OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – An Oklahoma court on Friday rejected a plea for leniency for a man convicted of torturing and killing a 10-year-old girl as part of a personal conviction, paving the way for him to be the 25th and final. was killed in the US this year.
Three members of Oklahoma’s Pardon and Parole Board voted against granting clemency to Kevin Ray Underwood, who is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday, his 45th birthday. An Indiana man, Joseph Corcoran, is expected to die Wednesday for killing four men in 1997 in what would be the Hoosier State’s first homicide in 15 years.
Underwood was convicted of murdering 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin in 2006. The girl was a neighbor of his Purcell home whom Underwood admitted to seducing in his apartment and hitting her over the head with a cutting board before strangling her to death.
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Underwood admitted to investigators in a videotaped confession played to the board on Friday that the killing was a fantasy and that he nearly decapitated the girl in his bathtub before abandoning his plan to eat her.
“I want to apologize to the victim’s family, to my family and to everyone in this room today who had to feel the horror of what I did,” Underwood said to the board via a video feed from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. “I can’t believe that I did those things. The person I was in the weeks leading up to that incident is not who I am now. “
Underwood’s lawyers argued that he deserved immunity from death because of his long history of abuse and serious mental health issues that included autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar and panic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and various sexual disorders. paraphilias.
His mother, Connie Underwood, tearfully asked the board for mercy for her son.
“I can’t imagine the pain that that precious girl’s family is going through every day,” Connie Underwood said. “I wish we had understood his pain before it led to this tragedy.”
Assistant Attorney General Aspen Layman urged the board to reject leniency, calling Underwood’s crime “one of the worst and worst murders in Oklahoma history.”
“Mr. Underwood chose Jamie because he thought he was young and vulnerable and easy to handle,” said Layman. “And even if we, as an enlightened society, can offer grace to those struggling with mental illness, we can expect them to refuse to plan to murder, rape, torture and eat the flesh of ten-year-old little girls.”
Several members of the Bolin family asked the board to reject Underwood’s clemency bid. The girl’s father, Curtis Bolin, was the one who was supposed to testify at the board, but he was suffocated when he held his head in his hand.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” he said.
Underwood was scheduled to receive a three-drug lethal injection Thursday inside the death chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It would be Oklahoma’s fourth homicide of the year and 25th in the nation if both his and Corcoran’s are done next week.