According to court documents William Flamer searching for more money to keep drinking would go to the home of his aunt and uncle: Byard Smith, 68, and Alberta Smith, 69. Flamer would stab the elderly couple to death before robbing their home
William Flamer would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
William Flamer would be executed by lethal injection on January 30 1996
William Flamer Case
During the night of February 6, 1979, Byard and Alberta Smith, an elderly couple, were murdered in their home in Harrington, Delaware. Autopsies showed that Byard Smith suffered 79 stab wounds and that his wife had been stabbed 66 times. Alberta Smith’s purse was opened and emptied. Various frozen foods, a television, a fan, Byard Smith’s wallet, and the couple’s automobile were missing from their home.
Flamer was a nephew of the victims and lived approximately 150 yards away from the Smith residence. An individual matching his description was seen near the Smiths’ car in the Felton area the following morning. A Felton store clerk identified Flamer as having been in the store that morning. When a description of the suspect was given to the Smiths’ daughter, she identified Flamer by name, and a warrant for his arrest was issued.
On February 7, 1979, the police went to Flamer’s residence and received his grandmother’s consent to search for him. They entered his bedroom and found a box of frozen food wrapped in the same way as the food which was still at the Smith house. Analysis later showed Byard Smith’s fingerprint on one of the food bags. The police found the Smiths’ television set and fan in a closet in Flamer’s residence. They seized a bayonet and scabbard. They saw on the bayonet what was later found to be human blood, and fibers which were microscopically similar to fibers from the clothing worn by Alberta Smith when she died. Flamer was not present at his residence.
Later that day, Delaware State Police officers arrested Flamer along with two codefendants. The State Police took him to Troop 5 in Bridgeville, Delaware. Spatterings of what appeared to be blood were visible on Flamer’s overcoat and under his fingernails, and fresh scratches were on his neck, chest, and torso. One of the codefendants, Andre Deputy, also had scratches on him and carried Byard Smith’s wallet and pocket watch.
According to court documents John Taylor would break into a home where he would sexually assault and murder eleven year old Charla King
John Taylor would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
John Taylor would be executed by firing squad on January 26 1996
John Taylor Photos
John Taylor Case
Child killer John Albert Taylor, strapped to a black metal chair with a white target over his heart, became the nation’s first convict in 19 years to die before a firing squad early Friday.
Taylor, 36, was executed at approximately 12:04 a.m. MST at Utah State Prison with a four-bullet volley fired by anonymous marksmen using .30-.30 caliber deer rifles – the type used to execute Gary Gilmore at the same prison in 1977.”The execution was carried out without any incident of any kind,” said Attorney General Jan Graham.
Utah is alone among the states in offering the condemned a choice of lethal injection or firing squad.
Taylor said he chose the firing squad because it would be costly and embarrassing to the state and because he feared “flipping around like a fish out of water” if given an injection. He also hoped the method would more dramatically underscore his claim that his death would be state-sanctioned murder.
Wearing a dark blue jumpsuit, he was strapped into a steel chair 23 feet from five executioners, a white cloth target pinned over his heart and a pile of sandbags behind him. A black hood was placed over his head.
The executioners – all law enforcement volunteers paid $300 each – fired through rectangular openings. One gun is traditionally loaded with a blank round; none of the shooters knows which.
Prison spokesman Ray Wahl said Taylor was pronounced dead at 12:07 a.m.
At first, Taylor had waited calmly in the deathwatch cell Thursday, downing antacid when he complained his stomach was “doing flip-flops.” He ate pizza with an uncle, wrote up his last will and testament and discussed the afterlife with the Catholic priest, Reverend Reyes Rodriquez, who baptized him last week.
Just over an hour before he was executed, Taylor, after singing hymns with two attorneys and Rodriquez, bowed his head and wept as the priest read scriptures. Rodriquez accompanied Taylor to the death chamber
Like Gilmore, Taylor could have demanded to halt the execution right up until the moment he was strapped into the chair. In fact, a federal magistrate was standing by Thursday night to issue a stay if needed.
But Beverly DeVoy, a freelance journalist who was one of Taylor’s three invited witnesses and had corresponded with him for years, said it was the inmate’s health problems – an enlarged heart, bleeding ulcers and swollen legs and feet – that bound him to his death wish.
