Carey Moore was executed by the State of Nebraska for a robbery murder. According to court documents Carey Moore would shoot and kill two cab drivers, Reuel Van Ness and Maynard Helgeland, in two separate attacks. Carey Moore would be executed by lethal injection using the fentanyl on August 13, 2018
Carey Moore More News
Nebraska executed Carey Dean Moore on Tuesday morning in the state’s first death by lethal injection.
Carey Moore, 60, had served 38 years on death row for shooting and killing cab drivers Reuel Van Ness and Maynard Helgeland in the summer of 1979, according to the Omaha World-Herald. He had said he was ready to die.
“We could see him mouthing some words toward his witnesses, it was clear he said I love you several times,” witness Brent Martin of Nebraska Radio Network said at a news conference after the death, KLKN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, reports.
The fatal drug cocktail used for Moore’s execution had never been used to put a person to death, the Lincoln Journal Star reports. The concoction included sedative diazepam, muscle relaxant cisatracurium, potassium chloride and fentanyl.
Fentanyl is an opioid painkiller that is 30 times more potent than heroin and at least 80 times stronger than morphine, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Nearly 30,000 overdose deaths were linked to fentanyl in 2017, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data cited by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The drug mixture is controversial, because if the substances did not work as planned, Moore could have suffered extreme pain. Friday, a lawyer for the drug company behind the paralyzing drug said it might not be effective if it wasn’t stored at the proper temperature, the World-Herald reports.
Witnesses reported no complications, only some coughing before Moore stopped moving. Moore died at 10:47 a.m. CT surrounded by three people, a clergy member and four media member witnesses, according to KLKN.
Moore released a “last statement,” where he apologized to his brother, Donald, who was with him during his first murder.
“I am terribly sorry,” Moore wrote. “Please forgive me, Don, somehow.”
Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska filed a motion to delay Moore’s execution on behalf of eight death row inmates, KETV-TV, in Omaha, Nebraska, reports. After the execution, ACLU of Nebraska Executive Director Danielle Conrad condemned the decision.
“This execution of Carey Dean Moore does not comport with Nebraska’s proud tradition of open government,” Conrad said in a statement Tuesday. “Today stands as the most recent dark chapter in Nebraska’s troubled history with the death penalty.”
In 2016, Nebraska reinstated the death penalty. Before Moore, the state had executed 37 people, the last being killed by an electric chair.
Aubrey Trail was sentenced to death and remain on Nebraska death row for a brutal murder. According to court documents Aubrey Trail and his girlfriend Bailey Boswell would lure the victim Sydney Loofe over the dating app Tinder. Once Sydney Loofe arrived Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell would attempt to convince her to join their cult and when she refused she was brutally murdered and chopped into pieces. Both Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell would be arrested and convicted of murder. Aubrey Trail would be sentenced to death. Bailey Boswell is currently awaiting sentencing.
Aubrey Trail 2021 Information
nmate Committed Name
Last:
TRAIL
First:
AUBREY
Middle:
C
Suffix:
Inmate Legal Name
Last:
First:
Middle:
Suffix:
Details
Gender:
MALE
Race:
WHITE
Date of Birth:
09/07/1966
Facility:
TECUMSEH STATE COR INSTITUTION
Offense Term
Description
Run Code
Minimum
Maximum
County of Commitment
MURDER 1ST DEGREE
DTH Yr Mo Da
DTH Yr Mo Da
SALINE
Felony – –
IMPROP DISP HUMAN SKEL REMAINS
CS
0 Yr 0 Mo 0 Da
2 Yr 0 Mo 0 Da
SALINE
Felony – –
MURDER 1ST DEGREE
CS
1 Yr 0 Mo 0 Da
50 Yr 0 Mo 0 Da
SALINE
Felony – CONSPIRACY –
Aubrey Trail More News
Sentencing was handed down Wednesday for a man convicted of killing a woman whose dismembered remains were later found in trash bags along rural Nebraska roads.
Convicted killer Aubrey Trail entered Saline County district courtroom facing life in prison or the death penalty.
