George Mercer was executed by the State of Missouri for the sexual assault and murder of a young woman
According to court documents George Mercer would pull a shotgun on twenty two year old Karen Mercer who was forced into a bedroom where she would be sexually assaulted. Karen Mercer would be repeatedly raped by Mercer and an accomplice. George would strangle Karen Mercer then brought her body to a remote location where she would be dumped
George Mercer would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
George Mercer would be executed by lethal injection on January 6 1989
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George Mercer FAQ
When was George Mercer executed
George Mercer would be executed on January 6 1989
How was George Mercer executed
George Mercer was executed by lethal injection
George Mercer Case
Missouri’s first execution in almost 24 years was carried out with swift, almost clinical precision within the first 10 minutes of Friday.
Coughing and straining against the straps that bound him to a gurney, George C. “Tiny” Mercer died within minutes of the moment when fatal drugs were injected into his left arm. Adhering closely to their schedule, officials of the Corrections Department began administering the lethal injection at 12:03 a.m. By 12:05, Mercer lost consciousness, and at 12:09 he was pronounced dead by an attending physician.
In his last. moments, Mercer focused his attention on the woman who had married him after he was imprisoned for the rape and murder of Karen Keeton in 1978. Mercer’s wife, Christie, observed the execution with a friend through a window of what used to be the gas chamber of the Missouri Penitentiary.
Mercer spoke, but neither his wife nor the witnesses who were observing through other windows in the chamber could hear what he was saying. “I can’t understand you,” Christie Mercer said at one point. “I love you.” She waved to him, blew him a kiss, raised two of her fingers in a gesture of peace and then pointed upwards, as if to heaven. Mercer lay on his back, Covered from his neck down by a crisp white sheet that obscured the intravenous tube inserted in his arm and the Bible underneath his hand.
He was wearing a dark blue hooded sweatshirt and a black headband. With his long brown hair and thick beard flecked with some gray, and a small braid, Mercer closely resembled the mug shots from his days as a leader of a motorcycle gang.
Warden Bill M. Armontrout said that before Mercer died, he had thanked him, shaken his hand and said, “Look out for my shipmates down here.”
Mercer was generally liked by the prison staff. Prison officials said Mercer had helped newly condemned men adjust to life on death row, where Mercer had been longer than anyone else. As Mercer’s life was taken from him, the 12 official witnesses observing the execution were silent. The execution had other observers, as well. Armontrout said that altogether, 19 people had been asked to witness the execution, in addition to the Corrections Department officials carrying it out.
The execution happened very quickly, in contrast to the long wait that had preceded it. The witnesses had been ordered to arrive at Corrections Department offices at 10 p.m. for a briefing. At 10:50, two ,vans transported them to the penitentiary three miles away. Then they waited 40 minutes in the vans before being escorted into the small, rock house containing the death chamber. During the waft, a hearse, black and glistening, and the attending physician’s silver BMW, with an “Iceman” vanity license plate, passed by en route to the place of execution.
Other than the brief conversations among the witnesses, the only sound was the incessant drumming of rain on the van’s roof. At 11:45, the witnesses were taken inside the execution building. Minutes before, Mercer was strapped to the gurney and administered a sedative, which he had requested. Plastic window shades had been pulled down over the observation windows.
At 12:01, the curtains were raised, and Mercer frantically scanned the windows for his wife. When he saw her smiling face behind him, he leaned back and began talking to her. Other than the brief moments when Mercer jerked up from the gurney and coughed three or four times, his eyes never left his wife until they stared lifelessly at the ceiling.
