A man who spent nearly 25 years on Missouri’s death row was executed on Tuesday for the kidnapping, rape and stabbing death of a 15-year-old girl.
Roderick Nunley, 50, became the sixth death row inmate to be put to death in Missouri this year. During the execution, his breathing became labored for a few seconds. He briefly opened his mouth before becoming still.
He was pronounced dead at 9:09pm.
“Despite openly admitting his guilt to the court, it has taken 25 years to get him to the execution chamber,” Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said in a statement.
Of 20 executions in the US this year, all but four have been in Missouri and Texas. Nunley’s execution was delayed by last-minute appeals from attorneys for death penalty opponents in Missouri questioning the competence of Nunley’s lawyer.
Nunley made no final statement and no one witnessed his punishment on his behalf, although he visited earlier in the day with his daughter and a spiritual adviser.
Robert Harrison, the father of the girl killed, watched the execution along with the victim’s uncle and two family friends.
The disappearance and death of Ann Harrison haunted the Kansas City area in March 1989. She was waiting for a school bus on her driveway when Nunley and Michael Taylor drove by in a stolen car and made the spur-of-the-moment decision to abduct her.
Both men were sentenced to death in 1991. Taylor was executed last year.
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon on Tuesday denied a clemency request for Nunley, filed by death penalty opponents, asserting that racial bias played a role in the case because a prosecutor refused a plea deal that would have given Nunley life in prison without parole.
Nunley was black, as was Taylor, while the victim was white.
The US Supreme Court, meanwhile, denied several appeals from Nunley’s attorney, including one claiming that the death penalty amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
Retired Kansas City detective Pete Edlund said the only thing cruel and unusual was how long Nunley and Taylor remained on death row.
“The delay in executing these two is just nuts because it didn’t have anything to do with their guilt. It was legal mumbo jumbo nonsense,” Edlund told reporters.
According to prosecutors, Nunley and Taylor binged on cocaine and stole a car in the predawn hours of March 22, 1989. At one point, a police officer from the neighboring town of Lee’s Summit chased the car but was called off by a supervisor when the stolen vehicle crossed into Kansas City.
Later that morning, the men were driving around Kansas City when they saw Ann, her school books and flute on the ground beside her.
The girl’s mother had stepped inside to get a younger daughter ready for school. When she heard the bus, she looked outside. The books and flute were still there, but Ann was gone.
Taylor and Nunley had grabbed the girl and taken her to Nunley’s mother’s home. She was raped and sodomized, then stabbed repeatedly in the stomach and neck.
Taylor and Nunley put the girl’s body in the trunk of the stolen car, then abandoned it in a residential area. The body was found three days later.
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