A three-judge panel sentenced Trail to death.
Trail, 54, and Bailey Boswell, 26, were convicted of the 2017 murder of Lincoln store clerk Sydney Loofe, 24.
On Wednesday, Trail said he wanted to set the record straight and addressed Loofe’s family whom were seated in the courtroom.
“I won’t say I’m sorry, is that would be an insult to you after what I’ve put you through. And I won’t ask for forgiveness. As I don’t believe there is such a thing,” Trail said.
He said that Loofe was not part of his ring of sex and crime.
“Sydney did nothing but threaten to expose my lifestyle and I killed her for it,” Trail said.
He said the murder was a spur of the moment and not planned for days.
Trail said Boswell lured Loofe using the dating app Tinder.
When Loofe got their apartment in Wilber, she “freaked out.”
He said he had no doubt she would tell authorities about “their lifestyle,” so he strangled her with an electrical cord.
“I have done some terrible things in my life but this is the only thing I have ever done that I feel real regret about,” Trail said.
Before announcing the sentence, District Court Judge Vicky Johnson said Trail used exceptional depravity in selecting and coldly planning the murder of Loofe. Exceptional depravity is one of the circumstances required for the death penalty.
Johnson asserted that Loofe’s death was planned in advance.
Trail and Boswell purchase tools to dismember and dispose of Loofe’s body before Boswell brought her to the apartment.
Johnson said during the trial, there was testimony that Trail enjoyed bragging about the murder and joking that he drank Loofe’s blood.
The judge said Loofe was “needlessly” dismembered to satisfy Trail’s desires and so he did not have to hide the body. Unnecessary mutilation is one factor considered when establishing exceptional depravity.
Johnson said Trail is not low-functioning and was not intoxicated when the murder occurred. She said his attempt to dispose of Loofe’s remains proves he understands the wrongfulness of murder.
The judge stated that Trail’s poor upbringing does not constitute a mitigating factor.
Trail’s attorneys said they were surprised by Trail’s statement but not surprised by the sentence.
“When you get a guy who slashes his throat in front of a jury and you still don’t get a mistrial you get a flavor of how these things are going to go,” Ben Murray said.
Trail made national headlines during a 2019 court appearance when he attempted to take his own life.
Shortly after a witness was sworn in, Trail reportedly shouted “Bailey is innocent and I curse you all!”
Trail then attempted to cut his own throat.
Death penalty sentences are automatically appealed.
Joe Murray said that will be one of the issues raised.
“After the incident with the razor, I think this case was over,” Joe Murray said.
Loofe’s family did not want to say anything as they left the courthouse.
Trail showed little emotion during the hearing. He said he was not looking for mercy or forgiveness.
“To be quite frank and no disrespect to intended to the court, I could care less what you do here to me today,” Trail said.
Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson called the three-judge panel’s order well-reasoned.
In a statement Peterson said, “The panel did an extensive job of setting forth the gruesome details of the murder of Sydney Loofe and explained why the death penalty is appropriate under the language of the Nebraska statutes and the history of Nebraska case law where the death penalty was upheld.”
Investigators say Boswell arranged a date with Loofe through the dating app Tinder for Nov. 15, 2017 — the same day officials say Loofe was killed. Loofe was reported missing by her family, and a massive search was launched. Her remains weren’t found until Dec. 4, when her dismembered body was found stuffed into garbage bags that had been dumped in a field near Edgar, about 90 miles southwest of Lincoln.
Trail previously told several news outlets that Loofe’s death was accidental. In the unsealed arrest affidavit, though, investigators said Trail and Boswell were captured on video at a Home Depot in Lincoln on Nov. 15 buying tools used to dismember Loofe, hours before Loofe’s death and while she was still at work.
A jury convicted Boswell of first degree murder Oct 14, 2020.
She is scheduled to be sentenced later this month.
If also sentenced to die, Boswell could become the first woman sent to death row in Nebraska.
