Willie Jones was executed by the State of Virginia for a double murder
According to court documents Willie Jones would go to the home of Graham and Myra Adkins. Jones would go into the home where he would murder Graham Adkins before shoving Myra Adkins into a closet where she was shot and set on fire. Jones would rob the home before fleeing
Willie Jones would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Willie Jones would be executed by way of the electric chair on September 11 1992
Willie Jones Photos
Willie Jones Case
Willie Leroy Jones, who murdered an elderly couple for their life savings in 1983, was electrocuted tonight in Virginia’s electric chair.
Jones, 34, who admitted committing the double murder, maintained his composure as he was strapped to the chair. He had said earlier today he was determined “to keep smiling to the end.” Seconds before he died, he looked at the witnesses in a glassed-in enclosure before him and said: “I love you.”
A prison official said there were no complications in carrying out the execution.
Earlier today, Jones said goodbye to his friends, packed up his books and photographs and said: “This is not about crying. Save it for the funeral home, the cemetery. If, at the end, I’m still smiling, I’m going to be okay through this.”
His appeal for clemency was denied by Gov. L. Douglas Wilder early tonight shortly after the Supreme Court unanimously rejected his request for a stay of execution
Jones was the third Virginia prisoner put to death this year, and the 16th since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 — continuing a steady dispatch of death-row prisoners that has brought national attention to executions in Virginia.
To organized opponents of the death penalty, Jones’s execution further bolstered Virginia’s ranking as one of the country’s top four “killing states,” behind Texas, Florida, and Louisiana; Jones was the eighth inmate to die in the Virginia electric chair since the beginning of 1990.
There are 48 other men awaiting death in the state. Most were condemned in the early years after the state’s revival of the death penalty 16 years ago, and have now exhausted their appeals.
Unlike Roger Keith Coleman, who was executed May 20 in the middle of an international media blitz in which he maintained he was innocent, Jones admitted killing Graham and Myra Adkins, the parents of a friend
On May 13, 1983, Jones went to the Adkinses’ home in rural Charles City County, intent on robbing them of their life savings, which they stored in their bedroom. Jones, wearing a disguise, immediately shot Graham Adkins, 77, in the head, then tied up Myra Adkins, 79, in a bedroom closet as he took more than $30,000 from a small safe.
Jones said he also shot Myra Adkins in the head after she looked him in the eye and said, “Willie, I know it’s you.” Leaving her for dead, he said, he set fire to the house with a can of gasoline he had brought with him and fled. Medical experts later ruled that Myra Adkins died of smoke inhalation.
Afterward, Jones went on a spending spree in Richmond, buying luggage, a briefcase and a $100 pair of shoes before flying to Hawaii, where he had served five years in the Army. He was arrested there a week later
Jones’s lawyer argued before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week that Myra Adkins may have been unconscious when she was set on fire, thus reducing the violence of the murder. That, the lawyer said, made the death sentence unconstitutional because the crime did not meet new guidelines for “vileness.”
One of the judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson, replied: “I would be hard pressed to think of any definition of vileness that did not include this offense,” the Associated Press reported. The court rejected the appeal.
Two hours before his execution tonight, Jones said: “I’m cool. I’m absolutely cool,” but complained that trousers given him were too big — size 34 instead of 31 — and that they were an indignity.
He was holding the trousers up as he was escorted into the death chamber a few minutes before 11, but nevertheless appeared confident, almost jaunty. He stared intently at the approximately 20 people in the witness box as guards fastened leather straps around his ankles and chest
His final words — “I love you” — followed a brief statement by death row chaplain Russ Ford, who said that only God is the “great executioner. All other taking of life is wrong.”
At the first 90-second surge of electricity — 1,825 volts — Jones clenched his fists and sparks and smoke appeared from the electrode on his right leg. The sparks and smoke appeared again with the second 90-second surge. There was a strong electrical burning odor in the room.
One of the 10 official witnesses to the execution was State Sen. Ed Robb (R-Charlottesville), who said he attended because he is sponsoring legislation to broaden the death penalty to cover anyone who commits premeditated murder. He said he believes the death penalty, in a time of rising crime, is the only answer.
In a series of interviews in the days leading up to his execution, Jones spoke of feeling detached as he committed the crime, his only serious offense, which he said was motivated “by greed.”
SLAYER SAYS GOODBYE, SMILING
By Sue Anne Pressley
September 16, 1992
JARRATT, VA., SEPT. 15 — Willie Leroy Jones, who murdered an elderly couple for their life savings in 1983, was electrocuted tonight in Virginia’s electric chair.
Jones, 34, who admitted committing the double murder, maintained his composure as he was strapped to the chair. He had said earlier today he was determined “to keep smiling to the end.” Seconds before he died, he looked at the witnesses in a glassed-in enclosure before him and said: “I love you.”
A prison official said there were no complications in carrying out the execution.
Earlier today, Jones said goodbye to his friends, packed up his books and photographs and said: “This is not about crying. Save it for the funeral home, the cemetery. If, at the end, I’m still smiling, I’m going to be okay through this.”
His appeal for clemency was denied by Gov. L. Douglas Wilder early tonight shortly after the Supreme Court unanimously rejected his request for a stay of execution.
Jones was the third Virginia prisoner put to death this year, and the 16th since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 — continuing a steady dispatch of death-row prisoners that has brought national attention to executions in Virginia.
To organized opponents of the death penalty, Jones’s execution further bolstered Virginia’s ranking as one of the country’s top four “killing states,” behind Texas, Florida, and Louisiana; Jones was the eighth inmate to die in the Virginia electric chair since the beginning of 1990.
