BONNE TERRE, Missouri — A Missouri man convicted of breaking into a woman’s home and repeatedly stabbing her was executed Tuesday despite objections from the victim’s family and the prosecutor, who wanted the death sentence commuted to life in prison.
Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted of the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle, who was stabbed during a burglary at her suburban St. Louis home.
Williams was put to death despite questions raised by his attorneys about the jury selection at his trial and the handling of evidence in the case. His request for clemency focused on the way Gayle’s family wanted Williams’ sentence commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“The family defines closure as allowing Marcellus to live,” the petition reads. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”
As Williams awaited execution, he appeared to be talking to a spiritual advisor sitting next to him. Williams wiggled his feet under a white sheet pulled up to his neck and moved his head slightly as his spiritual advisor continued to speak. Williams’ chest then rose and fell about a half dozen times and he showed no further movement.
Williams’ son and two attorneys watched from another room. No one from the victim’s family was present.
The Department of Corrections released a short statement Williams had written in advance, saying, “Praise be to Allah in every situation!!!”
Missouri’s Republican Governor Mike Parson said he hoped the execution would bring permanent closure to a case that “has languished for decades and has victimized Ms. Gayle’s family over and over again.”
“No juror or judge ever found Williams’ claim of innocence credible,” Parson said in a statement.
The NAACP was among the organizations urging Parson to call off the execution.
“Tonight, Missouri lynched another innocent black man,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement.
It was the third time Williams faced execution. He won stays in 2015 and 2017, but his latest attempts were futile. Parson and the state Supreme Court rejected his appeals in quick succession on Monday, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene just hours before he was put to death.
Last month, Gayle’s family members gave their blessing to an agreement between the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office and Williams’ attorneys to commute the sentence to life in prison. But acting on an appeal from the office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the state Supreme Court overturned the agreement.
Williams was among death row inmates in five states scheduled to be sentenced to death in the course of a week — an unusually high number that defies a years-long decline in the use of and support for the death penalty in the U.S. The first was executed Friday in South Carolina. Texas was also scheduled to execute an inmate Tuesday night.
Gayle, 42, was a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Prosecutors at Williams’ trial said he broke into her home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard the shower running and found a large butcher knife. Gayle was stabbed 43 times when she came downstairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.
According to authorities, Williams stole a jacket to cover up the blood on his shirt. His girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. She said she later saw the bag and the laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later.
Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was incarcerated on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the killing and provided details about the murder.
Williams’ attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole had both been convicted of crimes and were seeking a $10,000 reward. They said fingerprints, a bloody shoe print, hair and other evidence at the crime scene did not match Williams’.
A forensic examiner testified that the killer was wearing gloves.
Questions about the DNA evidence also led St. Louis District Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams’ guilt. But just days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new tests showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the DA’s office who had handled the knife without gloves after the original forensic lab tests.
Without DNA evidence to point to an alternative suspect, attorneys for the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with the prosecution: Williams would enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life without parole. A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt, but is treated as such for sentencing purposes.
Judge Bruce Hilton signed off, as did Gayle’s family. But Bailey appealed, and the state Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to proceed with an evidentiary hearing, which took place last month.
Hilton ruled Sept. 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments had all been previously rejected. That decision was upheld Monday by the state Supreme Court.
Attorneys for Williams, who was black, also challenged the fairness of his trial, particularly the fact that only one of the 12 jurors was black. Tricia Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project said the prosecutor in the case, Keith Larner, removed six of the seven black potential jurors.
Larner testified at the August hearing that he rejected a potential black juror, in part because he looked too much like Williams. Williams’ attorneys said the ruling showed undue racial bias.
Larner said the jury selection process had been fair.
Williams was the third inmate in Missouri to be put to death this year and the 100th since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1989.
