A convicted double murderer uttered three unusual last words before being executed by lethal injection.

Michael Dewayne Smith was convicted of fatally shooting two women, Janet Moore, 41, and Sharath Pulluru, 22, in two separate incidents in February 2002. Jurors agreed he should be executed for both deaths.

According to prosecutors, the death row inmate - who was alleged to be a gang member - was 19 when he killed Moore because he was looking for her son, who he thought had given his identity to cops, per The Independent.

Later on the same day, prosecutors said Smith then shot Pulluru - who was working as a store clerk at A&Z Food Mart - because he believed she had disrespected his gang. She was then doused in lighter fluid and set on fire, per The Mirror.

The 41-year-old inmate, whose attorneys have claimed is intellectually disabled, had been in custody for 20 years.

At a clemency hearing last month, he broke into tears as he spoke about his innocence regarding the crimes, saying: "I didn’t commit these crimes. I didn’t kill these people...I was high on drugs. I don’t even remember getting arrested," he added. However, his clemency application was denied 4-1.

In another interview with The Oklahoman, part of the USA TODAY Network, Smith pleaded: "I don't want to die, man...Who can ever be prepared to die, man? I sure don't want to die for something I didn't do."

Smith made the rare decision to not request a final meal before his scheduled death on Thursday (April 4). When asked if he had any last words, he responded, "Nah, I'm good," according to the Associated Press.

The convict died within minutes of receiving the lethal injection, reporters who witnessed it at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester disclosed. He was pronounced dead at 10:20ET, the Department of Corrections confirmed, per BBC News.

The family of Moore released a statement declaring that "justice has been served" and thanking officers. "It does not go unnoticed or in vain, as we were constantly reminded this is justice for a loss that has caused a ripple for generations to come," the family wrote.

Sharath Babu Pulluru's family also said that Sharath "will forever live in our hearts".

Smith has become the first person to be put to death in Oklahoma this year. He's also the 12th inmate to be put to death since the state resumed executions in 2021.

He was also convicted at a separate trial of second-degree murder for the fatal shooting of a man outside an Oklahoma City club in November 2001. He had confessed to police that he handed the gun to the shooter.

Reverend Don Heath, Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty chair, made the following statement in response to the execution, describing Smith as a troubled and vulnerable young man with intellectual disabilities.

"He was ill-served by advisers who encouraged him to proclaim his innocence instead of accepting responsibility for his crimes. That cost him any chance for clemency," Heath said, per The Independent. "He needed mercy and forgiveness and got none."

Featured image credit: Oklahoma Department of Corrections

A woman has married the man who was previously convicted of fatally shooting her brother in 1989, as he awaits a new trial over the alleged murder.

News 5 Cleveland reports that John Tiedjen and Crystal Straus - both from Cleveland, Ohio - tied the knot over the weekend, with the defendant's attorney, Kimberly Corral, officiating the nuptials.

Tiedjen proposed to Straus over the phone on New Year's in 2020, before the pair even knew he would be released from prison, the Washington Post reports.

Per Boston 25 News, on July 22, 57-year-old Tiedjen was released on bond after spending 32 years behind bars for allegedly taking the life of then 18-year-old Brian McGary.

Tiedjen was 25 when McGary's lifeless body was found in the apartment they shared. He had a stab wound and a fatal gunshot wound to the head.

After an intense three days of interrogation, Tiedjen gave investigators a signed statement confessing to killing McGary in self-defense.

Straus and Tiedjen's romance began after she wrote the inmate a letter saying she forgave him for killing her brother.

"And I wrote her a letter back and I said I didn’t do it, take a look at this stuff," Tiedjen told News 5 Cleveland. "I believe in God too, and I know things about it, but I didn’t do it."

"I had no powder burns, no gunshot residue, no blood, no cuts, no scrapes, nothing on my person or me or my clothing," he added.

Tiedjen believes McGary must have died by suicide and Straus soon came to believe in his innocence.

"I love him obviously, if I didn’t love him I would not be sitting here with him," Straus told the above outlet."I spent the whole time through Covid analyzing and learning about this case. We’ll get through this, it's going to be challenging, there’s no doubt about it."

Tiedjen was released from prison after photographic evidence and police reports not used in the original trial were submitted in the case.

During the initial interrogation, a Cleveland detective reportedly deceived Tiedjen about how substantial the case against him was. The same detective also allegedly told him he would get a better deal if he confessed to shooting McGary in self-defense.

Featured image credit: Pexels / Emma Bauso

A man convicted of murdering his mother was executed on Wednesday (November 9) - though not before he uttered some chilling last words.

Tracy Beatty, 61, spent nearly 20 years on death row after being convicted of strangling and burying his mom, Carolyn Click.

The pair had a fiery argument at her East Texas mobile home in November 2003 which resulted in Beatty killing and burying his 62-year-old mother before blowing her money on drugs and alcohol.

After years of appealing his death sentence on the grounds of mental illness, Beatty's lawyers were eventually defeated in the Supreme Court. He was executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, where he received a lethal injection of pentobarbital.

According to a report by The New York Post, Beatty choked up and began to sob when a warden asked if he had any final words.

The inmate's voice broke as he addressed his wife, who watched him from behind glass in a viewing room.

"I just want to thank…I don’t want to you leave you, baby," he said.

"See you when you get there. I love you," Beatty added as he blew her a kiss.

He then addresses his fellow death row inmates, naming a few and saying: "I love you, brothers. See you on the other side."

Beatty was pronounced dead at 6:39PM. He is the fourth inmate to be executed in Texas this year, and the 13th to be executed nationwide.

According to prosecutors, Beatty had a "volatile and combative relationship" with his mother, who told neighbor Lieanna Wilkerson that he had once "beaten her so severely that he had left her for dead."

