Missouri executes man for 1998 murder of woman despite family’s pleas to spare his life

Williams’ hopes of having his sentence commuted to life in prison were doubly thwarted Monday when, almost simultaneously, Republican Gov. Mike Parson denied him clemency and the Missouri Supreme Court declined to grant him a stay of execution. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene Tuesday.

Williams was executed despite questions raised by his attorneys about jury selection at his trial and the handling of evidence in the case. His clemency request focused primarily on how Gayle’s relatives wanted Williams’ sentence commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“The family considers that the end of the story is to allow Marcellus to live,” the petition reads. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”

Last month, Gayle’s family greenlit a deal between the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office and Williams’ attorneys to commute his sentence to life in prison. But the state Supreme Court overturned the deal on an appeal by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office.

Williams was among death row inmates from five states scheduled to be executed in the span of a week — an unusually high number that defies the decline in the use and support for the death penalty in the United States for years. The first execution took place Friday in South Carolina. Texas was also scheduled to execute a prisoner Tuesday night.

Gayle, 42, was a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Prosecutors in Williams’ trial said he broke into her home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard the shower running and found a large butcher knife. Gayle was stabbed 43 times as she walked downstairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.

Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to cover up blood on his shirt. His girlfriend asked him why he was wearing a jacket on a hot day. She said she later saw the purse and laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later.

Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was imprisoned on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the killing and provided details about it.

Williams’ attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole both had felony convictions and that they wanted a $10,000 reward. They said fingerprints, a bloody shoe print, hair and other evidence at the crime scene did not match Williams’.

A crime scene investigator testified that the killer was wearing gloves.

Tuesday marked Williams’ third time facing execution. He was less than a week away from lethal injection in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court halted the execution, giving his lawyers time to conduct additional DNA testing.

Williams was set to be executed in August 2017 when then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay. Greitens appointed a panel of retired judges to review the case. But that panel never reached a conclusion.

Questions about the DNA evidence also led St. Louis District Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing to challenge Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new tests showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the district attorney’s office who handled it without gloves after initial crime lab tests.

With no DNA evidence to identify another suspect, attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with the district attorney’s office: Williams would plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for another life sentence without parole. A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is treated as such for sentencing purposes.

Judge Bruce Hilton agreed, as did Gayle’s family. But Bailey appealed, and the state Supreme Court blocked the deal and ordered Hilton to an evidentiary hearing, which took place last month.

On September 12, Hilton ruled that Williams’ first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments had all been previously rejected. That decision was upheld by the state Supreme Court on Monday.

Attorneys for Williams, who was black, also challenged the fairness of his trial, including the fact that only one of the 12 jurors was black. Tricia Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project said the prosecutor in the case, Keith Larner, dismissed six of the seven potential black jurors.