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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

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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/

Ray Cromartie Georgia Execution

Ray Cromartie was executed by the State of Georgia for the murder of a store clerk in 1994. According to court documents Ray Cromartie would murder store clerk Richard Slysz during a robbery. Richard Slysz would be executed by lethal injection on November 13, 2019

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Ray “Jeff” Cromartie is dead, executed at 10:59 p.m. eastern for the 1994 murder of South Georgia convenience store clerk Richard Slysz.

Cromartie’s death by lethal injection became imminent once the U.S. Supreme Court denied his request for a stay of execution shortly after 10 p.m. Cromartie appealed to the Supreme Court Wednesday evening after the federal appeals court in Atlanta rejected his request for a stay late Wednesday afternoon.

The 52-year-old was set to receive a lethal injection of pentobarbitol at 7 p.m. But while Georgia schedules executions for that hour, the state does not proceed until all courts have weighed in, which puts the actual time of death well into the night.

Ray Cromartie died amid uncertainty and contention.

He has always insisted he was not the person who pulled the trigger in the 1994 South Georgia convenience store robbery and murder that sent him to death row.

Two days before Cromartie’s scheduled execution, one of his co-defendants, Thad Lucas, released an affidavit saying he’d overheard their other co-defendant, Corey Clark, confess to being the shooter.

Lucas, who was the getaway driver in the robbery in Thomasville, did not mention Clark’s alleged confession at trial or in a recent interview. Lucas said in the affidavit that he originally didn’t think telling the truth would do any good. State officials argued his statement changes nothing, because Lucas acknowledges he didn’t see the shooting and, thus, can’t know who killed 50-year-old Richard Slysz.

And the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in its ruling rejecting Cromartie’s request for a stay, disagreed with Cromartie’s lawyers’ contention that Lucas’ recent statement shows their client is innocent of malice murder and his case should be reopened.

A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit noted that just three days before Slysz was fatally shot in the head, Ray Cromartie committed an almost identical crime against another store clerk in the same town.

There was also testimony at trial that Cromartie picked out which store to rob in the Slysz killing. Given this, the court said, Cromartie has failed to present new evidence that’s so strong that reviewing judges cannot have confidence in the outcome of the trial.

In a concurring opinion, Judge Beverly Martin said that, under the law, Ray Cromartie “has no procedures available to allow us to consider the claims he raises here.”

This includes claims by Cromartie’s new lawyers that the jury should have heard mitigating evidence about their client’s troubled past. This is evidence that may have affected jurors’ views on Cromartie’s moral culpability for the crime that sent him to death row, Martin said.

“Certainly Mr. Cromartie, as well as our criminal justice system, would have been better served if his claims had been considered on the merits,” she wrote.

Slysz’s daughter, Elizabeth Legette, also didn’t see the shooting, which is one reason why she joined in Cromartie’s requests for new DNA testing. Cromartie’s attorneys say the testing — on shell casings and clothing — could prove it was Clark who shot the clerk, not Ray Cromartie.

At trial, Clark testified that Ray Cromartie fired the gun, and lawyers from the Georgia Attorney General’s Office say other witness testimony fits the pattern in Clark’s statements, not Cromartie’s.

Courts have one by one denied Cromartie’s DNA testing request in recent weeks, upsetting the victim’s daughter.

“In the course of the past few months, I have not been treated with fairness, dignity, or respect, and people in power have refused to listen to what I had to say,” Legette wrote in a statement released Tuesday. “I believe this was, in part, because I was not saying what I was expected to say as a victim.”

After 25 years of failed court fights, Ray Cromartie seemed resigned in recent visits with family.

Stepbrother Eric Major talked to him through a metal screen at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison outside Jackson, which houses the execution chamber.”

He was comforting us,” Major told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He was never a very emotional person, but he was always a caring person.”

Major didn’t need to square the image of the convicted murderer as a caring person, because he never believed his stepbrother was guilty.

The brothers grew up mostly around Houston, where they had little supervision at home. “We kind of were raising ourselves,” Major said.

Ray Cromartie seemed to Major like an average-enough kid with a job at McDonald’s and a love for music. Cromartie wanted to be like their neighbor, an engineer, but Major doesn’t think it was so much the profession Cromartie wanted to emulate, just the act of wearing a suit to work.

The stepbrothers got into trouble here and there before Major’s mother brought him to live with her in Alabama.

At the mother’s urging, Major went to college.

Cromartie, meanwhile, joined the Army and got kicked out for reasons he never disclosed to Major. Cromartie ended up in Thomasville, his mom’s hometown near the Florida border, and Major stayed in Alabama, where he would later become a state representative.