27-year-old Nebraska woman on Monday avoided the death sentence after being convicted of the online-dating murder of a store clerk, along her partner who received the death sentence two years ago, the Associated Press reported.
In 2017, Bailey Boswell and her boyfriend Aubrey Trail, 55, had planned to kill someone before they met Sidney Loofe, a Nebraska hardware store clerk, on the dating app Tinder. They lured Loofe to meet them, strangled her, and her body parts were later found in garbage bags in ditches along country roads in Clay County, cut into 14 pieces.
Boswell avoided being the first woman in Nebraska to be sentenced to death and was instead sentenced to life in prison as a three-judge panel voted 2-1, with one judge saying he did not believe the state met its burden of proof for a death sentence.
Trail was sentenced to death, and admitted that he repeatedly lied to authorities and plotted to kill Loofe two to three hours before her murder but claimed that Boswell was not in the room and did not know he was going to kill Loofe.
Boswell was convicted in October of 2020 of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and improper disposal of human remains. Trail was convicted of the same charges in 2019 and sentenced to death in June. No execution date has been set.
Anthony Garcia was sentenced to death by the State of Nebraska for the murders of four people at the Creighton Medical Center. According to court documents Anthony Garcia was fired from the Creighton Medical Center, and would return years to later to extract his revenge. The first two murders occurred in 2008 when Garcia fatally stabbed 11-year-old Thomas Hunter and 57-year-old Shirlee Sherman. The case went cold until years later when Garcia returned to Nebraska in 2013 and murdered two more people in a similar fashion. The police were able to tie all four murders together and it led them to Anthony Garcia. Anthony Garcia was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death.
A former doctor was sentenced to death on Friday for the revenge killings of four people connected to a Nebraska medical school, including the 11-year-old son of a physician who helped fire the man from a residency program nearly two decades ago.
Anthony Garcia, 45, of Indiana entered the courtroom in a wheelchair and appeared to sleep through the hearing as a three-judge panel sentenced him to death. The judges, who heard arguments earlier this year during the sentencing phase of Garcia’s trial, also had the option of life in prison.
Garcia was convicted in 2016 for two attacks — that occurred five years apart — on families connected to Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha. Prosecutors argued the killings were motivated by Garcia’s long-simmering rage over being fired in 2001 by Dr. William Hunter and another Creighton pathology doctor, Roger Brumback.
Some of the victims’ relatives testified Friday, including Jeff Sherman, whose mother was fatally stabbed alongside Hunter’s young son when she worked at the Hunter family’s home in 2008.
“I’m left with constant images from courtroom pictures of what happened to my mom,” Sherman said. “I can’t ever get those images out of my head.”
Investigators said Garcia fatally stabbed 11-year-old Thomas Hunter and 57-year-old Shirlee Sherman at the family’s home in an upscale Omaha neighborhood. Police collected a slew of evidence but struggled to find a suspect in the killings.
The case went cold in the following years. But that changed with the 2013 Mother’s Day deaths of Brumback and his wife, Mary, in their Omaha home. Police recognized similarities in the 2008 and 2013 killings, and Garcia was quickly eyed as a suspect. He was arrested two months later during a traffic stop in southern Illinois.
On Friday, Thomas Hunter’s mother, Dr. Claire Hunter, spoke of the agony of losing her young son so violently. She said the boy “was a joy in everybody’s life.”
“You can’t begin to enumerate what an event like has had on us, on the entire community,” she said after Garcia was sentenced.
Garcia’s parents and brother, who live in California, also attended the hearing. They were tearful as the verdict was read.
His brother, Fernando Garcia, said it was hard for his family to imagine his brother committing the crimes.
“We just want the victims’ families to know we do pray for them. We feel their pain,” he said. “We’re sorry those things took place. We’re not an evil family. We hope they find peace somehow.”
During the trial, prosecutors presented massive amounts of circumstantial evidence, including credit card and cellphone records placing Garcia in and around Omaha the day the Brumbacks were killed. One receipt showed Garcia eating a meal at a chicken wings restaurant within two hours of when police believe the Brumbacks were attacked.