With his deteriorating health, he was afraid would die alone in his cell, said DeVoy, and the only alternative was execution. He made her promise to keep his health a secret until he was dead.
Taylor, diagnosed at 17 as “a remorseless pedophile,” was convicted of raping 11-year-old Charla Nicole King and strangling the girl with a telephone cord in 1989.
“They say executing him is so barbaric,” said the victim’s mother, Sherron King. “Tell me what’s barbaric. My daughter was alive (while being raped and choked). He won’t even hear the sound of the bullets.”
Taylor had insisted he was wrongly convicted. But he abruptly dropped all appeals and fired his lawyer in December, determined to die now rather than spend years confined to a death-row cell for 23 hours a day
Gov. Mike Leavitt said Thursday the state had an obligation to make the execution dignified and orderly.
“There is nothing but sadness in this event,” Leavitt said. “This is the highest penalty that society can exact and the most difficult task government could be delegated.”
In Delaware, a killer went to the gallows early Thursday in the nation’s third hanging since 1965. Billy Bailey, 49, was executed for the shotgun slayings of an elderly couple at their farmhouse in 1979.
Gilmore was the first person put to death in the United States after the Supreme Court lifted its ban on capital punishment in 1976. His execution ended a 10-year moratorium on the death penalty.
It was during a visit to his sister in Washington Terrace that Taylor entered a neighbor’s apartment and attacked Charla Nicole King. The girl’s nude body, underpants stuffed in her mouth, was found on a bed by her mother.
Taylor’s own sister, Laura Galli, who testified at his sentencing that he had raped her three times when she was 12, tipped off police that he may have murdered the child
Taylor’s fingerprints were found on the bedroom telephone. He claimed he had merely burglarized the apartment, taking $3 from under the phone.
His strategy of requesting a non-jury trial backfired when Judge David Roth found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
Over his final dinner of pizza and Coke, Taylor told his uncle, Gordon Lee, that he was comfortable with his decision to die, but “he said he had butterflies and he didn’t know why.
“I said I had butterflies and Johnny said, `It must be the pizza,”‘ Lee said.
Lee said he tried to talk Taylor into appealing to get a stay of the execution, but, “It’s like he told me, he couldn’t live my life for me and I couldn’t live his.”
According to court documents Billy Bailey would escape from a work release program and would break into the home of Gilbert Lambertson, aged 80, and his wife, Clara Lambertson, aged 73. The elderly couple would be fatally shot before he robbed the home
Billy Bailey would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Billy Bailey would be executed by hanging on January 25 1996
Billy Bailey Photos
Billy Bailey Case
Convicted murderer Billy Bailey was hanged today, dropping silently from an outdoor gallows at the state penitentiary here in the most violent legal execution Delaware has performed in half a century.
Bailey, who shotgunned an elderly farm couple to death without provocation in 1979, was already standing on the 15-foot wooden platform when witnesses entered the compound in a distant corner of the Delaware Correctional Center at midnight. The noose swung beside him in a bitterly cold wind.
Bailey, 49, faced forward without expression, flanked by guards wearing black jumpsuits and black hoods held in place by baseball caps. One faced forward holding Bailey’s left arm. The other kept his back to witnesses and held the prisoner’s shoulder.
Warden Robert Snyder, standing farther to the right, at first did not hear Bailey’s reply when the condemned man was asked if he had any last words.
“Pardon?” Snyder said.
“No, sir,” Bailey repeated.
The guards then led the squat, 200-pound man onto the trapdoor, placed a strap around his ankles and pulled a black hood over his head and upper chest. The noose was fastened over the hood and tightened beneath Bailey’s chin.
Several times, Snyder felt at the hood to be certain that the top of the hangman’s knot lay beneath Bailey’s left ear, the placement old Army regulations specify to assure the straightening rope has the best chance of bringing quick death by severing the spinal cord. Finally, the warden stepped back and pulled a gray wooden lever with both hands.
The trapdoor opened with a thump. Five feet of manila rope followed Bailey through the hole and snapped taut 10 feet above the sodden ground.