Cromartie didn’t deny involvement in the robbery attempt at Junior Food Store.

Cromartie and Clark were driven to the store by Lucas, who is Cromartie’s half-brother.

Cromartie had convinced Lucas to give them a ride to steal some beer, according to Lucas. Lucas said he waited in the car behind the store while Cromartie and Clark went around to the front. When Cromartie and Clark fled the store, they were toting two 12-packs of Budweiser.

From where the car was parked, Lucas said he couldn’t see inside the store, so he didn’t realize the clerk was shot until later that night, when Clark pulled him aside and said Cromartie had killed the man.

Shortly thereafter, Lucas now claims, he overheard Clark tell someone else he had killed the clerk himself.

In the days to come, Lucas heard police were also accusing Cromartie of shooting a different clerk, Dan Wilson, who’d taken a bullet to the head during a robbery and survived.

Police said Cromartie acted alone in Wilson’s shooting. Lucas, who said he was not close to his half-brother, never asked Cromartie if he was guilty. “Some things you just don’t ask,” Lucas, 47, told the AJC. But in his affidavit, he said he has actually always believed Clark was the shooter.

“I keep hearing that Jeff Cromartie is the shooter and I know that is probably not true,” Lucas wrote, adding that his own past statements “helped hide the truth.”

Lucas and Clark testified at the trial, avoiding the death penalty and murder charges. Lucas and Clark were released from prison in the early 2000s. Clark was recently arrested on a parole violation and hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

Generally speaking, Georgia’s party to a crime law could have made Cromartie eligible for the death penalty whether he pulled the trigger or not. But his attorneys said that statute didn’t apply because prosecutors explicitly argued at trial that Cromartie fired the fatal shots.

No members of Slysz’s family openly opposed the DNA testing or called for Cromartie to be executed. But Wilson, the victim who survived, very much wanted Cromartie to die, according to retired Thomasville police detective Melven Johnson.

Johnson said the evidence from both shootings left no doubt that Cromartie killed Slysz and shot Wilson.

As the execution neared, Major thought of how his path had diverged from his stepbrother’s many years earlier, when Cromartie headed for prison and Major headed for the Alabama Statehouse.

“But for the grace of God,” Major said, “I would be Jeff.”

Major decided not to attend the execution. Cromartie asked him and other relatives not to come, so they wouldn’t have to endure it, which Major took as further evidence that his stepbrother is a caring person.

https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2019/11/14/Ray-Cromartie-Georgia-executes-1994-killing-store-clerk/stories/201911140161

Marion Wilson Georgia Execution

Marion Wilson was executed by the State of Georgia for a murder committed in 1995. According to court documents Marion Wilson and Robert Butts would shoot and kill Donovan Parks during a robbery. Both men would be sentenced to death. Robert Butts would be executed in 2018 and Marion Wilson would be executed by lethal injection in 2019. Marion Wilson was the 1500th execution in the United States since the death penalty returned in the 1970’s

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A Georgia inmate convicted of the 1996 shotgun slaying of a man who had agreed to give him and another man a ride outside a Walmart store was executed Thursday evening.

Marion Wilson Jr., 42, was pronounced dead at 9:52 p.m. following an injection of the sedative pentobarbital at the state prison in Jackson, the office of the Georgia attorney general said in a statement.

Wilson and Robert Earl Butts Jr. were convicted of murder and sentenced to death for the shotgun slaying of 24-year-old Donovan Corey Parks in Milledgeville, a community in rural Georgia about 90 miles southeast of Atlanta.

Wilson was convicted in November 1997 of malice murder, armed robbery, hijacking a motor vehicle, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, and possession of a sawed-off shotgun. Butts was found guilty of the same charges about a year later.

Butts, who was 40, was executed in May 2018.

Wilson’s execution came after the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, the only authority in Georgia that can commute a death sentence, denied his clemency request. Efforts by his lawyers to get the courts to intervene also were unsuccessful.

The killing occurred on March 28, 1996, after Parks went to a Walmart to buy cat food, leaving his car right out front. A witness heard Butts ask Parks for a ride, and several people saw them getting into Parks’ car, according to a Georgia Supreme Court summary of evidence and the testimony presented at trial.

Butts was in the front passenger seat and Wilson was in the back as they left. A short distance away, the men ordered Parks out of the car, shot him in the back of the head, and stole his car, prosecutors said.

