Ronald Bennett was executed by the State of Virginia for the murder of Anne Keller Vaden
According to court documents Ronald Bennett would break into the residence of Anne Keller Vaden. The woman would be beaten and stabbed before her house was robbed
Ronald Bennett would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Ronald Bennett would be executed by lethal injection on November 21 1996
Ronald Bennett Photos
Ronald Bennett Case
Ronald Bennett, denied clemency by Gov. George Allen and a last-minute stay by the U.S. Supreme Court, was executed by injection tonight for the 1985 murder of a Chesterfield County woman.
Bennett, 42, was pronounced dead at 9:19 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center, a prison official said.
Neither Bennett nor any of his attorneys made a final statement.
Rufus Fleming, a Department of Corrections regional director, said Bennett was asked if he had anything to say. He said no, Fleming said.
Fleming said that officials had difficulty finding an artery in Bennett’s left arm and that the arm was draped in a towel.
Outside the prison, about 60 miles south of Richmond, no death penalty protesters showed up for the execution.
Earlier today, the Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to allow the execution to proceed. Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg voted for a stay of execution
Allen (R), after reviewing Bennett’s case, called the evidence against him overwhelming. He said he concluded that “there is no convincing reason for me to prevent the judgment of the jury and judge from being carried out as scheduled.”
Bennett was convicted in 1987 of murdering Anne Keller Vaden. She had been bound and choked with pantyhose, bludgeoned and stabbed three times in the neck and once in the abdomen.
A medical examiner testified that Vaden, 28, was alive throughout the 20 to 30 minutes her attacker assaulted her. Her father discovered her body moments after she died.
A year after the murder, Bennett’s ex-wife, Mary Bennett, talked to a friend about the killing, and the friend tipped off the police.
Mary Bennett testified at the trial that she, her husband and her husband’s cousin had been drinking and using cocaine the night Vaden was killed. She said Ronald Bennett, a maintenance man at Vaden’s apartment complex, went out and was covered with blood when he returned home the next day. She testified that Bennett told her that he had killed a woman at the apartment complex. The cousin gave a similar account
In a 1994 videotaped affidavit, Mary Bennett recanted her trial testimony, saying she lied to protect herself. She said that she and the cousin went out looking for Bennett and ended up at Vaden’s apartment and that the cousin killed the woman.
In 1995, she told investigators that she lied in the affidavit to save Bennett. On Monday, she told Chesterfield police that Bennett asked her to make the videotape. She said he had written to her telling her what to say and that she made the videotape after rehearsing.
Bennett was the 33rd person to be executed in Virginia since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment in 1976.
