CHEATING THE CHEF IN OHIO...

That's two this month....

Death row inmate dies of heart attack

MANSFIELD, Ohio (AP) -- A man who drew up a hit list and methodically killed four people died of a heart attack in his cell on death row.

Jerry F. Hessler, 45, was found Tuesday by a prison guard during a routine security check, said Rod Johnson, administrative assistant to the warden at Mansfield Correctional Institution.

An autopsy determined Hessler, who had a history of heart problems, died of a heart attack.

"His Judgment Day has come," said Ruth Canter, a former co-worker who survived being shot by Hessler. "I always felt like when he was in prison, I was in prison."

Hessler was convicted of killing four people in a shooting spree November 19, 1995, that targeted former bank co-workers.

He had been fired from Bank One in 1994 for alleged sexual harassment. Following his dismissal, he killed two former co-workers and their 5-month-old daughter and the father of a woman who had rejected his romantic advances 10 years earlier.

Hessler also shot and wounded his former supervisor and Canter before driving 75 miles to try to kill a former girlfriend.

Hessler was sent to death row in 1996 after his conviction for aggravated murder.

Attorneys said Hessler had bragged about the killings by writing about them on the walls of his cell while awaiting trial.

OKLAHOMA LAST MEAL
DANIEL REVILLA
January 17, 2003

The first appearance of cherry cola this year....

LAST MEAL: three large hamburgers, two orders of fries, an order of jumbo shrimp, four mini pecan pies and a large cherry cola

The skinny: Revilla killed his teenage girlfriend's 13-month-old child. Witnesses said Revilla did not like the child because he wasn't the child's father and that Revilla had shut the infant in a kitchen drawer, folded him in a hide-a-bed, and hanged him by his ankles with duct tape.

The boy was killed just two days before his father was have taken custody.

No People, No Words: There were no witnesses for Revilla, who lay with his eyes closed and his head turned from the witness room in the death chamber. He shook his head "no" when asked if he had a final statement.

Factoids: Revilla was the first convicted killer executed this year in Oklahoma.

TEXAS LAST MEAL
JOHN RICHARD BALTAZAR
January 16, 2003

Life is NOT a bowl of cherries.....

LAST MEAL: Baltazar requested cherries and Cool Whip, but the request wasn't met because the prison system doesn't have those items on hand.

The Skinny: Baltazar shot to death a 5-year-old girl as she was curled up on her family's couch watching "Sleeping Beauty". Baltazar said he was drunk on Sept. 27, 1997, when he went to the girl's Corpus Christi house looking for the girl's uncle, who was dating his mother. Baltazar said he had heard that the uncle, Narciso Cuellar, had beaten his mother. Cuellar had been sleeping on the couch of the family's home but moved out a week earlier.

NO WORDS: With his tattooed arms outstretched as he lay on the gurney, Baltazar declined to make a final statement. He glanced at five members of the Marines family who witnessed the execution, including Adriana's parents, her aunt and two of her grandparents. No one representing Baltazar witnessed the execution.

PRESHOW: On Tuesday, Baltazar spent much of the day talking with visitors and reading. According to prison officials, Baltazar didn't go to bed until after midnight Wednesday. Much of his morning was spent with visitors.

FACTOIDS: Baltazar's death is Texas' 291st since the state resumed executions in 1982. His execution leaves 449 inmates on death row.

Baltazar said he wasn't afraid to die but thought his crime wasn't one he should be paying for with his life.

ALEX TIZON OF THE SEATTLE TIMES ASKS.....

Does Northwest draw out serial killers?

Highlights:

Can we blame it on the rain? Do the dark green forests that blanket the land bring out the monster in a few of us?

These questions might seem frivolous if the facts were not so damning: Police continue to unfold the grisly details of three of the nation's most notorious serial-murder cases, all within a 280-mile radius of Seattle, the emerald hub of the region.

In the universe of serial killings, the Pacific Northwest, if only in public perception, may be one of its capitals.

....But even the region's defenders must have paused at the steady stream of news over the past two years. Take one 72-hour period last fall:

• On Oct. 2, Canadian authorities charged Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farmer Robert William Pickton with five more counts of murder, raising the number of women he is accused of killing to 15. He is a prime suspect in the disappearances of as many as 63 women in the Vancouver area. Investigators believe Pickton's victim pool will eventually spill over into Washington. A preliminary hearing in his case began this week in Port Coquitlam.

• On Oct. 3, Robert Lee Yates of Spokane was sentenced to death for the murders of two Pierce County women. Yates has confessed to 15 slayings, but investigators believe his actual victim count may be twice that high.

• On Oct. 4, the Green River Task Force announced it would spend another weekend scouring a wetland near Kent for more victims of the Green River Killer. Gary Leon Ridgway, an Auburn truck painter, has been charged with four of the 49 Green River killings.

