David Duren was executed by the State of Alabama for the murder of Kathleen Bledsoe
According to court documents David Duren and seventeen year old Richard Kinder would rob Kathleen Bledsoe and her friend at a remote location. Kathleen Bledsoe would be shot multiple times as well as her friend. Kathleen Bledsoe would die from her injuries and her friend survived
David Duren would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Richard Kinder would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to life without parole due to his age
David Duren would be executed by way of the electric chair on January 7 2000
David Duren Photos
Richard Kinder Photos
David Duren FAQ
When Was David Duren Executed
David Duren was executed on January 7 2000
Where Is Richard Kinder Now
Richard Kinder is incarcerated at the St Clair Correctional Facility
David Duren Case
A man convicted of killing a teen-age girl wrote an account of his crime, conviction and religious conversion in an autobiography posted on the Internet after his execution. David Ray Duren, 37, was electrocuted early Friday for the 1983 robbery and shooting death of Kathleen Bedsole, 16.
He wrote “An Attitude Adjustment” at the request of high school students, said Birmingham minister Richard Copeland, a family friend. Duren mixes his own story with Biblical quotations and references. “I’m writing to you from death row, where I am awaiting execution,” he begins. “This is a shameful thing to admit … but it is my hope that through sharing these things … that I may help you, or those you know, avoid making the same poor choices I made.”
Self-loathing apparent
He said he felt “tremendous shame” at recounting Miss Bedsole’s death and his other crimes. “The hatred that I felt for myself — that I was ever capable of such inhumanity, such destruction of innocent lives,” he wrote. “It never goes away, it never fades.” Duren writes about dabbling in drugs, saying he once had to be revived by cardiopulmonary resuscitation after mixing heroin, methamphetamines and alcohol, and he was discharged from the Army for smoking marijuana. Duren was the first inmate executed in an electric chair since the U.S. Supreme Court decided in October to consider a Florida case concerning whether the chair is cruel and unusual punishment.
Miss Bedsole and her boyfriend, 16-year-old Chuck Leonard, were in Leonard’s parked car when they were approached by Duren, then 21, and accomplice David Kinder, 17. Duren and Kinder forced the teen-agers into the car’s trunk and drove to a secluded spot, where the youths were tied up and shot. Leonard survived. Kinder was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Duren, who said he became a born-again Christian and was baptized in 1986, had opposed any last-minute appeals to avoid the electric chair. He declined to make a final statement. “David wanted to express his deep sorrow for his horrible crime of 16 years ago, and for the pain that he caused for the victims and their families,” Copeland said after the execution. “He wanted the world to know he was sorry.”
http://www.apbonline.com/cjsystem/justicenews/2000/01/08/autobiography0108_01.html