Prosecutors also presented evidence that Garcia had sought to attack another Creighton medical school faculty member on May 10, 2013 — the same day the Brumbacks were killed. Prosecutors said Garcia pushed in a back door of that woman’s home but fled when the home’s alarm went off. Police believe he then found the Brumbacks’ address on his smartphone and attacked them.
Roger Brumback was shot in the doorway of his home and then stabbed. His wife was stabbed to death, much the same way Thomas Hunter and Shirlee Sherman had been stabbed, according to investigators.
Nebraska had not executed an inmate in more than 20 years until last month, when Carey Dean Moore died by lethal injection for the 1979 shooting deaths of two Omaha cab drivers.
However, the state’s mode of execution remains riddled with controversy and legal challenges in the face of difficulty in obtaining some of the drugs used to carry out lethal injection.
Under Nebraska law, Garcia’s sentence will be automatically appealed.
Friday’s sentencing was briefly interrupted when the lead judge in the case suffered a medical emergency and had to be carried from the courthouse on a stretcher. Gage County District Judge Rick Schreiner took over, explaining that Randall had undergone a medical procedure earlier in the week that caused him extreme back pain.
Patrick Schroeder was sentenced to death by the State of Nebraska for a prison murder. According to court documents Patrick Schroeder was already serving a life sentence for murder when he murdered his cell mate by strangulation. At his trial Patrick Schroeder would tell the judge if he was given another life sentence he would keep killing until he received the death penalty. Patrick Schroeder was sentenced to death.
The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday upheld the death sentence of a prison inmate who admitted that he killed his cellmate, then told a corrections officer afterward that he would “kill again” if he weren’t sentenced to death.
Patrick Schroeder was already serving a life sentence for the 2006 slaying of a Pawnee County farmer when he was charged, and convicted, of choking his cellmate to death at the Tecumseh State Prison in 2017.
“If given another life term, I will kill again and we will be right back in court doing this all over again,” Schroeder wrote in a statement shortly after cellmate Terry Berry was found unconscious in their cell. Berry was pronounced dead four days later at a Lincoln hospital.
On Friday, the Supreme Court considered the automatic appeal granted to all inmates who receive the death sentence.
Schroeder, now 42, served as his own attorney during his trial for the murder of Berry, a 22-year-old who was placed in a solitary confinement cell designed for one inmate over Schroeder’s objections.
Berry was within two weeks of his release on a conviction for second-degree forgery, but Schroeder opposed being paired with him, calling him unsanitary and “a loudmouth, a punk,” who would not quit talking. Schroeder told his jailers that “something was going to happen” unless Berry was moved out of his cell.
At his trial, Schroeder submitted no evidence in his defense, or in opposition to prosecutors’ arguments that he deserved the death penalty.
But attorneys appointed to present his automatic appeal objected to the imposition of the death penalty, saying that the three-judge panel that sentenced him to death ignored mitigating circumstances, such as Schroeder’s dysfunctional childhood and the undue pressure caused by pairing him with a cellmate he detested.
Sarah Newell of the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy also argued that the state had an ulterior motive for seeking the death penalty — “to avoid and detract” from possible civil liability for placing two incompatible inmates in a cell designed for one prisoner.
Prosecutors with the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office, meanwhile, argued that Schroeder was not under “unusual” pressure, but acted to kill Berry out of “displeasure,” and that his actions were “deliberate” and “pretty cold-blooded.”
The three-judge panel that sentenced Schroeder to death ruled that while he “expressly welcomed” the death penalty, “it is the law, and not his wishes, that compels this panel’s ultimate conclusion.”
The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Judge Jeffrey Funke, said that even though a corrections officer had a “gut feeling” that Berry was in danger by being placed with Schroeder and had even tried to get the assignment reversed, Schroeder made no formal request that Berry be removed and did not indicate that his cellmate was in “mortal danger.”
