Brian Steckel was executed by the State of Delaware for the murder of Sandra Long
According to court documents Brian Steckel met Sandra Long a week before the murder. He would go into her home and would sexually assault the woman before murdering her. After he was arrested Brian Steckel would confess to several other murders however it was later proven he could not have committed them
Brian Steckel would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Brian Steckel would be executed by lethal injection on November 4 2005
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When Was Brian Steckel Executed
Brian Steckel was executed on November 4 2005
Brian Steckel Case
Police and prosecutors say Brian “Red” Steckel was a serial killer who just never got the chance to kill again. Steckel apparently saw himself the same way. Before he raped Sandra Lee Long, then set fire to her apartment in 1994, he boasted to strangers that he’d killed people in other states and that his tattoos came from prison.
After his arrest, he confessed to several murders he had nothing to do with, even offering what appeared to be a signature detail — bite marks on the buttocks. Authorities, however, were never able to connect Steckel to any other killings and eliminated him as the killer in many of the cases. Steckel is set to die Friday by lethal injection for Long’s murder.
Former New Castle County detective John Downs, who investigated the case, said he believes Steckel “thought about committing a murder for a long time. We got him relatively early in his career. This was something he’d worked at.” In interviews with Steckel, Downs, who is now a prosecutor, said he detected “a sense of excitement that he had done what he dreamed about.” Even attorney Joseph Gabay, who defended Steckel at trial, said Steckel “had all the triggers, all the mechanisms” early in his life that turn a person violent. Gabay said Steckel seemed to like the attention his crimes brought, and his horrendous behavior was a twisted way of exercising control. “He liked people to be afraid of him.”
If Steckel had not been caught, Gabay believes he would have killed again. Hours after he tortured Long and set fire to her unit in the Driftwood Club apartments in Prices Corner, Steckel called The News Journal to brag, giving himself the name “The Driftwood Killer.” He also said he was going to kill again, and gave the newspaper a prospective victim’s name — which was given to police. Using that information, police focused on Steckel as the likely killer of Long and hours later, New Castle County police Patrolman Michael McGowan picked up Steckel, who was drunk, as he walked down Union Street in Wilmington.
Imposing size
Steckel is an imposing figure, standing 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighing a lean 195 pounds at the time of his arrest. He’d been a furniture mover and was quite strong. Several months before he killed Long, he got into a fight with a bartender on Union Street and flattened him with a single punch. Even though Steckel was clearly drunk, on Sept. 3, 1994, when the officer encountered him on Union Street, McGowan, now a lieutenant, said he was wary of approaching Steckel without backup. McGowan said he wasn’t sure the man was Steckel until he saw a distinctive tattoo on his left forearm — the name “Ashley” — and he knew he had his man. McGowan convinced Steckel he was giving him a break on a public drunkenness charge and would give him a ride home. Instead, McGowan drove him to police headquarters, where he was booked for murder.
Once in custody, Steckel mailed more than 75 letters, some confessing to murders in other states and others bragging about the Long murder or making threats. In one, to Long’s mother, Virginia Thomas, he included the autopsy report of his victim with a note in the margin, “Happy, Happy. Joy Joy. Read it and weep. She’s gone forever. Don’t cry over burnt flesh.” He threatened court personnel and frightened his first team of attorneys, from the Public Defender’s Office, off the case. He also spit on prosecutors.
Thomas Pedersen, who prosecuted Steckel and is now a private attorney, said it was “the most gruesome case I was ever involved with. … If the death penalty is ever justified, Brian’s case is probably the best candidate I can ever think of.”
Specifics of what happened that day are difficult to know with certainty because Steckel has constantly changed his story. On the night he was arrested, an apparently remorseful Steckel asked the officers interrogating him, “Don’t you get tired of dealing with people like me? … Can’t you see I’m worthless? I mean, why are you wasting time on me?” according to a transcript in court records. Downs responded, “We’ve got to find out what, what’s going on with you.” “I [expletive] killed somebody,” Steckel shot back. “What the [expletive] do you mean ‘What’s going on?’ “
Steckel then went on to say he met “Sandy” through a “sleazy thing in the neighborhood” and moments later objected to his own description saying, “She’s not sleazy, man. I took her [expletive] life, man. She didn’t deserve to die. … There is something wrong with me inside of me and I … I just go off the [expletive] handle man. And it’s just not right, you know what I mean? I guess now I finally got stopped.” During the interrogation, Steckel changed the details several times. At one point he said he killed Long because she refused to have sex with him. At another, he said they had had consensual sex several times in the days before the murder. Later, he said Long was pregnant, possibly with his child, and that she was demanding support payments.
