July 2021 | Page 8 of 17 | My Crime Library

Walter Moody Alabama Execution

Walter Moody was executed by the State of Alabama for the murder of a judge. According to court documents Walter Moody sent a letter bomb to Judge Robert Vance. When the US Federal Judge open the package a pipe bomb went off killing the judge. Walter Moody would be executed by lethal injection on April 19, 2018

Walter Moody More News

Getting a plainly wrapped package in the mail wasn’t all that surprising. It was the holidays, after all. What was inside was another matter. It was a bomb.

When federal appeals Judge Robert Vance opened the small brown parcel in the kitchen of his suburban Alabama home on December 16, 1989, it exploded, killing him instantly and seriously injuring his wife.

Two days later, virtually the same scenario happened again. This time, the victim was Atlanta Attorney Robert Robertson.

It wasn’t over. Two more bombs mysteriously appeared. The third, sent to the federal courthouse in Atlanta, was intercepted. A fourth was recovered after being mailed to the Jacksonville office of the NAACP. Through brave and careful work, ATF personnel defused the one bomb and Florida police bomb experts the other.

The murders and serial bombings stunned the nation. Who’d be spiteful enough to send mail bombs during the holidays?

That’s what we aimed to find out. We started with the obvious. Both men were known for their work in civil rights. But that turned out to be a red herring.

Meanwhile, with extensive help from U.S. postal inspectors, we’d gathered the remnants of the bombs and packages for our Lab to analyze, learned the path the packages had taken through the postal system, and assembled a long list of suspects.

A break came when an ATF expert was contacted by a colleague who had helped defuse one of the bombs. He thought it resembled one he’d seen 17 years before. And he remembered the name of the person who had built it—Walter Leroy Moody.

With this lead, the Bureau and its partners began an extensive probe of the events—purchases, contacts, phone calls, etc.—and ultimately linked both the exploded and unexploded bombs to each other and to Moody. Court authorized surveillance of Moody at home and in jail (he talked to himself) provided additional evidence. Other leads were followed, suspects eliminated or linked to the crimes, and detailed analysis done on every bit of evidence, information, and trail that we came across.

Over the next year, Moody’s motive became clear. We found a pattern of experimentation with bombs dating back to the early 1970s when Moody was convicted of possessing a bomb that had hurt his wife when it exploded. His conviction and failed appeals in that case had led him to harbor a long-festering resentment of the court system. His contact with Judge Vance in a 1980s case led to even deeper resentment and a personal animus that led to revenge. The other bombs, we determined, were meant to make us suspect that racism was the motive.

By the spring of 1991, with the help of prosecutor (and future FBI Director) Louis Freeh, a solid case had been developed. The trial was difficult. Moody had made every effort to conceal his connection to the bombings.

On June 28, 1991, based on the extensive investigative work of the FBI, the ATF, the IRS, the U.S. Marshals, the Georgia State Police and many others, the jury found Moody guilty of more than 70 charges and sentenced him to life in prison.

It ended up one of the largest cases in our history—and an important one, as protecting our nation’s judges is a responsibility we take very seriously.

https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/judge-vance-murder

Rosendo Rodriguez Texas Execution

Rosendo Rodriguez was executed by the State of Texas for the sexual assault and murder of a pregnant woman. According to court documents Rosendo Rodriguez would sexually assault and murder Summer Baldwin before placing her body into a suitcase and leaving it at a Lubbock landfill. Rosendo Rodriguez would be executed on March 27, 2018 by lethal injection

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Texas Tuesday executed a man known as the “suitcase killer” for a 2005 murder and sexual assault of a pregnant woman.

Rosendo Rodriguez III was executed via a lethal dose of pentobarbital after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his final appeal minutes before his execution was scheduled, the Texas Tribune reported

He was sentenced to death for killing Summer Baldwin, a 29-year-old pregnant woman, and discarding her body inside a suitcase in a landfill in Lubbock, Texas.