At Wilson’s trial, while asking the jurors to impose the death penalty, Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit District Attorney Fred Bright said Wilson “blew [Parks’] brains out on the side of the road.” A year later, during the sentencing phase of Butts’ trial in front of a different jury, Bright said Butts “pulled the trigger and blew out the brains of Donovan Corey Parks.”

Lawyers for each man seized on that discrepancy to argue that their client wasn’t the triggerman and shouldn’t be executed. State lawyers argued that it doesn’t matter who fired the fatal shot, that both men participated in the crime.

Wilson’s lawyers noted that Bright later said under oath that he believed Butts was the shooter. They argued that while Wilson knew Butts probably intended to rob someone that night, he didn’t know that Butts planned to harm or kill anyone and that Wilson played no active role in the slaying.

Wilson’s sentence was, therefore, unconstitutionally excessive and disproportionate, his lawyers had argued in an unsuccessful court filing. Bright also deliberately misled the jury about Wilson’s role to secure a death sentence in violation of his right to “a fair and reliable sentencing proceeding,” Wilson’s lawyers wrote.

State lawyers countered that Bright repeatedly said throughout the trial that it wasn’t clear which man fired the gun, but they said there was enough evidence that Wilson participated in the killing to merit a death sentence.

Wilson’s lawyers had also written in a clemency petition that his childhood was characterized by abuse, neglect, and instability that led him to engage in criminal behavior that escalated as he got older. But they said the prosecution exaggerated Wilson’s juvenile criminal record and provided misleading speculation on his gang involvement.

Wilson was the second prisoner executed by Georgia this year. He was the 1,500th put to death nationwide since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/nation-world/georgia-execution-marion-wilson-jr-walmart-killing-20190621.html

Scotty Morrow Georgia Execution

Scotty Morrow would be executed by the State of Georgia for a double murder. According to court documents Scotty Morrow would drive over to an ex girlfriends home and would shoot and kill her and her friend and shooting and injuring a third woman. Barbara Young and Tonya Woods would die from their injuries. Scotty Morrow would be executed by lethal injection on May 3, 2019

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Scotty Morrow, arms extended to his side, eyes open to the heavens, seemed at peace with his fate. Appeals exhausted, clemency denied, Morrow was just moments from death, and at 9:38 p.m. he became the first person executed by the state of Georgia this year.

His final words were contrite, his delivery, composed. The 52-year-old Gainesville man first addressed the relatives of the two women he killed nearly a quarter-century ago.

“I would like to give my deepest and sincerest apology to the Woods family and to the Young family,” he said.

The father of two and grandfather of four said in his petition for clemency that he thought every day about what happened on Dec. 29, 1994.

Spurned over the phone by his ex-girlfriend, Barbara Ann Young, Morrow drove to her house and fatally shot her and her friend, Tonya Woods. He shot a third woman in the face and arm but she survived. The murders were witnessed by Young’s 5-year-old son.

“I’m truly sorry for all that happened,” Morrow said, strapped down on a gurney inside a small room toward the rear of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.

“I hope that you all recover and have healing,” he said to the roughly 20 people who observed his execution.

Morrow also thanked his family for their support and asked for their forgiveness.

“I love you all. God bless,” he said.

An imam gave the final prayer, telling Scotty Morrow he loved him.

At 9:26 p.m., prison Warden Benjamin Ford left the small room, signaling the injection of a lethal dose of anesthetic.

One woman in a white dress, sitting alone on the wooden pews facing Morrow, shook noticeably, holding back tears.

At 9:28 p.m., Morrow’s chest heaved, tilting his head to the right. One minute later, he yawned.

Then, stillness.

At 9:37 p.m. two doctors entered the room, checking Morrow’s vitals. One nodded to the warden, who announced Morrow’s death. Morrow is the 73rd person executed by the state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, and the 50th by lethal injection.

“Tonight, justice was carried out for the families of Tonya Woods and Barbara Ann Young and the injured LaToya Horne,” said Hall County District Attorney Lee Darragh, who witnessed the execution. “Twenty years ago, I stood in front of a jury and asked them for the sentence of death finally imposed. It was indeed a profound experience to witness the execution for which I had asked, but it was important I be present.”

The U.S. Supreme Court had denied Morrow’s final appeal to stay the execution at about 9 p.m. Thursday, two and a half hours after his defense team petitioned the nation’s highest court.

Morrow was denied clemency Wednesday by the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. His attorneys argued that unplanned crimes of passion, such as the ones Morrow was convicted of, are rarely punished by death.

They also pointed out that jurors in Morrow’s murder trial heard little about his traumatic childhood.