Months later, in a prison interview with The News Journal, he denied he had any involvement at all. “I’m aware of what happened, but I’m not the one who committed the act,” Steckel said, alleging it was a drug-using married man with children who killed Long. He is still changing his story, according to prosecutors at his Board of Pardons hearing on Friday. In the most recent version, told to a prison official this month, Steckel alleges Long started the fight by accusing him of stealing drugs and then attacking him with a frying pan.
On the day he was arrested, Steckel confessed to six other killings, four in Delaware and two in Pennsylvania. He claimed one victim was a 15-year-old paper carrier. He later would confess to other killings in Maine, Las Vegas, Florida and California. He told police, “I’m an animal. … I hurt anybody, man. Been hurting people for a long time. If you let me walk out the door, I’d go do it again.” Police checked out Steckel’s stories and the next day confronted him with the fact that someone else had been arrested and convicted of killing the paper carrier. Steckel immediately recanted: “I was just shooting the breeze, man, and I was drunk … when I was saying that … I never killed anyone else,” according to court records.
Unsolved case
Pennsylvania State Police, however, are interested in talking to Steckel one last time before he is executed. One of the murders he confessed to — killing Fountain Hill, Pa., resident Frances Kiefer, a neighbor of his mother — remains an unsolved missing person case. Kiefer hasn’t been seen since 1994. At trial, prosecutors argued that Steckel didn’t know Long either at all or very well. In police interviews, Steckel said he picked Long, who had long, dark hair, because he thought she was pretty and had a nice body.
Long was a divorced data-entry clerk who lived across the hall from the apartment where Steckel had been staying with friends for a few weeks. Long’s family would not give interviews before the execution, but at legal proceedings have described her as a loving person who was close to her family and friends. She was the youngest of four children and also had worked as a waitress and a saleswoman. At Friday’s Board of Pardons hearing, Long’s mother said her daughter was a giving person who would offer help to whomever needed it. And on Sept. 2, 1994, Steckel went to her door around lunchtime asking to use her phone, according to the most consistent version of his confession. Other tenants said Steckel regularly asked to use people’s phones, saying he needed a touch-tone phone to get his messages.
Prosecutors said Steckel knocked on Long’s door intending to rape and murder her. He was carrying nylon stockings and a tube sock to bind her and a screwdriver. Once inside, Steckel unplugged the phone so Long couldn’t call 911, then turned on the 29-year-old. He claimed to have punched her in the face and thrown her across the room. Long’s body had marks on it indicating she attempted to fend off Steckel’s attacks with the screwdriver and teeth marks on Steckel’s finger indicate she bit him, drawing blood. Steckel said he used the nylons and the tube sock to strangle Long into unconsciousness, then sexually assaulted her and raped her with the screwdriver.
‘I watched the flames’
Brian Steckel then set fire to the bedspread and curtains, he told police, for “something different, man … some excitement. … I watched the flames and I walked out.” Long woke up afterward, surrounded by flames and thick smoke, and cried out. Lane Randolph, a tree trimmer who was passing by and saw the flames, testified that when he arrived he heard weak calls of, “Help me, please.” He kicked out a window of the basement apartment and called to Long, briefly grabbing her hand. He had it for 30 to 40 seconds but flames were burning him. “The room was totally black with smoke. Smoke and heat were pouring out. I pulled with all my might but I just couldn’t pull her [to safety],” he said on the stand. A co-worker, John Hall, kicked in the apartment door, but flames also prevented him from getting to Long. “I felt like I was in total hell,” Hall testified. After the fire was put out, Hall said he went back to look through the window and saw Long’s body. “She was just folded like a flower in a microwave,” he said.
