Jimmie Slaughter was executed by the State of Oklahoma for a double murder
According to court documents Jimmie Slaughter would murder his girlfriend and their eleven month old daughter: Melody Wuertz, 29, and their daughter, Jessica. Apparently Jimmie Slaughter became upset when Melody filed a paternity suit. Slaughter would maintain until his death he had nothing to do with the double murder
Jimmie Slaughter was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Jimmie Slaughter was executed by lethal injection on March 15 2005
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When Was Jimmie Slaughter Executed
Jimmy Slaughter was executed on March 15 2005
Jimmie Slaughter Case
A family’s 14-year nightmare ended Tuesday with the execution of a double murderer at Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Jimmie Ray Slaughter was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m., ending a long period of torment for family members of murder victims Melody and Jessica Wuertz.
“This is the end of a nightmare,” Wesley Wuertz said after the execution. “There’s no more waiting for the next appeal, no more wondering if a technicality will get him off. Š What he got tonight was justice.”
But the 57-year-old inmate never said he was sorry for what he had done. Instead, he continued to proclaim his innocence as his three daughters sobbed softly in the witness room of the state’s execution chamber. “I’ve been accused of murder and it’s not true,” the 57-year-old inmate said. “It was a lie from the beginning. God knows it’s true. My children who were with me know it’s true. And you people will know it’s true some day. “May God have mercy on your souls.” He told each of his daughters and his fiancé, whom he had met while on death row, that he loved them and “I’ll be seeing you soon.”
Jimmie Slaughter kept his head raised from the gurney to which he was strapped for almost a minute after the warden ordered the execution to begin, mouthing words at the women who sat crying in the front row of the witness chamber, then lowered his head as the first of three drugs took effect. A muffled “Daddy” and wracking sobs. There was no further sound.
Neither had there been any sound in the minutes leading up to the execution, when death row inmates typically bang on their cell doors, whistle and whoop as a kind of “last sendoff” for an inmate they like. Sometimes the banging and whistling is so loud it can be heard in the death chamber’s witness room. Other times it’s more muted, but can still be heard in the law library of H Unit, the portion of the prison that houses death row. At times the banging, whistling and whooping begins a half hour before the scheduled execution time and continues until long after the inmate is pronounced dead. But there was none of that Tuesday. Just silence.
Earlier the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected a request from Jimmie Slaughter’s attorneys for a stay of execution. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal on Monday and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals had denied an appeal for Slaughter on Thursday.
Attorneys had argued that a hair found at the crime scene didn’t fit the prosecution’s theory of the crime, but appellate courts found that a mountain of other evidence did. In addition, Slaughter’s attorneys said that bullet lead analysis, which was used to help identify the bullets used in the murders, was not as accurate as had been previously believed. They also said that a new technology called “brain fingerprinting” had indicated Slaughter didn’t have knowledge of the crime, but Assistant Attorney General Seth Branham called the technology “junk science,” adding that the brain waves of anyone who had sat through a trial and seen the crime scene photographs, as Slaughter had, should show they had some knowledge of the crime.
The Wuertz family’s long nightmare began on July 2, 1991, when the family members learned the 29-year-old mother and her daughter, who was five days shy of her first birthday, had been murdered in Edmond.
Melody Wuertz was a strong woman who wouldn’t let life get her down, even though she’d been diagnosed with epilepsy and put on anticonvulsants in the seventh grade. She took part in school plays, concerts and musicals, eventually earning a music degree in college. Still, when she packed her belongings into a moving van and drove to Oklahoma for a new job, the family members in Indiana and Kentucky were a little nervous.
That tension grew after she returned home for her 10th high school reunion in 1989. Her self esteem plummeted. While others in her class had families and had become successful, Melody “felt she had failed,” said her mother, Susie Wuertz. That’s when Jimmie Ray Slaughter entered the picture. “We were very disturbed about it,” Susie Wuertz said. “He’d been married three times and was so much older than her.”
The family had no way of knowing it at the time, but the psychiatric nurse and Army Reserve officer had a long history of befriending young women, then manipulating them into sexual relationships and trying to control them, according to police. Police say one female doctor with whom he’d had a 10-year relationship had seven abortions after becoming pregnant with Slaughter’s children. But Melody refused to get an abortion and even stopped taking her anticonvulsants for fear they might hurt her baby.
When she learned Jimmie Slaughter was married, she called his house, enraging him. That rage grew after Jessica was born and she went through the Department of Human Services to collect child support. Melody Wuertz grew afraid of Slaughter. Police records indicate she told several people she was worried he might try to hurt her or Jessica and that she was planning to change the locks on her doors because he still had a key. “She was right to be worried,” Edmond police Capt. Theresa Pfeiffer said later.
Jimmie Slaughter set up an elaborate plan to get rid of Melody and Jessica. He had another woman he’d manipulated get him a pair of soiled men’s underwear and hair clippings from an African American patient at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Oklahoma City. “He was the predator, she was the prey,” Susie Wuertz said Tuesday. “He manipulated her just like he had so many others in his life and, I feel, like he manipulated his own daughters tonight.”
Slaughter had maintained he was in Kansas at the time of the murders, that he was shopping with his wife and daughters in Topeka. Police said that Slaughter’s alibi didn’t hold up, that store employees remembered Slaughter’s wife and daughters on that day but not him.
Instead of shopping, prosecutors said, Slaughter drove from Fort Riley, Kan., where he had been stationed after being activated for the First Gulf War, to Edmond, killed Melody and Jessica Wuertz, then drove back to Kansas, leaving the hair and underwear at the scene. There was no forced entry, indicating to police the door had either been unlocked or that the person who committed the crime had a key.
Investigators began with a list of 10 suspects, but the more they investigated, the more the evidence pointed to Slaughter as the killer. For one thing, Slaughter kept trying to get police to investigate the possibility an African American had raped and killed Melody and mutilated her body, as well as killed Jessica. “We knew at the time it was a staged domestic homicide,” prosecutor Richard Wintory said. “There were several important things that made it clear this crime wasn’t done by a black guy or a lust murderer.”
For his last meal, Slaughter ate fried chicken, mashed potatoes, cole slaw, biscuits with honey butter, an apple pie, one pint of cherry ice cream and a large cherry limeade.
http://mcalesternews.com/articles/2005/03/16/news/local_news/news01.txt