Rodriguez’s attorneys appealed the sentence with the high court saying the medical examiner’s testimony wasn’t credible and that Baldwin wasn’t sexually assaulted.

Assistant Texas Attorney General Tomee Heining called the appeal “nothing more than a last-ditch effort,” KTRK-TV in Houston reported.

Rodriguez told investigators he had consensual sex with Baldwin, who was a prostitute, but the two then fought and he accidentally killed her when he put her in a chokehold. Medical examiners said injuries on Baldwin’s body were consistent with sexual assault, making Rodriguez eligible for the death penalty.

Investigators linked Rodriguez to Baldwin’s death through the suitcase — he purchased it using his debit card and the tag for the item, as well as the woman’s blood, were found in his hotel room.

Police have implicated Rodriguez in five other sexual assaults and the death of a 16-year-old girl, whose body also was found in a suitcase in the landfill. Prosecutors said they were willing to accept life imprisonment for Rodriguez if he confessed to the death of the teen. He confessed and gave police the location of her body, but backed out of the arrangement before the plea deal could be finalized.

Rodriguez was in Lubbock at the time for training as a member of the U.S. Marines Reserves.

Lubbock County Criminal District Attorney Matt Powell told The Texas Tribune that Rodriguez deserves his sentence.

“Who sticks a human being in a suitcase and throws them out with the trash? This was a guy that, left unchecked, was going to hurt somebody else again and was going to continue to terrorize women,” he said.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2018/03/27/Texas-executes-suitcase-killer-Rosendo-Rodriguez-III/1061522177231/

Carlton Gary Georgia Execution

Carlton Gary was a serial killer who would be executed by the State of Georgia for three murders. According to court documents Carlton Gary would murder three elderly woman over a two year period. Carlton Gary would be executed by lethal injection on March 15, 2018

Carlton Gary More News

Despite his steadfast insistence that he was not the “Stocking Strangler,” serial killer Carlton Gary was executed Thursday night, 40 years after he raped and killed at least three elderly women in the Wynnton neighborhood of Columbus.

Gary was pronounced dead at 10:33 p.m., three and a half hours after he was initially scheduled to die by lethal injection.

Gary was convicted of murdering three women — Florence Scheible, 89; Martha Thurmond, 70; and Kathleen Woodruff, 74 — by strangling them with their own stockings. But he also was blamed for four other rapes and strangulations of older women during a seven-month period in 1977 and 1978. He later was linked to similar murders that occurred in New York in the early 1970s, before he moved back to his hometown of Columbus.

Gary, 67, always admitted he was at the homes of the murdered women, but he was adamant that someone else did the killing.

Gary’s eyes were closed as witnesses filed into the execution chamber at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison near Jackson.He never even glanced at the family members of his victims, who sat crowded on a bench just a few feet from the glass that separates the execution chamber from the observation room.

The three detectives who arrested him, one of them now the chief of police in Columbus, were also there to witness Gary take his final breath.

Gary, who was chatty and charismatic in his younger days, declined to make a final statement. He also rejected the offer of a prayer. And he chose not to eat his final meal.

Outside the prison, about 18 protesters held a vigil.

Gary’s lethal injection closed a dark chapter in Columbus.

For months in 1978 and 1979, Columbus residents, especially older women who lived alone in the Wynnton neighborhood, feared becoming the next victim of the villain known as the Stocking Strangler. Residents reduced mature azalea bushes to stumps to get rid of any potential hiding places. Women quit walking neighborhood streets, especially at night. Some invited male relatives or friends to stay with them for security.

And then they were left with confusion and trepidation when the killings suddenly stopped after the last strangled victim was found — 61-year-old Janet Cofer — on April 20, 1978. Police later said the killings stopped because Gary was in prison for a series of armed robberies in South Carolina, where he was known as the “Steakhouse Bandit.”