At age 3, Scotty Morrow watched his father stomp on his pregnant mother’s abdomen, causing her to miscarry. Mother and son eventually fled to a relative’s home but found no solace. That relative started raping Morrow when he was 7, his attorneys said. Another relative raped him one year later. Later, after moving to New York, Morrow was beaten repeatedly by his mother’s new boyfriend, according to his clemency petition

A state court judge overturned Morrow’s sentence in 2011, saying that his lawyers had not afforded him proper representation. A new trial was ordered, but the Georgia Supreme Court later reversed that decision and reinstated the death sentence.

On Tuesday, a Butts County judge dismissed a petition claiming Morrow’s death sentence was unconstitutional because it was improperly imposed. Lawyers for the Gainesville man said the judge in Morrow’s criminal trial decided which of the two murders he committed warranted the death penalty, a decision they said the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled must be made by jurors.

The Butts County judge on Wednesday agreed with attorneys for the state that those claims had already been rejected by higher courts.

On Thursday, the state Supreme Court agreed in a unanimous decision. The court described Morrow’s appeal “as lacking in arguable merit” and it also denied a request from his lawyers for a stay of execution.

The state Supreme Court’s ruling came just as Morrow was served his final meal — a hamburger, chicken and waffles, two hot dogs, a bag of buttered popcorn, a pint of butter pecan ice cream and a large lemonade. A Department of Corrections spokeswoman said he finished only about half the meal.

Earlier in the day, Scotty Morrow was visited by one friend, 10 family members, two members of the clergy, and four of his attorneys.

“Mr. Morrow’s acts of violence were aberrations in a life otherwise characterized by kindness and compassion, and the man he became in December of 1994 bears no resemblance to the man he was before and the man he has worked to be since,” his attorneys wrote in his clemency petition.

Prison officials testified Scotty Morrow was a model inmate who sought redemption for his crimes. His son and namesake said he was a positive influence on his four grandchildren. Counselors told the parole board he had been fully rehabilitated.

But the parole board was unswayed, denying Morrow’s last, best chance at survival.

https://www.ajc.com/news/crime–law/georgia-set-execute-convicted-double-murderer-tonight/4r5Ibz4U8zNun6yEKqL02M/

Donnie Lance Georgia Execution

Donnie Lance was executed by the State of Georgia for a double murder. According to court documents Donnie Lance would murder his ex wife and boyfriend in 1997. Donnie Lance would beat to death Joy Lance before fatally shooting Dwight Butch Wood. Donnie Lance would be executed on January 29, 2020 by lethal injection

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Georgia has executed Donnie Lance for the 1997 murders of his ex-wife and her boyfriend in Jackson County.

Time of death was 9:05 p.m. Wednesday.

Lance, 66, who was sentenced to death in 1999, was given a lethal injection of pentobarbital at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.

He declined to make a final statement, to hear a final prayer. He’d already spent the day praying with family, including his adult kids, who had tried to stop the state from executing him for the deaths of their mother, Joy Lance, 39, and her boyfriend, Dwight “Butch” Wood Jr., 33.

Lance closed his eyes as the warden finished reading the death warrant.

The drug began to flow at about 8:54 p.m.

At 8:56 p.m., Lance blew out a large puff of air. A woman in the front row cried. Lance’s mouth came open, but he barely moved except for wiggling his toes occasionally.

By 9 p.m., the color had drained from Lance’s face. Moments later, his arms and hands, which were strapped to the gurney, became pale.

He was gone.

FUTILE COURT FIGHTS

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Lance’s final appeals at roughly 8:15 p.m., clearing the way for his execution.

The high court, in two separate orders, declined to hear Lance’s requests that it halt his execution on grounds of alleged prosecution misconduct and lower-court rulings that denied his request for DNA testing.

One of Lance’s filings to the nation’s highest court said if his grand jury was not randomly selected, “his death sentence is invalid and unconstitutional.”

Wednesday afternoon, in a brief order, the Georgia Supreme Court turned down a similar appeal. The justices said Lance’s motion was “lacking arguable merit.” The vote was 8-0, with Justice Sarah Warren disqualified from the case because she had worked for the state Attorney General’s Office.

Before Wednesday’s filing in the U.S. Supreme Court, Lance’s legal team filed a separate appeal before the high court. The other appeal challenges lower court rulings that denied Lance’s request for DNA testing of the state’s evidence.

The nation’s highest court rejected both appeals.

Lance’s attorneys have also argued that the jury that convicted him and sentenced him to death should have known he had brain damage and an IQ that makes him borderline intellectually disabled.

