Ronald Yeatts was executed by the State of Virginia for the murder of Ruby Dodson
According to court documents Ronald Yeatts and an accomplice would break into the home of seventy year old Ruby Dodson. The elderly woman would be stabbed to death before her house was robbed
Ronald Yeatts would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Ronald Yeatts would be executed by lethal injection on April 29 1999
Ronald Yeatts Photos
Ronald Yeatts Case
Ronald Dale Yeatts, who robbed and killed an elderly widow in Southside Virginia, was executed by injection tonight after Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R) denied clemency and the Supreme Court turned down a final appeal and stay request.
Yeatts, 38, of Blairs in rural Pittsylvania County, was pronounced dead at the Greensville Correctional Center at 9:03 p.m.
He made no final statement.
The execution marked the first time since 1945 that Virginia has executed two inmates on consecutive days, although the state has executed two or more inmates on the same day several times.
On Wednesday night, Eric Payne was put to death for killing two women during a 1997 rampage of hammer beatings in the Richmond area.
Yeatts’s execution was the sixth in Virginia since March 9 and the eighth this year.
Yeatts was sentenced for the murder of Ruby Meeks Dodson, 70, who was stabbed to death Sept. 23, 1989
He and Charles Michael Vernon, an accomplice who named him as the killer, went to Dodson’s remote farmhouse in Ringgold looking for drug money, according to court records.
Vernon, a self-described cocaine addict, and Yeatts, who had a record of burglaries, pretended to have car trouble and asked for water. Once inside, they ransacked Dodson’s home and took $1,400 from her. A neighbor found her dead on her kitchen floor.
Vernon is serving two life sentences at Greensville for his role in the crime. Because he was sentenced before the Virginia legislature abolished parole for violent offenders, he will be eligible for parole in 2002.
Yeatts maintained his innocence, but his attorney, Gerald T. Zerkin of Richmond, said in the clemency plea to Gilmore that Yeatts was the killer.
Nonetheless, Zerkin wrote, the jury in Yeatts’s 1990 trial should have been told that Yeatts would not be eligible for parole for 30 years if they gave him a life sentence. The petition asked Gilmore to commute the sentence to life in prison
Gilmore, a former attorney general and commonwealth’s attorney, noted that Yeatts’s conviction and sentence were upheld on multiple appeals. The governor has not granted a clemency petition in a death penalty case since he took office in January 1998.
Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 against stopping the execution, with Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg voting in the minority.