It wasn’t until 1984 — after linking Gary to a gun taken from a car stolen off a street where the strangler had struck — that police connected him to seven murders, plus the sexual assaults of two women who fought off attempts to strangle them with their own stockings.

By then Gary was back in Columbus, having escaped from a South Carolina prison.

Once Gary was arrested, prosecutors opted to charge him with raping and murdering three women — Florence Scheible, 89; Martha Thurmond, 70; and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. They said they focused on those three because Gary’s fingerprints were found at their homes and he admitted to being inside the houses, though insisting that someone else killed the women.

Prosecutors said Gary also committed similar crimes in another state, New York, in the early 1970s, before he returned to his hometown, Columbus, just before the first stocking strangling.

Gary’s fingerprints were found at the Albany, N.Y., home of 85-year-old Nellie Farmer, who was found raped and strangled with her stockings on April 14, 1970. He admitted to being there, pleading guilty to burglary, but implicated another man in the murder, who was later acquitted.

In another New York case blamed on Gary, Marion Fisher, 40, was found on June 7, 1975, on a road outside Syracuse, N.Y., raped and strangled. Eventually, DNA found on Fisher was matched to Gary.

And Gary had a watch that was taken from Jean Frost, 55, who was raped and almost strangled in Syracuse on Jan. 2, 1977. He again blamed another man for the attack. Gary was charged with possessing stolen property and went to prison.

Prosecutors used the other four deaths and the two rapes in Columbus, as well as the cases in New York, to show a pattern.

In December 2009, Gary was scheduled to die. But with four hours to spare, the Georgia Supreme Court stopped it, ordering the court in Columbus to consider DNA evidence, which was not used at his 1986 trial because the science had not been developed.

Superior Court Judge Frank Jordan Jr. in Muscogee County held two days of hearings in 2014. Last September, Jordan turned down Gary’s motion for a new trial, setting him on his path to lethal injection.

Still, Gary’s lawyers continued to argue he was innocent and push the newer evidence that Judge Jordan had discounted

Gary’s lawyers focused on testing of DNA evidence collected from the Scheible, Thurmond and Woodruff murder scenes. Those samples either did not match Gary’s DNA, or the evidence was damaged or destroyed and could not be tested.

“Carlton Gary is the Stocking Strangler,” said District Attorney Julia Salter from Muscogee County. “We have absolute confidence.”

As recently as the day of his execution, there was another twist.

Gary attempted to take control of his last-minute appeals by asking the federal court in Columbus to stop his execution and give him a new attorney.

n the handwritten filing, Gary wrote that he recently learned that his lawyer, Jack Martin, has cancer. Gary said he didn’t know “to what degree that may have affected his representation.”

On Wednesday, Martin spent three hours with the state Board of Pardons and Paroles, seeking clemency for Gary. The appeal was denied.

Also in recent days, Martin filed numerous legal appeals and conducted several media interviews in which he insisted that Gary is not the Stocking Strangler.

https://www.ajc.com/news/crime–law/last-words-georgia-executes-serial-killer-carlton-gary/oG7dZf3AyFanVGFcrr0CuM/

Michael Eggers Alabama Death Row

Michael Eggers was executed by the State of Alabama for the murder of an elderly woman. According to court documents Michael Eggers would beat to death sixty seven year old woman who was attempting to help him. Michael Eggers would be executed by lethal injection on March 15, 2018

Michael Eggers More News

The state of Alabama executed Michael Wayne Eggers– an inmate who asked to die– on Thursday night at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. His time of death was 7:29 p.m.

This is the first execution the state has carried out this year.

Just before 6 p.m., the set execution time, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution and announced they would not review the case. Their decision came after Eggers’ former attorney filed petitions for a stay and for a writ of certiorari on Monday.

Eggers, 50, was convicted of capital murder in 2002 for the death of 67-year-old Bennie Francis Murray. In 2016, the inmate said he wished to expedite his execution date and fired his attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Montgomery.