There are 48 other men awaiting death in the state. Most were condemned in the early years after the state’s revival of the death penalty 16 years ago, and have now exhausted their appeals.
Unlike Roger Keith Coleman, who was executed May 20 in the middle of an international media blitz in which he maintained he was innocent, Jones admitted killing Graham and Myra Adkins, the parents of a friend.
On May 13, 1983, Jones went to the Adkinses’ home in rural Charles City County, intent on robbing them of their life savings, which they stored in their bedroom. Jones, wearing a disguise, immediately shot Graham Adkins, 77, in the head, then tied up Myra Adkins, 79, in a bedroom closet as he took more than $30,000 from a small safe.
Jones said he also shot Myra Adkins in the head after she looked him in the eye and said, “Willie, I know it’s you.” Leaving her for dead, he said, he set fire to the house with a can of gasoline he had brought with him and fled. Medical experts later ruled that Myra Adkins died of smoke inhalation.
Afterward, Jones went on a spending spree in Richmond, buying luggage, a briefcase and a $100 pair of shoes before flying to Hawaii, where he had served five years in the Army. He was arrested there a week later.
Jones’s lawyer argued before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week that Myra Adkins may have been unconscious when she was set on fire, thus reducing the violence of the murder. That, the lawyer said, made the death sentence unconstitutional because the crime did not meet new guidelines for “vileness.”
One of the judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson, replied: “I would be hard pressed to think of any definition of vileness that did not include this offense,” the Associated Press reported. The court rejected the appeal.
Two hours before his execution tonight, Jones said: “I’m cool. I’m absolutely cool,” but complained that trousers given him were too big — size 34 instead of 31 — and that they were an indignity.
He was holding the trousers up as he was escorted into the death chamber a few minutes before 11, but nevertheless appeared confident, almost jaunty. He stared intently at the approximately 20 people in the witness box as guards fastened leather straps around his ankles and chest.
His final words — “I love you” — followed a brief statement by death row chaplain Russ Ford, who said that only God is the “great executioner. All other taking of life is wrong.”
At the first 90-second surge of electricity — 1,825 volts — Jones clenched his fists and sparks and smoke appeared from the electrode on his right leg. The sparks and smoke appeared again with the second 90-second surge. There was a strong electrical burning odor in the room.
One of the 10 official witnesses to the execution was State Sen. Ed Robb (R-Charlottesville), who said he attended because he is sponsoring legislation to broaden the death penalty to cover anyone who commits premeditated murder. He said he believes the death penalty, in a time of rising crime, is the only answer.
In a series of interviews in the days leading up to his execution, Jones spoke of feeling detached as he committed the crime, his only serious offense, which he said was motivated “by greed.”
“It was like a movie to me, you know, it was like an out-of-body experience,” he said. “It was like I was really watching someone else do these things, and what it was, it was my anger. It wasn’t me, it was my anger.
“It didn’t cross my mind whether it was wrong or not,” he said. “I probably could say something now, but it wouldn’t have been what I felt then, right? Because I didn’t feel anything.”
As he approached his death, Jones said he had tried to make no excuses for what he had done. He did not expect a last-minute reprieve, and he said during his last 15 days that he had little or no chance of walking out alive.
Interviewed in the death house at Greensville Correctional Center here, about 50 miles south of Richmond, he said he was resigned to his execution. But he also said he did not believe the state should be killing him and the other men on death row.
“I wasn’t some poor little black kid,” he said. “I wasn’t mistreated or abused. I wasn’t on drugs. I just messed up. I did it. It was all my fault. I am very sorry for what I did, very, very sorry. I have lived with it for years, and I hope I’m going to go a place where I’ll see {the Adkinses} again and I’ll be able to make it right with them.”
Willie Jones earned notoriety for more than the Adkinses’ murders. On May 31, 1984, he and five other death-row inmates made the largest death-row prison escape in U.S. history.
Using knives made from metal door facings, the men forced a dozen prison guards to disrobe, locked them in a broom closet, then slipped on guard uniforms. Pretending to have a bomb in their possession, they left the Mecklenburg Correctional Center near the North Carolina border in a prison van. Mecklenburg is where condemned men wait on death row, a 45-minute drive from the death house here in Jarratt.
Jones surrendered to police in Vermont about a week later, after telephoning his mother in Richmond, who told him she did not want him to be “hunted down in the streets and shot like a dog.” Had he made it to Canada, which does not have capital punishment, he would not have been sent back to Virginia’s death row.
With his execution, only one of the former escapees remained alive; four of his accomplices already have been put to death.
A graduate of Armstrong High School in Richmond, Jones, one of six children, was a member of the Junior ROTC drill team and joined the Army because of his interest in the military. After his honorable discharge in 1981, he returned to Richmond from Hawaii, and quickly became depressed, he said, over his inability to get a good job. He also became swept up in night life, he said, and “materialism and the fast dollar.” Married briefly in Hawaii, he had no children
On death row, he established a reputation for his sense of humor — his impressions of Ronald Reagan and Bill Cosby became well known — and his skill on the prison basketball court. He said repeatedly that he wanted to look at “the positive side” of his life.
As his final days ticked off, Jones greeted a stream of old friends and family members who came to see him one last time in the death house, where he occupied a cell next to the room containing the electric chair. He told them over and over again that he had grown into a man on death row, that he was not the same person who had killed a defenseless elderly couple, that he was at peace.
“When all is said and done,” he said, “I am not going out of this a loser.”