Dennis Eaton was executed by the State of Virginia for four murders
According to court documents Dennis Eaton would murder Walter Custer Jr., 26, and Ripley Marston Sr., 68. He would then take off with his girlfriend. When State Trooper Jerry Hines attempted to pull him over he would be shot twice. Eaton would then take off again and would eventually crash his car where he would fatally shoot his girlfriend Judy McDonald, 24
Dennis Eaton would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Dennis Eaton would be executed by lethal injection on June 18 1998
Dennis Eaton Photos
Dennis Eaton Case
Dennis Wayne Eaton was executed tonight despite a plea for mercy from the sister of a state police trooper killed in a 1989 rampage in which Eaton also killed three other people.
Eaton, 41, was pronounced dead of an injection at 9:09 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center here. A corrections official said his last words were: “I’d like to say that I’m sorry. I’d like to thank my brothers and sisters at State Church. I love you all so much. Mom, I love you.”
Hours earlier, Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R) had rejected a final clemency petition from Eaton’s attorneys, who said at least one juror acknowledged voting mistakenly for the death sentence.
“Dennis Wayne Eaton murdered Virginia State Trooper Jerry Hines on February 20, 1989. . . . There is no question as to Eaton’s guilt,” Gilmore said. “I decline to intervene.”
Eaton’s attorneys said the Fauquier County jury that sentenced Eaton to death in January 1990 was told wrongly that he posed a future danger to society, when in fact he faced life in prison without parole. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that such a warning is unconstitutional if defense attorneys can’t rebut it, but the judges decided not to apply the standard retroactively. The court rejected Eaton’s appeal this week on a 7 to 2 vote.
Hines’s nighttime slaying came during a traffic stop on Feb. 21, 1989, during an eight-hour rampage that started when Eaton killed a Shenandoah County neighbor, Ripley Marston Sr., 68, and Walter Custer Jr., 26, who was a friend of Eaton’s girlfriend.
After killing Hines, Eaton, who was accompanied by his girlfriend, Judy Ann McDonald, 24, led police on a high-speed chase along Interstate 81 that ended when he crashed into a utility pole. Witnesses said Eaton then killed McDonald and wounded himself with a gunshot to the right eye
Hines’s funeral in Lexington, Va., was attended by thousands of fellow officers and then-Gov. Gerald L. Baliles (D).
This year, Hines’s sister, Maria, of Louisville, mounted a campaign to spare her brother’s killer, a stance that set her against his widow and three sons.
“He’s not a monster. . . . He’s a living example of redemption,” Maria Hines, 65, a former nun and retired psychotherapist, said at a Richmond memorial for slain officers this week. Hines said she was inspired to “forgiveness and reconciliation” after seeing the 1996 movie “Dead Man Walking,” the story of a nun assigned to comfort a death row inmate.
“I began to cry and then to sob and then sob uncontrollably through the entire execution scene,” said Hines, who met with Eaton on Wednesday and participated in a candlelight vigil outside the prison tonight
After Eaton was pronounced dead, Hines called the execution an “act of retribution and revenge. . . . Depite the heinous acts that Dennis committed in 1989, the Eaton family can be proud of the person Dennis Eaton became while in prison, the same person who was executed tonight.”
Justin Hines, 26, of Charleston, S.C., one of the trooper’s three sons, said Maria Hines “has come to know and love Dennis Eaton more than she ever did her brother or us. We don’t consider her part of our family.”
Eaton, a former orchard worker with an IQ of about 80, confessed to shooting Custer and Marston. Custer’s family has said that Eaton shot Custer because of a love triangle involving Custer, Eaton and McDonald.
He and McDonald fled to Rockbridge County in Marston’s car, and were stopped on suspicion of drunken driving. Hines’s shooting led to a chase that ended when Eaton’s car struck a light pole. Salem, Va., police then saw Eaton shoot McDonald and then himself.