Richard Fox was executed by the State of Ohio for the murder of Leslie Keckler
According to court documents Richard Fox would lure Bowling Green University student Leslie Keckler to an interview for a job that did not exist. Following the interview Fox would get Leslie Keckler into his car saying they were going to take a look at the sales route. Fox would attempt to sexually assault Keckler who would fight back. Fox would stab the teen multiple times causing her death before throwing her body into a ditch
Richard Fox would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Richard Fox would be executed by lethal injection on February 12 2003
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When Was Richard Fox Executed
Richard Fox was executed on February 12 2003
Richard Fox Case
A man who lured a college student to her death with the promise of a job was executed Wednesday. Richard E. Fox, 47, made no final statement before being killed by injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. He was pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m. It was the state’s sixth execution since Ohio resumed the death penalty in 1999.
Fox kidnapped, stabbed and strangled Leslie Keckler, 18, of Bowling Green, on Sept. 26, 1989. Her body was found four days later in a ditch near the northwest Ohio city. Fox had confessed and was convicted in 1990 of aggravated murder and kidnapping. Students from Roman Catholic high schools in Cleveland and Cincinnati joined anti-death penalty protesters outside the prison in bitter cold Wednesday morning. School officials said 125 students made the trip. “It should be God who decides when someone dies,” said Tiera Carson-Nicholson, 16 and a sophomore at Trinity High School in suburban Cleveland.
Gov. Bob Taft last week refused to grant clemency, saying there was no doubt that Fox was guilty. Greg Meyers, chief of the Ohio Public Defender’s death penalty section, said then that there were no more legal issues to appeal. Andrea Dean, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said Fox had spent the hours leading up to the execution with family members and that he was upbeat. He went to sleep about 1 a.m. and woke around 4:20 a.m., Dean said. He did not take a shower or eat his breakfast of coffee, apple juice, toast, dry cereal and peanut butter and jelly, Dean said. Dean said Fox had been compliant and spent time with spiritual advisers after being moved to Ohio’s death house Tuesday from the Mansfield Correctional Institution. On Tuesday, Fox ate his requested meal of a cheeseburger with lettuce, pickle, onion, tomato, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise along with french fries and a Pepsi, Dean said.
The injection Fox received consisted of sodium pentothal, which induces unconsciousness; pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant that stops breathing; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
Authorities said Fox found Keckler, a student at Owens Community College near Toledo, through an application she filled out at the restaurant where he worked. After an initial meeting in hotel lobby, Keckler got into Fox’s car so that they could check out businesses where supplies could be sold. In a rural area outside of Bowling Green, Fox started making advances. Keckler fought him and tried to open the car door. But he pulled her back, pulled her coat over her head and stabbed her six times in the back. He then drove to a secluded road where, he told police, he strangled her with a rope “just to make sure she was dead.” Fox had lived in the northwest Ohio town of Tontogany.
Prosecutors said he had repeatedly used deception to lure women in the years before the murder. However, his attorneys said he used trickery to meet women, not to kill them. His attorneys argued that Fox was not the “worst of the worst” criminals for whom the death penalty is intended. They also said he should have been re-sentenced because guidelines used in his case later were declared flawed by the Ohio Supreme Court. The high court refused to delay the execution to hear the sentencing issue.