Lance has maintained his innocence, and his grown children have spent months unsuccessfully calling for DNA testing on case evidence to confirm whether he killed their mother.

FAMILY’S FINAL VISIT

Stephanie Cape and her brother Jessie Lance visited their dad Wednesday afternoon and shared old stories and memories, trying not to think about his fate. The siblings said they’d both been thinking a lot about what their mother would think of the situation.

“I can’t imagine any mother would want this to happen,” Jessie Lance told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Just let us keep our dad.”

Stephanie Cape had her last embrace with her father. He told her to remember that just because he’s leaving doesn’t mean he’s going anywhere.

Donnie Lance told his kids he had been saved and intended to go to heaven with all their other lost family members.

The siblings had spent their lives with a cavernous void where their mother should’ve been. Their father filled it best he could, they said, by offering advice and encouragement.

The siblings know that other relatives of the victims wanted their father dead. But Stephanie Cape said — and her brother agreed — that the two of them were the only ones with something left to lose in the case. “Everybody else has already lost all they’re going to lose,” the daughter said.

What could those who wanted Donnie Lance dead gain from his death? Tammy Dearing, Wood’s sister, explained moments after she walked out of the death chamber: “I feel relief this is over, no more worries about appeals — we got our justice.”

THE TERRIBLE CRIME

Lance’s death marks the end to a complex and emotionally trying saga.

It began on Nov. 8, 1997, when Joy Lance, who had worked as a secretary at a trucking company, was savagely beaten to death. Her boyfriend, Wood, a truck driver and father of three, was shot in the back with a shotgun. The bodies were found at Wood’s home in the Maysville area, and police brought Donnie Lance in for questioning within hours.

Donnie Lance’s attorneys noted there was no physical evidence on him, in spite of the bloody nature of his ex-wife’s beating. The lawyers asked for DNA testing on wood fragments from what is believed to be the butt of the shotgun and a fingerprint from a shotgun shell found at the scene.

Jackson County District Attorney Brad Smith and state attorneys have said the evidence against Lance, “although circumstantial, was overwhelming.” Prosecutors maintain Lance was abusive to his ex-wife for years before the murders. Witnesses said they’d heard Donnie Lance threaten to kill her if she divorced him and became involved with Wood.

Lance was indicted for murder in the deaths by a grand jury that his attorneys have said was improperly picked. Instead of choosing grand jurors at random, a prosecutor allegedly packed it with friends and others he knew would be on his side, according to Lance’s defense team.

“The same clique of people sat (on the grand jury) for years and years,” said Katrina Conrad, an investigator from the Federal Defender Program. “(Prosecutor Tim Madison) picked jurors from one church in Jefferson, and the preacher there would preach about the grand jury indicting people.”

At trial, prosecutors painted Lance as a cold and calculated killer who committed the murders to exact revenge.

“I sat through many days of the trial in ‘99 and I heard what a monster this man was,” said Wood’s brother-in-law Terry Dearing.

After the jury convicted Lance, his trial attorney chose not to present any mitigating evidence to sway the jury from sentencing him to death. That was extremely rare.

Lance’s new attorneys say the jury should’ve been told about his brain damage from repeated head traumas. One of the injuries, Lance’s lawyers said, occurred when Lance was shot in the head during a previous confrontation with the murder victims.

In January 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Lance’s appeal, which included information about his trial attorney’s failure to submit any mitigating evidence in the sentencing phase of the trial. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying Lance’s lawyer should have presented evidence of his client’s cognitive impairments. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan joined in the dissent.

Sotomayor said multiple experts had testified in a previous hearing that Lance, a former race car driver, had frontal lobe damage. (The frontal lobe of the brain controls myriad cognitive processes, including memory, reasoning and language.) Sotomayor said the experts also agreed that Lance’s IQ was borderline for intellectual disability.

Lance’s children said he had been a positive force in their lives since going to prison, a constant they could count on. And his daughter’s daughter, a 2-year-old, called Lance “Papa Don.”

Tammy Dearing, Wood’s sister, said she sympathizes with the Lance children, but their father made his bed.

“We as taxpayers have supported this man for too long,” she said. “There’s so many things we missed out on as a family. I watched Butch’s kids grow up without a dad.”

Donnie Lance’s kids chose not to be in the death house to see their dad’s final moments. Jessie Lance told him he would be there for him, but the father asked him not to, so the son wouldn’t have to see it.

https://www.ajc.com/news/crime–law/execution-looms-tonight-for-georgia-man-whose-kids-want-save-him/ZLhsNr3xiAtHBuGGkRMkIL/

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