Bailey’s body spun counterclockwise six times, then rotated once in the opposite direction. In the perhaps 20 seconds before Snyder released a canvas tarp to conceal the body, witnesses said, they found themselves thinking of a rag doll. One sleeve of Bailey’s denim prison jacket flapped in the bitter wind. His dangling feet wore new white tennis shoes.
Eleven minutes later, a voice behind the tarp announced that the official time of death was 12:15 a.m. A Correction Department spokeswoman later declared the execution had occurred “without complication.” An independent trauma surgeon said 11 minutes was not an unusual amount of time to wait for the pulse to stop after the spinal cord has been cut.
“The heart beats on its own,” said the surgeon, Willie C. Blair, of Greenbelt, Md. “That’s why we can transplant them.”
It was the first hanging in Delaware since 1946 and only the third in the United States since 1965. The two others took place in Washington state, where Delaware officials traveled to study a means of execution that in recent decades has given way to more sanitized methods.
After going decades without an execution, Delaware since 1992 has put to death five men by injection, which became the state’s official method in 1986. But Bailey chose to be killed according to his original 1980 sentence.
The 19th of 23 children, Bailey grew up amid stark poverty and chronic physical abuse, state records show. As a young man, he was known to police as a brawler and a thief. On May 21, 1979, after he learned that under a habitual offender statute, he faced life in prison for a check forgery conviction, he walked away from a work-release center. Weeping, he held up a liquor store, then he murdered Gilbert Lambertson, 80, and Lambertson’s wife, Clara, 73, in their farmhouse barely 10 miles from the gallows.
Bailey’s execution was seen by the couple’s sons, Saxton and Delbert Lambertson, who afterward shook hands with prosecutor Paul Wallace. A dozen other relatives and family friends waited outside, separated from death penalty opponents by two snow fences.
“When they know for a fact that someone did something, it shouldn’t take 16 years to execute him,” said Mary Ann Lambertson, who heard the shots and found the bodies of her in-laws slumped on the chairs where Bailey had arranged them. She said that half her father-in-law’s face was blasted away and that Clara Lambertson was shot through the hand she would bring to her breast when startled.
“One of ’em watched the other one get blown away,” said Dennis Lambertson, the grandson who now lives in the big yellow farmhouse where the murders occurred. “They were kind of old, feeble people. My grandfather kind of wobbled when he walked.”
Bailey had told his attorney earlier that he hoped his death would bring the family peace. The lawyer, Edmund D. Lyons, declared the execution “medieval.”
“The most chilling thing was the two fellows up on the platform with Bill with the hoods on their heads,” Lyons said.
“If we are proud of what we’ve done today, ask yourself why we do it in the middle of the night. If we are proud of what we’ve done today, ask yourself why we hood those who are part of the execution.”
Prison officials clearly were reluctant about the hanging, worrying openly about the mechanics of a process that can end in strangulation or decapitation. Officers spent hours practicing on gallows first refurbished for Bailey in 1986. Today a non-skid safety strip was affixed to each of the 23 steps.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Thomas R. Carper (D) acknowledged that the method was “awkward.” It divided even those who braved biting winds to show their support for capital punishment.
“I don’t think hanging is a good idea,” said Kevin Gant, a Dover truck driver. “It’s part of our history.”
Beside him, retired police officer Roger Hollopeter wanted more. “I actually think that they should bring back the whipping post,” he said. In fact, Delaware Senate Majority Leader Thomas Sharp (D) has repeatedly introduced legislation that would return lashing, outlawed in 1972, for some drug offenses.
“No fewer than five and no more than 40 lashes, well laid on” was the penalty prescribed in his first bill, which a colleague said would validate outsiders’ impression of Delaware as “a little quaint and a little strange.
According to court documents Richard Townes would rob a store and in the process shoot and kill the clerk Virginia Goebel
Richard Townes would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Richard Townes would be executed by lethal injection on January 23 1996
Richard Townes Photos
Richard Townes Case
A female employee was working the night shift alone at a convenience store. She was observed working in the store by two policemen after midnight. A woman who often patronized the store came in about 2:00 a.m. and observed that the employee seemed to be frightened. The customer saw a man in the back of the store, but upon being told by the clerk that there was no problem, she bought a soft drink and left. Several hours later a policeman went inside the store where he found the employee’s body. She had been shot in the head and the paper money was missing from the cash drawer. Only one other sale had occurred after the sale of the soft drink. Four weeks later the customer who had bought that soft drink came forward to the police and was shown a photoarray of six men. She picked two “possibles”, including the defendant. At a live lineup she identified the defendant as the man who had been in the store before the murder. The defendant was also identified as the person who had bought an automatic .45 caliber handgun a few days before the murder.