Eggers’ execution started at 6:54 p.m., when the curtain to the three viewing rooms opened. The warden first read Eggers his death warrant, and then asked if he had any last words. Eggers replied, “No ma’am.”

At 6:56 p.m., Eggers gave a thumbs up signal using his hand facing the room where his brother, sister-in-law, two friends, and spiritual advisor sat, along with members of the media. One of the men in Eggers’ group gave back a sign language signal meaning, “I love you.”

At 7:00 p.m., Eggers showed signs of heavy breathing. A corrections officer performed a consciousness check at 7:03 p.m. and loudly said, “inmate Eggers,” three times. The officer also brushed Eggers’ eye and pinched him, and Eggers’ arm moved slightly.

His breathing slowed, and another consciousness check was performed at 7:09 p.m. Eggers made no movements.

At 7:12 p.m., the inmate’s breathing appeared to stop. The curtains were closed for the viewing rooms at 7:22 p.m., and Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton announced the time of death was officially 7:29 p.m.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshal issued this statement following the execution: “Michael Eggers showed no mercy towards his victim, his former employer, Bennie Francis Murray, who donated much of her personal time to helping him find a new job. On the night of her murder, Mrs. Murray gave Eggers a lift to pick up his car. Instead of showing her gratitude, Eggers rewarded her kindness by brutally beating and strangling her. He even returned to the scene of the crime to make sure she was dead. After 18 years of waiting, justice has finally been served tonight for the Murray family.”

Gov. Kay Ivey also issued a statement. She said: “When an execution is approaching, I thoroughly consider all elements of the crime committed, the procedural history of the case and any mitigating and aggravating factors which are present. With every execution, my goal is to ensure that the law is followed and that justice is ultimately served for all parties involved, including the accused and the victim. Mr. Eggers was convicted of brutally beating and then murdering Mrs. Francis Murray, who was simply trying to help him. The facts are clear, and Mr. Eggers admits, that he went to great lengths to ensure Mrs. Murray’s death and then to hide the evidence of his crime. His case has been reviewed at every level of the judiciary and has consistently been upheld, including Mr. Eggers’ own personal request to have his sentence carried out. After having considered Mr. Eggers’ wanton crime and all the factors surrounding his case, I determined it was best to allow the laws of this state to be followed and for the execution to be completed.”

Members of the media were driven to the prison just before 6 p.m., but were not allowed inside the facility until approximately 45 minutes later. Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn said there were no issues with the execution. “It just takes time to get the inmate prepared,” he said. “There was nothing unusual about that.”

“This execution went exactly according to our protocol,” Dunn said.

No representatives from the victim’s family witnessed the execution, and none provided a statement to Dunn.

Following the execution, several of the men with Eggers’ friends and family shook the hands of corrections officers inside the viewing room and thanked them.

Eggers’ final meal was the same meal that was served to the general population: Chicken creole, dirty rice, turnip greens, cornbread, cream corn, cake, and a grape drink. He also ate breakfast, which consisted of eggs, grits, prunes, two biscuits and gravy.

Eggers made no phone calls in the past two days. Wednesday, he was visited by his son, brother, sister-in-law, and five friends. Today, he was visited by his brother, sister-in-law, and ten friends.

As a special request, Eggers asked that no attorneys be allowed to visit him or witness his execution. He did allow his brother, sister-in-law, two friends, and his spiritual advisor to witness. Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton confirmed that each of those people will attend the execution.

The execution comes after years of Eggers seeking to represent himself during his legal proceedings, firing his attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Montgomery, and asking the state to expedite his execution. A federal judge declared him competent to waive his appeals, and the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision last year.

In 2002, Eggers was convicted of capital murder for the December 2000 killing of 67-year-old Bennie Francis Murray. Murray and her husband owned a carnival concessions business that traveled with various carnivals for Kissel Rides and Shows, but lived in Talladega when they weren’t on the road.