During Beatty's trial, Wilkerson testified that the pair were arguing daily in the run-up to Click's murder. "Several times [Beatty] had said he just wanted to shut her up, that he just wanted to choke her and shut her up," she testified.

Beatty's own legal team claimed that he was "clearly psychotic and has a complex paranoid delusional belief system". Despite their petition to the supreme court citing a medical expert's diagnosis of Beatty, it failed to overturn his death sentence.

Featured Image Credit: Image Source / Alamy

A death row inmate who died by lethal injection on Tuesday evening penned a chilling final statement before his execution.

Michael Tisius's execution went ahead on Tuesday (June 6) despite several former jurors saying they hoped his sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment.

The double murder convict fatally shot two jail guards – Leon Egley and Jason Acton – on June 22, 2000, during a botched plot to free his former cellmate.

The 42-year-old – who was 19 at the time of his crime – was said to have been neglected as a child and was homeless by the time he was in his early teenage years, KCTV5 reports.

The jury spent hours deliberating in July 2010 when asked to sentence Tisius for the murders. Ultimately, they decided on the death penalty.

More recently, six jurors, including two alternates, gave sworn affidavits saying they would either support or decline to oppose if Tisius' sentence was commuted to life in prison.

However, Tisius's execution ultimately took place on the scheduled date.

Per The Mirror, he shared in his final statement: "I am holding tightly to my faith. It’s all I have to take with me. I am sorry it had to come to this in this way. I wish I could have made things right while I was still here.

"I really did try to become a better man. I really tried hard to give as much as I could to as many as I could. I tried to forgive others as I wish to be forgiven. And I pray that God will forgive those who condemn me.

"Just as He forgave those who condemned Him. I am sorry. And not because I am at the end. But because I truly am sorry. And I need to say that I love you Truffle. Seacrest Out!"

"I feel angry and remorseful," former juror Jason Smith told The New York Times ahead of Tisius's execution. "I feel that I wronged Michael. I hated having a part in somebody dying."

Another former juror revealed that during the time of the 2010 death sentence, he was unable to read English – a requirement for jury duty in the state of Missouri. A federal court stayed Tisius' execution so that an investigation into the claim could be carried out, but an appeals court overruled that decision last week.

Tisius' lawyers are arguing that because Tisius was a teenager at the time of the murders, his brain was not yet fully developed and he was more susceptible to manipulation.

Roy Vance – the former cellmate who Tisius tried to free at the time of the killings – once bragged that the death row inmate was a "a kid in a grown man’s body and I knew I could manipulate him into what I wanted him to do," per the Kansas City Star.

In June 2000, Tisius was sent to the Randolph County Jail to serve a 30-day probation violation sentence for theft. He had previously met his cellmate, 27-year-old Roy Vance, through mutual friends. Vance was facing a 50-year sentence at the time.

Featured image credit: Paul Harris / Getty

A death row inmate made a statement to his victim's family before he was executed using a lethal injection.

James Osgood was put to death Thursday evening at 6:35PM CT, making him the second person executed in Alabama this year and the 14th across the United States, per USA Today.

According to Commissioner John Hamm of the Alabama Department of Corrections, it took the execution team five tries to successfully insert his IV.

His victim was 44-year-old Tracy Lynn Wilemon, a nursing home worker and mother who was rebuilding her life after a divorce.

On October 13, 2010, Osgood and his girlfriend — and Wilemon’s cousin — Tonya Vandyke, sexually assaulted and murdered her in what prosecutors described as a “twisted fantasy.”

Prosecutors said the pair attacked Wilemon in her bedroom. Both Osgood and Vandyke raped her and forced her to perform sex acts. Then, Osgood slashed her throat multiple times before stabbing her in the back.

“I remember seeing the fear in her eyes and seeing her shaking,” Osgood confessed during his police interview. “I know there was a lot of cutting involved but it wasn't a crime of violence. There was no anger involved. I was scared. She wasn't dying, so I kept cutting her throat and neck.”

He claimed he apologized during her final moments: “I told her I was sorry,” he said. “It was nothing against her. She just needed to quit fighting and go.”

Chief Assistant District Attorney C.J. Robinson described the murder to jurors in chilling detail: “A life was taken because James Osgood decided he wanted to fulfill some twisted fantasy to kill someone.” He added, “The same things you heard … that turned your stomach, turned him on.”

Osgood later admitted to a judge that he believed the death penalty was the appropriate sentence for his crime. “I've always been a firm believer in an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life,” he said in 2018. “If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. I screwed up. I deserve what I was given.”

Even in his final moments, Osgood remained blunt. “I’m a firm believer in, like I said in court, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. I took a life, so mine was forfeited,” he told the Associated Press. “I don’t believe in sitting here and wasting everybody’s time and everybody’s money.

“I’m not going to ask their forgiveness because I know they can’t give it. I regret taking her from them. I regret cutting her life short. I regret that I took one of God’s children. And I regret the pain and suffering that I caused, not only for the victim and her family, but to mine.”

He broke down in tears as the lethal injection took effect, saying simply, “Tracy, I apologize,” before losing consciousness.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey had a strong response following the execution. “The murder of Tracy Wilemon was premeditated, gruesome and disturbing, and tonight, the state carried out the death sentence of James Osgood.

“Both Mr. Osgood and his accomplice, who will never see the light of day, from the moment they were inspired by a Hollywood torture scene, set out to commit this heinous crime against Ms. Wilemon and are now paying the price.

“And let’s be clear: At the end of all of this, Mr. Osgood robbed Ms. Wilemon of her life, something that can never be reversed for her or her family. I pray that her loved ones can feel some sense of closure today.”

Vandyke, who helped commit the crime, is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison.

Featured image credit: Gregory Smith / Getty