Died of burns, smoke The medical examiner said Long died from severe burns over 60 percent of her body and smoke inhalation. In his initial confession, Brian Steckel said he thought Long was pregnant. Long’s family also believed she was four to five months pregnant. An autopsy report at trial that included information on an examination of Long’s uterus showed no indication of pregnancy. Long’s family members, however, wonder if Steckel’s brutal attack and the fire eliminated evidence of a child. At trial, defense attorneys presented evidence that Steckel had suffered sexual abuse as a child and had emotional and mental problems as young as age 12. He’d also spent time in several juvenile facilities.
At Friday’s Board of Pardons hearings, relatives testified that Steckel was not a heartless monster. One aunt, Nancy Renniger said, “You could not find a more gentle child.” Steckel’s brother Robert recalled ripping open Christmas presents with his younger sibling and playing together. At the time of the murder, Brian Steckel had a daughter. Now 12, she left the Board of Pardons hearing in tears after her father spoke. While Steckel offered no excuses on Friday, relatives and attorneys Joseph Bernstein and John Deckers pointed to a history of mental problems. Gabay said Steckel was angry and had delusions of grandeur when he was young — such as believing he would one day own a professional basketball team, though he dropped out of school after not doing well, and never held a job for very long. In one of his confessions to police, Steckel said he was a messed-up person. “I was a redhead. People taunted me. People did [expletive] to me. You know what I mean? Pushing me aside. Step on me. I got tired of that, man. I just fought back. … My family loved me and now they’re … scared of me cause they made me this way. The family. The system. Society.”
Seemed to want death
Gabay said that before and during trial, Brian Steckel seemed intent on getting the death penalty. “You can explain some actions to a jury,” Gabay said. Others, such as Steckel’s taunting letters to the family of his victim, are impossible. Steckel also refused defense attorneys’ attempts to have him evaluated for mental health problems, and he resisted attempts to show evidence that he was sexually abused as a child, things attorneys hoped a jury would see as mitigating factors. The jury, which convicted him, ultimately voted 11-1 that he should be put to death.
After the trial, Virginia Thomas said the death penalty was “most justly deserved.” When Superior Court Judge William C. Carpenter Jr. sentenced Brian Steckel to death in 1997, calling his crime “exceedingly depraved, cruel and vicious,” Steckel smiled. Gabay said he believes Steckel isn’t a threat behind bars. “Outside, he is a dangerous guy. Very dangerous,” said Gabay. “He’s just good at being in jail.” Gabay said that outside, Steckel does not have the 24-hour-a-day structure that jail provides.
At the Board of Pardons hearing, defense attorneys and relatives argued Brian Steckel had undergone a transformation, matured and was truly remorseful.
Sandra Jones, a death penalty opponent and an assistant professor of sociology at Rowan University, said she believes Brian Steckel could make a contribution even behind bars. Jones has worked with Steckel and other Delaware death-row inmates for the past year for a book she is writing. Jones said she could not explain Steckel’s crime or his early behavior, but said that now, “I think there is good reason to believe he could be OK on the outside,” adding that she would not mind having him as a neighbor. Jones said that when she met him, from press accounts she expected Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic killer in the movie “Silence of the Lambs,” but the reality “couldn’t have been further from the truth.” “He’s a really neat guy,” she said, adding that he was probably “the type of kid who tried too hard to get people to like him. A little awkward, sometimes obnoxious.” She said he has a “playful and fun” sense of humor and is humble.
The Board of Pardons nonetheless refused to commute Brian Steckel’s sentence. He has one appeal left, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Gabay said he believes Steckel is remorseful and wants to die for his crimes, judging by his surprise address to the jury at the end of his trial.
Brian Steckel told the jury, “I didn’t know how to say I’m sorry. How do you tell someone’s family you’re sorry for strangling them? … How do you do such a thing? I don’t know. I ask you people to hold me accountable for what I did. I’ve gotten away with so much in my life that I stand here today … I know I deserve to die for what I did to Sandy. … I’m prepared to give up my life because I deserve to.”
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