There's no consensus on the number 49. True-crime writer Anne Rule says the Green River killer (or killers) could easily have slain another 25.

These amount to stunningly high body counts, even in the ever-expanding universe of serial killings. In any previous era, such clusters of killings discovered in such close proximity would have been considered a horror.
..."There's something about the Pacific Northwest that seems to breed serial killers. John Douglas, the famous FBI profiler, once called the region 'America's killing fields,' " he writes.

"The weather — weeks on end of dreary rain punctuated by rare, brilliant days — probably has something to do with it. Or the fact that this is where the frontier ends and America literally runs out of room."

....By contrast, a serial killer kills strangers, usually women and girls, in different locations and at different times over long periods: months, years, even decades. They tend to be white, heterosexual males with above-average intelligence. Very often they are sexual psychopaths who hunt and kill for the thrill.

A lot of them end up in or near coastal cities.

Many of what Rule calls the "old school of serial-killer watchers" ascribe to this notion that serial murderers subconsciously gravitate to the geographic extremities as a form of fleeing — fleeing from authorities, and perhaps even from something in their own psyches.

This partially explains, Rule says, why most serial killers have been captured on the edges of the continent: the East and West coasts and the Gulf of Mexico.

Read the rest....

ILLINOIS BE DAMNED, WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE TEXAS!!

TEXAS LAST MEAL
SAMUEL GALLAMORE
January 14, 2003

The first of the year....

LAST MEAL: A disheartening...no final meal request.

The Skinny: Samuel Gallamore was sentenced to death for the 1992 murders of Clayton Kenney, 83; his partially-paralyzed wife, Juliana, 74, and their daughter, Adrienne Arnot, 44, at their rural home near Kerrville in central Texas.

Gallamore and an accomplice were on crack cocaine the night of March 29, 1992, when they went to the Kenney house looking for drug money. His partner had once cared for Mrs. Kenney at an area nursing home. After killing them, they fled with cash and valuables, including silver servings and a rare spoon collection.

It took 18 months for police to track down Gallamore. He had moved to Chicago, where he was working as a home repairman.

ROBERT FROST MOMENT: At the trail, jurors heard a poem Gallamore wrote from his jail cell during his trial in which he described the begging and pleading of "the people I sat and watched bleed. I say I am guilty and that is true. Now I ask mercy from all twelve of you."

Last words and writings and such: In a written statement Gallamore prepared before the execution the condemned man apologized for the murders to a relative of the victims who was a witness.

"I would like to apologize and say how sorry I am but words seem so hollow and cheap," he said. "Their death should not have happened, but it did. I'm so sorry that all of this took place."

GRINCH MOMENT: Gallamore also said that in the last hour of his life, his heart grew because relatives of the slain victims said they forgave him.

"You have given me more hope than I have had in a long time," he said in his note. "If I could change things I would, not for my sake but for all those who have loved me over the years and for those who have forgiven me."

REFLECTION IS GOOD: "My life is worthless since I've done this," said Gallamore, who says he began using marijuana when he was 5, dropped out of school as a teenager and often fought to protect his older brother who was in a gang.

"When it comes to having a life, you can pretty much say mine was a failure," he said. "I was just a mixed-up, confused kid. A lot of it had to do with the drugs. ... If it wasn't for me shooting the bathtub crank we were making, I wouldn't be (on death row.)"

Factoids: The accomplice received a life sentence.

Both the victim’s family and the family of the individual sentenced to die can have up to five people attend the execution,

Gallamore was the first of 18 convicted killers currently scheduled for execution in Texas this year. Six others also are set to die in January. Thirty-three were executed last year by the state and 290 have been put to death since the state restored the death penalty in 1982.

WEDNESDAY TV NOTE:

Oprah!

The Governor Who Emptied Death Row (PG)

Hours from leaving office…a governor spares 167 men and women sentenced to die. Today, hear from the families of the victims. Plus, meet the three fully pardoned men who now walk free and the former governor at the center of it all.

THE DEAD MAN EATING STORE IS OPEN!

Shirts, baseball caps, boxer shorts, lunch boxes, stickers, frisbees and thongs, baby, thongs!

Let's see Gov. Ryan stop this!

Jamaica, Man, Jamaica...

Jamaica May Try Hanging

Jamaica plans to bring back hanging to try to stem a rise in violent crime, the country's leader says.

"The Jamaican people are substantially agreed on the need to resume the death penalty," Prime Minister P. J. Patterson said in a televised speech on Sunday night. "We intend to heed the voice of the people."

The police say that 971 people have been killed in Jamaica so far this year. Last year a record 1,139 people were killed. The last hanging in Jamaica took place in 1988.

Gov. Ryan was a little too late for Pogo...





John Wayne Gacy, the subject of DME's one man show "Dead Clown Walking."

Executed: in Illinois May 10, 1994....