In comparing the case with other death penalty cases, the court found that it was similar to the case of David Dunster, who was serving a life sentence for two murders when he killed his cellmate and was sentenced to die. While the two cases are not “a color match,” they were sufficiently similar to justify the death sentence for Schroeder, Funke wrote.
atrick Schroeder, the man sent to death row in 2018 for killing his cellmate, died Monday, according to the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.
Laura Strimple, chief of staff for the state’s prisons system, said the 45-year-old died at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution, which is home to death row.
The cause of Schroeder’s death has not been determined, she said.
He is the fifth death row inmate to die while awaiting execution by the state.
Arthur Gales, 55, died last year of cancer. In 2015, Michael Ryan, 66, died of natural causes. David Dunster, 56, died of a health-related issue in 2011, and Roger Bjorklund, 39, of a heart attack in 2006.
“Mr. Schroeder had a hard and complicated life and we are saddened to hear of his death. His death like all deaths leaves behind people who loved him and who will miss him now that he is gone,” said Todd Lancaster of the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy.
Schroeder’s death leaves 11 men on Nebraska’s death row.
As is the case whenever an inmate dies in custody, a grand jury will review the death.
In 2018, Carey Dean Moore was the last inmate to be executed in Nebraska.
Moore, 60, was sentenced to death on two counts of first-degree murder in Douglas County in the 1979 deaths of Omaha cab drivers Reuel Van Ness Jr. and Maynard Helgeland. He had been on death row 38 years.
Schroeder had been serving a life sentence for killing 75-year-old Pawnee City farmer Kenny Albers when on April 15, 2017, he strangled Terry Berry in a cell at the Tecumseh prison.
Schroeder pleaded guilty to that crime and didn’t fight the death sentence.
When the three-judge panel pronounced his sentence, Judge Vicky Johnson said it was the law, and not the defendant’s wishes, that compelled the judges to choose a death sentence.
“Mr. Berry’s murder was disturbing in its own right and especially cruel,” particularly because he was two weeks from his release and Schroeder knew it, she said
Prosecutors alleged just one aggravator needed to make the case eligible for the death penalty — that Schroeder had previously been convicted of another murder — and Schroeder, who represented himself, chose not to fight the death penalty and made no argument or case for why the judges shouldn’t give it to him.
He admitted to strangling Berry, 22, because he wouldn’t stop talking.
At the time, Schroeder was in prison on a life sentence for beating Albers with a nightstick during a robbery in 2006 and dumping him, still alive, into an abandoned well. Albers died there.
Last year, the state agreed to pay $479,000 to Berry’s family to settle the lawsuit it filed over his killing.
Schroeder’s case brought questions and scrutiny from state senators and prisoner advocates alike who saw the killing as a failure of a prison system beset by one problem after another. Many asked how Berry had come to share a cell with Schroeder.
At Schroeder’s plea hearing, Assistant Nebraska Attorney General Doug Warner said Schroeder and Berry had shared cell No. 16 in a segregation unit from April 10 to April 15, the night a corrections officer doing normal checks came by and Schroeder said there was “something he needed to get out of his cell.
Berry was lying unconscious on the floor with a towel around his neck.
He was taken to a Lincoln hospital, where he died five days later.
Marco Torres was sentenced to death by the State of Nebraska for a double murder. According to court documents Marco Torres went to the first victims home where he would tie up and torture the victim before killing him. Marco Torres would then murder another man who lived in an upstairs room. Police believe the murders were committed to conceal a robbery. Marco Torres was sentenced to death.
Marco E. Torres Jr. sat silently, stared straight ahead and showed no sign of emotion as a three-judge panel announced he would pay for two murders with his own life.
“As to count one, murder in the first-degree, the sentence of death will be imposed,” Hall County District Judge James Livingston read from the decision he reached with Lancaster County District Judge Jodi L. Nelson and Douglas County District Judge Gary B. Randall.
Torres, 34, of Pasadena, Texas, was convicted on Aug. 28, 2009, of killing Timothy Donohue, 48, and Edward Hall, 60, in March 2007.