According to court records and previous stories from the Birmingham News, Eggers worked as a short-order cook for the Murrays until September of 2000 when he moved to Jasper. In late December of that year, then 33-year-old Eggers called Murray and asked for his job back. She said that the carnival was on a break until the next spring, and that the converted trailer where several of their employees lived had no room for another person at the time. On Dec. 28, he called back and asked Murray to pick up him and his teenage son from the bus station in Birmingham. She picked then up and the three went to Talladega.

On Dec. 30, 2000, Eggers asked Murray to drive him and his son back to their home in Jasper. She agreed, and the three left in her white 1988 Chevrolet pickup truck.

After dropping off his son at the Jasper apartment, Eggers asked Murray to drive him to his car in Nauvoo. Again, Murray agreed to drive Eggers. On the way to Nauvoo, Eggers told police he and Murray got into a fight, and he beat her unconscious. He said he then pushed her out of the truck, and he took off.

Eggers said after he left, he worried that Murray was still alive and he “wasn’t going to let her stay out there suffering,” court records show; so, he went back, and kicked her and choked her. According to court records, “Eggers then dragged Francis into nearby woods where she could not be seen from the road and, because he believed she was still alive at that point, he put a tree limb on her throat and stood on it in an effort to kill her.”

Eggers was arrested in Kissimmee, Florida, about one week after Murray disappeared. Police found Murray’s abandoned truck in Kentucky earlier that day, and discovered someone had used her ATM card several times in the state on Dec. 31 and on Jan. 1, 2001. He was found in Florida after being tracked through telephone calls.

After his arrest Eggers led police to the missing woman’s unburied body, which still was underneath the tree limb, in a wooded area in northwest Walker County.

Eggers was found guilty by a Walker County jury at his 2002 trial, and the jury voted 11-1 to recommend the death penalty. Circuit Court Judge James Brotherton followed the jury’s recommendation.

Eggers spoke at his sentencing hearing. “I stand before you today, not to beg for my life or seek your sympathy. I am asking for a sentence of death… my actions cannot be justified,” he said.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals later upheld his conviction and death sentence.

In 2014, Eggers was appointed lawyers from the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Montgomery to handle his appeals. The inmate, however, said he wanted to fire his attorneys and waive future appeals.

A federal hearing was held in April 2016 to determine Eggers’ competency. Both Eggers, his former lawyers’ expert witness Dr. Kenneth Benedict, and the state’s expert Dr. Glen King testified. Following the hearing, a federal judge ruled Eggers competent to give up his rights to appeal and dismiss his lawyers, and the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals later agreed.

In December, Assistant Federal Defender John Palombi asked the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals to hold a rehearing on the case with its full panel of judges, but they denied his request.

Eggers’ execution date was set in January.

As of Thursday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court had not ruled on Palombi’s petition for a stay of execution. Monday, the lawyer filed for a stay and for a writ of certioari, or a request to review the case. “Michael Eggers is severely mentally ill,” one of the filings states. “His testimony and filings are strong evidence of the irrationality of his reasons for wanting to terminate present counsel and to abandon his appeals.”

Tuesday, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office filed responses to Palombi’s requests. “While appointed counsel may speculate about the reasons Eggers wanted to discharge his counsel and waive his appeals, the fact remains that he is competent to do so,” the AG’s filing to the Supreme Court states.

In a filing on Wednesday, the federal defender’s office, however, countered to the U.S. Supreme Court that Eggers isn’t competent.

“Michael Eggers is delusional and has been equivocal on the issue of whether he wants to be executed for over 15 years. This Court should stay his execution and take this case to examine the important issues surrounding the execution of the mentally ill, in particular, whether a death-sentenced inmate should be allowed to expedite his execution with the help of the State, when what he truly desires is to represent himself.”

