Day: November 20, 2017

South Carolina Schedules First Execution in more than Six Years

November 20,  2017

South Carolina has scheduled its first execution in more than six years.

The State Department of Corrections said Friday it had received an order from the South Carolina Supreme Court setting a December 1 execution date for 52-year-old Bobby Wayne Stone.

Stone has been on death row for 20 years in connection with the 1996 shooting death of a sheriff’s sergeant.

Who are the women on death row in Arizona?

November  20, 2017

There are currently three women on death row in Arizona, and one woman who was executed.

Sammantha Allen was sentenced to death August in the killing of her 10-year-old cousin, Ame Deal. Her husband, John Allen, was also sentenced to death on Thursday, making Sammantha and John the first couple in the state to be sent to death row, according to the Arizona Department of Corrections.

Allen is the fourth woman to be sentenced to death in Arizona. She joins Wendi Andriano and Shawna Forde, who are currently on death row. The Arizona State Prison Complex – Perryville is where female death row inmates are housed.

Eva Dugan

Crime: January 1927

Executed: February 21, 1930

Dugan was found guilty of killing Arthur Mathis, a rancher near Tucson.

Dugan grew up a frontierswoman, floating from town to town for work. She met Mathis in Tucson, and he hired her immediately to work as his housekeeper. The Prescott Courier from May 1979 implies the relationship was a kind of arrangement.

A young man named Jack moved in with Mathis and Dugan, then Mathis was never seen again. Dugan and Jack skipped town.

Dugan and Jack sold Mathis’ car in Amarillo, Texas, the Pima County Sheriff discovered. Dugan was tracked to New York and arrested for grand larceny.

Months later, a man bought some land near the Mathis ranch. He was driving stakes for a tent when he discovered a shallow grave. The red-headed remains were identified as Arthur Mathis.

Dugan was sentenced to death.

“If I was a flapper with pretty legs, I never would have been convicted and given the death penalty,” she reportedly said.

Dugan was hanged February 21, 1930. When the gallows trap sprang, her body fell and she was decapitated.

The scene caused five people to faint.

Dugan’s gruesome death lead to capital punishment reform in Arizona. A year after the horrific incident, Arizona stopped executions by hanging and began using the gas chamber.

Wendi Andriano

Crime: October 8, 2000

Andriano was found guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of her husband. A jury found Adriano had killed her husband, Joe Andriano, by beating him with a barstool and slitting his throat.

Joe Andriano had been diagnosed with a terminal illness when Wendi Andriano was pregnant with their second child.

The night of Oct. 7, 2000, Wendi called 911 in the early-morning hours to get Joe medical help. She called a coworker in her apartment complex to help watch the kids. The coworker said he saw Joe lying on the floor in the living room. He was in the fetal position, vomiting and weak.

When paramedics arrived, Wendi sent them away, saying Joe was dying of cancer and had a do-not-resuscitate order. Paramedics left.

Andriano called 911 again at 3:39 a.m. Paramedics found Andriano in a bloody shirt, and Joe dead on the floor. There was a bloody barstool nearby. Joe had fatal head injuries and a stab wound to his neck.

The medical examiner determined Joe had been hit on the head at least 23 times. He also had sodium azide, a pesticide, in his system.

Andriano claimed she had tried to help Joe take his own life, and when the assisted suicide attempt failed, the two fought. Andriano said she hit Joe with a barstool in self defense.

Andriano was sentenced to death. She is appealing. She filed a federal habeas corpus appeal in April 2016.

Shawna Forde

Crime: May 30, 2009

Forde was found guilty in the first-degree murders of Raul and Brisenia Flores.

Forde, a rogue Minutemen leader on the Arizona border, burst into the Flores home in Arivaca, Arizona, in the middle of the night along with Jason Eugene Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola.

Dressed in camouflage, Forde, Bush and Gaxiola claimed to be agents looking for fugitives. They took jewelry, then shot Raul Flores, his daughter, 9-year-old Brisenia, and his wife, Gina Gonzales.

Gonzales survived the attack by pretending to be dead. Gonzales was calling 911 when the intruders came back. Gonzales fired a shotgun at them, wounding Bush.

Evidence showed Forde planned the attack, though Bush pulled the trigger. Both Forde and Bush were sentenced to death.

Sammantha Allen

Crime: July 12, 2011

Allen was found guilty in the killing of 10-year-old Ame Deal.

Sammantha and John Allen lived in a home near Broadway Road at 35th Avenue with Ame Deal and many others.

Ame faced severe abuse in the home, court documents said.

Deal died after she was locked in a plastic box that was left outside overnight in the Arizona summer. Deal was being punished for taking a popsicle. She died of suffocation and heat, according to court documents.

Sammantha Allen was sentenced to death. John Allen was later also sentenced to death in November.

Charles Manson, leader of murderous ’60s cult, dead at 83

November 20,2017

Charles Manson, the wild-eyed 1960s cult leader whose followers committed heinous murders that terrorized Los Angeles and shocked the nation, died Sunday of natural causes, according to the California Department of Corrections. He was 83.

Manson served nine life terms in California prisons and was denied parole 12 times. His notoriety, boosted by popular books and films, made him a cult figure to those fascinated by his dark apocalyptic visions.
“He was the dictatorial ruler of the (Manson) family, the king, the Maharaja. And the members of the family were slavishly obedient to him,” former prosecutor Victor Bugliosi told CNN in 2015.
To the point they would kill for him.
The brutal killings began on August 9, 1969, at the home of actress Sharon Tate and her husband, famed movie director Roman Polanski. He was out of the country at the time. The first set of victims were Tate, who was eight months’ pregnant; a celebrity hairstylist named Jay Sebring; coffee fortune heiress Abigail Folger; writer Wojciech Frykowski; and Steven Parent, a friend of the family’s caretaker.
The next evening, another set of murders took place. Supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were killed at their home.
Although Manson ordered the killings, he didn’t participate.
Over the course of two nights, the killers took the lives of seven people, inflicting 169 stab wounds and seven .22-caliber gunshot wounds. Both crime scenes revealed horrifying details. And a few details linked the two crime scenes.
The word pig was written in victim blood on the walls of one home and the front door of another. There was also another phrase apparently scrawled in blood: Helter Skelter (it was misspelled Healter). The reason for the disturbing writings, the prosecutor argued, was because Manson wanted to start a race war and had hoped the Black Panthers would be blamed for the killings.
On June 16, 1970, Manson and three of his followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — went on trial in Los Angeles.
All of those details came tumbling out in the trial that both mesmerized and horrified the nation. During the trial, Manson and his followers created a circus-like atmosphere in the court with singing, giggling, angry outbursts and even carving X’s in their foreheads.
The charges came after a major break in the case when Atkins, who was already in jail on another charge, bragged to a fellow inmate about the Tate murders. She said they did it “because we wanted to do a crime that would shock the world. …”
Manson was originally sentenced to death but the death penalty was briefly abolished in the state and his concurrent sentences were commuted to life in prison.
He also was convicted in the connection with the killings of Gary Hinman, a musician, and stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea in 1969.