Livingston went on to sentence Torres to death on the second charge of first-degree murder, to 50 years each for robbery and three counts of using a gun to commit a felony, and to 20 months to five years in prison for unauthorized use of a debit card. Due to state statute, some of the sentences for the lesser felonies were ordered to be served after the sentences for the murder charges.
“I really don’t know how to react,” Hall County Attorney Mark Young said after the hearing. “We often talk about life-and-death decisions, and this one really was.”
Prior to being sentenced, Torres was given the chance to speak to the court, but he declined, with a simple “No, your honor.”
Livingston then outlined the case, going over the dates of the trial, the jury’s decision, Torres’ waiver of his right to have the jury determine the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and the appointment of the three-judge panel. He also noted that the sentencing determination hearing was on Nov. 13, 2009, and at that hearing the attorneys presented evidence and arguments.
At that hearing, Young said the aggravating circumstance were clear: Torres committed the murders to conceal a robbery; he committed two murders at the same time; Hall was bound and gagged and likely suffered prior to his death, making it heinous and cruel; and Torres has a criminal record.
Torres’ court-appointed attorney, Kirk Naylor, argued that his client was under the influence of methamphetamine at the time of the murders.
Naylor also questioned the constitutionality of the death penalty. At the time of the murders, the state’s manner of execution was electrocution. Since then, electrocution has been found unconstitutional, so Naylor has argued that his client should receive life in prison instead.
Lethal injection was approved by the governor as the state’s means of execution in May 2009.
The three-judge panel overruled Naylor’s objections as related to the death penalty.
Livingston then went over each of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances before giving the panel’s decision on each. The panel determined that the evidence showed Torres was previously convicted of kidnapping and robbery; Hall was bound and gagged before he was shot, which made him helpless and caused him to suffer mentally; the men were killed to conceal Torres’ identity following the robbery; and both men were killed at approximately the same time.
As for the mitigating circumstances, the judges found Torres wasn’t under mental or emotional distress at the time of the murders, he wasn’t an accomplice, and he wasn’t unable to appreciate the wrongness of his actions. His attorneys presented evidence of meth use and the effects it can have on the user’s mental state, but Torres told an officer conducting the presentence investigation that he wasn’t using meth in March 2007.
After the sentencing, Young said he was happy for the victims’ families because he knew several of them were hoping for the death penalty.
Many of those family members sat in the courtroom Friday afternoon, along with friends, law enforcement personnel, courthouse employees, defense attorneys and prosecutors. A quiet murmur went through the crowd when the sentence was announced.
Donohue’s niece, Jennifer Henningsen, said she was relieved by the decision but was sad as well because the crimes should never have occurred.
“It was hard to breathe, listening to what they were saying,” she said.
Henningsen believes Torres deserves the death penalty because he has shown no remorse or pity.
“Why should he get to see his family? We don’t get to see Tim,” she said.
She recalls her uncle as a happy man who was very giving. She met Hall a few times and said he was soft-spoken and kindhearted.
“They did a lot for each other,” Henningsen said.
The sentence does give the families closure, even though appeals and requests for post-conviction relief could last for years, she said.
“Ironically, my dad helped build the prison he will spend the rest of his life in. The walls are very secure,” Henningsen said, smiling at her family.
Young said this case is the first one he has handled that resulted in the death penalty. The last death-penalty case in Hall County was that of Charles Jess Palmer, who killed Eugene Zimmerman during a robbery in March 1979. Palmer, 68, died in August 2006 while on death row, where he had been since 1980.
Young said he knew such a case could come up when he first filed to be the county attorney and he feels it is his job to follow the rules set up by the Unicameral.
“If I didn’t think I could handle it, I wouldn’t have run for office,” he said.
Young thanked his staff for their help, particularly Sarah Carstensen and Gail Vermaas, who assisted with the trial. Young commended law enforcement and the trial jury for their work as well.
Torres is already an inmate at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution. In February 2008, he was sentenced, following a jury trial, to 90 to 140 years in prison for kidnapping, robbery and two counts of using a gun to commit a felony.
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