His former attorneys argued to the nation’s highest court they believe the 50-year-old inmate is delusional and wasn’t competent when he dropped his appeals and asked the courts to “expedite” his execution. The U.S. Supreme Court denied their petitions on Thursday evening, before the execution was set to begin.

Eggers execution date is the third one the state has faced this year. First, Vernon Madison was set to be executed on January 25, but the U.S. Supreme Court stayed his execution. On February 22, the state was set to execute Doyle Lee Hamm–a 61-year-old inmate who has been on death row over 30 years for killing a motel clerk in Cullman. After a brief delay, the state attempted to execute Hamm, but couldn’t find a vein to insert the catheter needed for the lethal drugs. At approximately 11:30 p.m., 30 minutes before the death warrant expired, the state called off Hamm’s execution.

If executed, Eggers would be the first inmate to be put to death this year.

There is one other execution already scheduled for 2018: Walter Lee Moody.

Moody is set to die on April 19, and at 83-years-old is the oldest inmate currently on Alabama Death Row., Earlier this year, Moody had his request for a review of his appeal rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The next day the Alabama Attorney General sought an execution date from the Alabama Supreme Court.

Moody was convicted of killing U.S. 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert S. Vance. Vance died Dec. 16, 1989, and his wife, Helen, was seriously injured after the judge opened a package that had been sent to his home, detonating a pipe bomb. A similar bomb killed a lawyer in Atlanta two days later.

Moody was linked to the crimes through a similar bomb nearly two decades earlier that had injured his wife when it exploded. His prosecution in that case led to his resentment of the courts leading up to the 1989 bombings.

https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2018/03/michael_eggers_set_to_die_thur.html

Eric Branch Florida Death Row

Eric Branch was executed by the State of Florida for the murder of a college student in 1993. According to court documents Eric Branch kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered college student Susan Morris. Eric Branch would be executed by lethal injection on February 23, 2018

Eric Branch More News

Convicted murderer Eric Branch used his final moments before he was executed to make a political statement, falling into unconsciousness as he shouted “murderers” between blood-curdling screams on the execution gurney.

The state of Florida carried out the execution of Branch, 47, on Thursday evening at the Florida State Prison in Raiford — roughly 335 miles from where he abducted, sexually assaulted and killed University of West Florida student Susan Morris as she was leaving a night class in January 1993.

Branch, who was on death row for nearly 25 years, was pronounced dead of a lethal injection at 6:05 p.m. Central Standard Time.

After Morris’ family, officials and media entered the execution chamber’s witness room at about 5:30 p.m., a nondescript brown curtain was raised to reveal Branch, restrained and largely covered with a white sheet.

He appeared wide-eyed and shuffled beneath the leather straps and mitten-like hand covers that held him in place.

He was vocal in his final minutes, choosing to use them to make a political statement.

“My last statement is for you guys,” he said, directing his attention to the team warden and two other officials standing beside him in the execution chamber. “I ask you to step out of line of duty and not participate in this. The governor wishes to be senator, and Pam Bondi wishes to be governor. Let them come down here and do it. I’ve learned that you are good people and this is not what you should be doing.” Bondi is the Florida Attorney General.

The team warden announced that with those final words, the preparation phase was complete and the execution would begin.

An anonymous executioner, chosen by the team warden and paid $150, began injecting the lethal mix of etomidate, bromide and potassium acetate through an IV line from behind a long curtain.

Branch’s screams immediately began pulsing through the room as he repeatedly yelled the word “murderers” and violently thrashed on the gurney.

Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman Michelle Glady said after Branch’s death that his screams were not the result of the controversial lethal injection drugs, and the procedure was carried out according to protocol. She said his screams began only seconds after the first drug began moving through the IV line. That was confirmed independently by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, she told reporters.

At some point during Branch’s yelling, shaking and thrashing, his glasses fell. Then, so too did his chest.

The team warden shook Branch to ensure he had lost consciousness, and the second two drugs coursed through the line.

