BONNE TERRE, Mo. (KTVI) – Despite protestations from the prosecutor’s office that sent him to death row and anti-death penalty advocates, as well as calls for clemency from the victim’s family and two men famously convicted by the Missouri justice system for murders they did not commit, the state executed Marcellus Williams late Tuesday afternoon.
Williams, 55, died via a lethal dose of pentobarbital. The execution was carried out just after 6 p.m. on Sept. 24 at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri. He was declared dead at 6:10 p.m.
Earlier that day, Williams released his final statement: “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation!!!”
Williams’ last meal was served at 10:53 a.m. Tuesday and included chicken wings and tater tots, Karen Pojmann, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Corrections, said. His last visit was with Imam Jalahii Kacem, from 11:01 a.m. to 12:32 p.m. The imam was with Williams in the execution room.
Williams’ son and two attorneys were in one room, with state agents and three selected media members in the other. Pojmann said members of Lisha Gayle’s family did not attend the execution and chose not to release a statement through the Department of Corrections.
Williams was convicted of first-degree murder in the August 1998 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle during a robbery of her suburban St. Louis home. He had long maintained his innocence.
Williams was put to death despite questions his attorneys raised over jury selection at his trial and the handling of evidence in the case. His clemency petition focused heavily on how Gayle’s relatives wanted Williams’ sentence commuted to life without the possibility of parole.
Last month, Gayle’s relatives gave their blessings to an agreement between the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney’s office and Williams’ attorneys to commute the sentence to life in prison. But acting on an appeal from Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office, the state Supreme Court nullified the agreement.
Tricia Rojo Bushnell, Williams’ attorney and executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday morning seeking a stay of the execution. That appeal was denied just over an hour before the execution.
Gayle, a social worker who previously worked as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was found stabbed to death inside her home in August 1998. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen. Investigators and prosecutors claimed Williams broke a windowpane to get inside the home, heard water running in the shower, and found a large butcher knife. When Gayle came downstairs, they said Williams stabbed her 43 times and left the knife in her throat.
Prosecutors said Williams confessed to the killing to his former girlfriend after she found Gayle’s purse in Williams’ car. She also said Williams threatened to kill her and her family if she told anyone about it. A jailhouse informant also testified that Williams bragged about the murder to him.
Defense attorneys, then and now, said the girlfriend and informant were convicted felons only interested in reward money. However, Governor Mike Parson’s statement said the girlfriend never inquired about the money, and the informant provided investigators with details about the crime that were never made public.
Following Monday’s rejection of the appeals, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, who was not involved in the original case, said in a statement that his office still had questions “about the integrity of (Williams’) conviction.”
“Even for those who disagree on the death penalty, when there is a shadow of a doubt of any defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option,” Bell said. “As the St. Louis County prosecutor, our office has questions about Mr. Williams’s guilt but also about the integrity of his conviction.”
Parson, however, disagreed. The governor, a former county sheriff who has not granted clemency for capital punishment during his entire tenure as the state’s chief executive, said Williams received ample consideration from the justice system.
This was Missouri’s third execution of 2024. Brian Dorsey and David Hosier were executed earlier this year. Nine inmates across the state are awaiting execution. Christopher Collings is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3 for the 2007 rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in Stella, Missouri.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
