretical motive on, the detective and his team made mistake after mistake. Then began the investigative farce.

Two quite unreliable witnesses, Felton Thomas and Edward Williams, made statements to the police, and as their accounts did not match the detective’s own theory, Donald Frye massaged the times to suit his own ends. And he went even further to get a feather in his hat. He did not label spent bullets. He failed to blood group the victims or the trails and splashes of blood. He failed to carry out even the most basic gunpowder residue tests on clothing. He lost or shredded any evidence which could assist the accused man, and anything that did remain intact was withheld from the defence at Zeigler’s trial.

Even with all the withheld evidence and the judge’s obvious support of the prosecution which was noted by several people and confirmed in four juror interviews, the first vote was six to convict and six to acquit.

Eventually, the six who wanted to acquit were swayed towards a guilty verdict, except for Irma Brickle. She held out under much persecution from several of the other jurors and fainted on two occasions. She sent the biased Judge Maurice M. Paul several notes, trying to get his help and let him know what was going on during the deliberations. He was prevented from seeing her for fear of a mistrial and eventually contacted the desperate woman’s doctor, who prescribed Valium. But it was not enough, and even Irma Brickle gave way.

Irma has since gone on national television to say that she believes that Zeigler is innocent and, more recently, another juror admitted having taken Valium during deliberations.

Denied any relief by the State of Florida, the Zeigler case is currently before the US District Court under federal appeal. Tommy Zeigler himself is now rapidly approaching the age of 60, having spent the best part of the last 30 years on Death Row.

Although this book concerns convicted killers, the authors believe strongly that a miscarriage of justice has taken place in the case of Tommy Zeigler. Should you require more information on this disturbing case, or wish to offer much-needed support, please contact: The International Bannister Foundation, ibf@brum.net