His chest remained moving, slowly rising and falling, until Branch became still and was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. A physician entered the room to check for a pulse with a stethoscope, and he used a flashlight to check Branch’s eyes before marking the official time.

Branch spent his final hours Thursday morning meeting with his daughter, according to FDC. At around 9:30 a.m., he ate a last meal of a pork chop, a T-Bone steak, French fries, a bottle of ginger ale and two pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. He refused a spiritual adviser and was restless Wednesday night, according to FDC.

His execution marked the end of a decades-long wait for justice for the Morris family. Wendy Morris Hill sat in the front row of the witness room with her husband and daughter to watch the man who killed her sister die.

The family remained stoic, showing no sign of emotion even as Branch stared directly at them moments before death.

Afterward, they spoke to the media about Susan’s life and legacy.

“Twenty-five years ago, Susan’s life was suddenly and brutally extinguished,” Morris Hill said to media following the execution. “We have grieved for her longer than she was with us. Yet because of who she was, because of the difference she made, she will never be forgotten by those who love her.”

The murder of 21-year-old Morris shook the Escambia County community for days as authorities tried to find the missing woman. Once they made the grim discovery of her body on Jan. 13, 1993, the manhunt for her killer began.

Branch was mistakenly released from a work-release facility in Indiana in November 1992, before the completion of his sentence, according to the Evansville Courier & Press archives. The mistake happened when an employee from the county clerk’s office failed to forward a judge’s order to the work release center’s officials.

He was convicted in Indiana on counts of forgery, theft and sexual battery. Branch fled to Florida to see a cousin in the Panama City area, where he raped another woman and again fled, this time to Pensacola.

Multiple court documents and archives state he spent a weekend on the UWF campus and found Morris walking to her car in an empty parking lot days later.

She was abducted from the red Toyota Celica she had bought with her own money from working in a video store. She had always promised her sister, Morris Hill, that she would teach her to drive a stick in that same car. That never happened.

“The lives of so many of us would’ve been different had Susan been allowed to live,” Morris Hill said to reporters. “My grandparents lost the company of Susan in their twilight years. Because of the tragic nature of her death, no one who loved Susan had a chance to tell her goodbye. Susan had a boyfriend whom she loved, they lost the chance to pursue their relationship. She lost the chance to live her life.”

She later added: “As relieved as we are that the legal process has now concluded, nothing will bring Susan back.”

Morris Hill spoke of the numerous judges, attorneys, prosecutors and law enforcement officials who comforted, consoled and helped the family find justice over the last 25 years.

Those officials prayed with the Morris family, aggressively pursued Branch’s conviction, and continued to fight for the death penalty through a multitude of appeals.

In his final weeks, Branch’s counsel argued his constitutional rights had been violated repeatedly, based on everything from the way his body was positioned during execution to new studies on juvenile brain development and maturity. Branch claimed his execution was unconstitutional based on the argument that a new Florida law that requires juries unanimously recommend death should be retroactively applied to him. His conviction and the jury’s 10-2 decision to recommend the death penalty came eight years before the new law’s retroactivity cut-off date.

He ultimately appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. A group of former judges, Florida Supreme Court justices, psychologists and other professionals filed “friend of the court” briefs before the court supporting Branch’s arguments in the last two weeks.

The decision on whether or not to stay his execution was up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the high court denied the stay at 5:30 p.m., allowing the execution to continue.

Branch’s execution was one of three scheduled to take place Thursday across the country. A Texas inmate, Thomas Whitaker, was issued a last-minute clemency Thursday evening, halting his scheduled execution, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a last-minute bid to stop the execution of Alabama inmate Doyle Hamm at 9 p.m., and the execution was expected to move forward at that time.

https://www.pnj.com/story/news/crime/2018/02/22/eric-branch-last-words-execution-target-florida-governor-attorney-general-scream-murderers/363914002/