Justin May was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Jeanetta Murdaugh
According to court documents Justin May would rob a Western Auto Store and would shoot and kill Jeanetta Murdaugh and her husband. May was not charged in the husband’s murder.
During a crime spree police believe that Justin May murdered five people
Justin May would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Justin May would be executed by lethal injection on May 7 1992
Justin May Photos
Justin May Case
Justin Lee May, 44, coughing and gasping, was executed by lethal injection shortly past midnight Thursday for the slaying of a woman in an auto-store robbery.
The U.S. Supreme Court late Wednesday denied a stay of execution
‘I want to tell them I love them, and I appreciate all their support,’ May said to prison officials in his last words, apparently in reference to family members who witnessed the execution, his wife whom he married by proxy, Sandra Manning, and a sister, Sandra Martinez.
Strapped to gurney, May, wearing blue pants and a light blue shirt, coughed a gasped before he was was pronounced dead at 12:18 a.m.
May killed Jeanetta Murdaugh, 43, with two shots to her head, and he also killed her husband in a 1978 assault on their Western Auto Store in Freeport.
The defendant was never tried, however, for the shooting of the man.
The execution was the sixth in Texas this year and the 48th the state has carried out since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in 1976.
Authorities said Mrs. Murdaugh was one of five people May killed during two robberies.
May and accomplice Richard Allen Miles were not charged in the robbery-slayings until May reportedly bragged about the killings six years later while serving time in the Texas prison for three other murder convictions.
Miles testified against May in exchange for a 42-year prison sentence for his part in the auto store robbery. A witness who had called police at the time of the crime also was able to identify May as the person he had seen looking into the Murdaugh’s store window shortly before the robbery.
In the other slayings, May pleaded guilty in the July 1978 shooting deaths of three bar patrons at Don’s Lounge in Houston in exchange for a 15-year sentence