The defendant worked on a construction job near the convenience store. A few days after the murder another worker observed a gun in the defendant’s pocket and asked to see it. He purchased the gun along with ammunition, and an unusual cleaning rod. The superintendent of the construction work found a religious tract, a law book and an essay in defendant’s handwriting concerning murder in his office. The worker who had purchased the gun from the defendant decided to turn it over to the police. However, as he was telephoning an investigator from a public telephone, the defendant appeared and blocked his car. Defendant took the weapon and gave the man another gun.
The next day the defendant was arrested and charged with the offenses of which he was later convicted. The trunk of his car was searched and an unusual cleaning rod for a .45 caliber weapon was found. The defendant was placed in a jail block along with an acquaintance to whom he admitted that he had committed the murder. A firearms expert testified that the casing from the bullet which had killed the woman had been fired from the same gun as had the casings which the construction worker had saved from some shooting he had done with the .45 caliber gun he had bought from the defendant.
According to court documents Walter Correll and two accomplices would kidnap Charles W. Bousman who was brought to a remote location and murdered
Walter Correll would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Walter Correll would be executed by lethal injection on January 4 1996
Walter Correll Photos
Walter Correll Case
A man who stopped a passing motorist, stole his car and killed him with a hunting knife was executed by injection tonight, becoming the fourth condemned murderer put to death in Virginia in the last three months.
Walter Milton Correll Jr., 34, was pronounced dead at 9:13 p.m., 45 minutes after Gov. George Allen (R) refused to grant him clemency and a day after the U.S. Supreme Court turned down his final appeal.
Correll made no final statement and asked his family not to attend, but he telephoned his father, mother and sister at their home in the Roanoke area a half-hour before his death to bid them farewell. A Baptist who converted to Catholicism last summer, Correll was visited Saturday by Bishop Walter F. Sullivan and spent most of his last day with five clergy members.
The Rev. James C. Griffin, Catholic chaplain to death row inmates, said Correll changed during his nine years on death row and, though resigned and in control tonight, went to his death regretting the path he chose in life.
“He seemed remorseful for being in this situation and his lifestyle, meeting the wrong people,” Griffin said. “He was very remorseful that his lifestyle led to his dying tonight.”
Correll’s attorneys had argued that his confession was unconstitutional and that the crime was committed by either of two accomplices. The attorneys claimed that those accomplices took advantage of his borderline-retarded IQ and placed the blame on him to get lighter sentences. The high court and Allen dismissed those claims, saying the evidence pointed to Correll.
His execution at Greensville Correctional Center was the first of the year in the United States but just the latest in an accelerating series in Virginia. The five executions in 1995 tied the state’s modern record for a year, and if the current pace continues, the 1996 total could be more than twice that
The increased momentum stems in part from new laws intended to reduce death row appeals, part of a national trend that led to a modern record of 56 executions across the country last year. Advocates of such changes have argued that endless litigation has diluted the effectiveness of capital punishment, while critics complain that a rush to judgment could result in the execution of innocent people.
Correll’s conviction stemmed from a night in 1985 when he and two other men decided to steal a car. While his accomplices hid, Correll stood on a street in Roanoke and stopped a car driven by Charles W. Bousman Jr., 24, then signaled for the others to emerge from hiding.
After choking Bousman, stealing his wallet and dumping him into the trunk, Correll and the others drove south to a wooded area in Franklin County and hauled the unconscious victim out of the car. According to court records, Correll took a hunting knife he found in the car and threw it into Bousman’s chest twice, and another man used it to slit Bousman’s throat.
Correll, then a house painter, ultimately confessed during a police interrogation, and one of his compatriots testified against him at trial, as did two other acquaintances who said he told them of his involvement. Correll later tried to retract the confession and claimed that it was unconstitutional because he had asked for a lawyer and had not been granted one.
Correll was the 30th man executed in Virginia since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976.
