Missouri will carry out its second execution of the year Tuesday evening, after Gov. Mike Parson rejected a death row inmate’s request for clemency, about which the condemned man had also expressed frustration.
“I don’t feel like they represent me at all,” David Hosier, 69, said of his legal team in a recent phone call from the state prison in Bonne Terre.
Hosier, who is about to die by lethal injection, has long maintained his innocence in the 2009 slayings of a Jefferson City couple, Angela and Rodney Gilpin.
A 19-page clemency petition cites childhood trauma from the murder of his own father as a mitigating factor in Hosier’s case. Hosier’s father, Glen Hosier, was an Indiana state trooper who was killed in the line of duty when Hosier was 16. But Hosier said he disagreed with the angle his lawyers took in arguing for leniency.
“Fifty-three years ago my father was murdered,” he said. “I told them I didn’t want any of that to be used. It has nothing to do with this case.”
Instead, Hosier wanted his attorneys to focus on the lack of DNA evidence at the crime scene.
His legal team did not respond to requests for comment.
Hosier has admitted that before the murder he had an affair with Gilpin, who was married during their romantic relationship.
“I had seen a married woman who was separated from her husband,” Hosier said, “and she went back with her husband.”
Gilpin ended the relationship with Hosier and reconciled with her husband, court documents show. Prosecutors say Hosier then broke into their apartment and killed her and her husband.
Prosecutors portrayed Hosier as a scorned ex-lover bent on revenge. Gilpin’s bag contained an application for a protective order against Hosier, as well as a document stating she feared Hosier would shoot her and her husband.
After the bodies were discovered, Hozier was arrested in Oklahoma, where police recovered fifteen firearms, numerous rounds of ammunition, a bulletproof vest and a knife from his car. According to court documents, all the weapons were loaded except for a World War II machine gun, which prosecutors said was the murder weapon.
There was also an incriminating note on the front seat of Hosier’s car that read: “If you go with someone, don’t lie to them. …Be honest with them if something is wrong. If you don’t, this could happen to you. People don’t like to befriend them, and after so much effort they can go off the deep end.”
Hosier has claimed his innocence. He has said that he did not run away to Oklahoma, but that he liked to take long drives to clear his head and often took his guns with him because he hunted, and also out of caution because, he said, his landlord would go into his house. apartment when he was not home.
‘I know two people died. I know I was blamed for it,” he said. “I know they have no witnesses who can place me in this crime. No one saw anything that happened. So there are no witnesses who say, ‘He did it.’ They have no fingerprints that could tie me to this crime. They have no DNA linking me to this crime.”
Hosier rejected a plea deal that would take the death penalty off the table if he admitted guilt. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 2019.
He said his lawyers missed a filing date for his appeal and that no further appeals in his case are pending.
While Reps. Cori Bush and Emmanuel Cleaver, both D-Mo., had urged Parson, a Republican, to halt the execution, Parson declined the request Monday.
“Ms. Angela Gilpin’s life was stolen by David Hosier because he could not accept it when she ended their romantic involvement. He shows no remorse for his senseless violence,” Parson said in a statement. “For these heinous acts, Hosier deserved maximum penalty under the law.”
In a series of interviews from his prison, the first conducted shortly after he was given an execution date, Hosier went through a range of emotions, from outrage to tears. During an interview last week, he was out of breath and short of breath. Last month he had been transferred from prison to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which causes a very irregular heartbeat.
‘I’ll keep that up until the day they stick a needle in my arm and kill me. “I will still be innocent even if I am dead,” he said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
