The state of Delaware executed a man Tuesday for the shotgun slaying of a 67-year-old woman, while in Texas a man was put to death for stabbing and slashing his former boss to death during a robbery.
Kenneth DeShields, 33, was executed by injection in a trailer on the grounds of the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna.He was sentenced to die for the August 1984 killing of Elizabeth Reed, a Democratic committeewoman who worked part-time at the Sussex County landfill.
Hours earlier, in Huntsville, Texas, Richard James Wilkerson, 29, was pronounced dead shortly after midnight CDT.
"I'd just like to say I don't hate nobody," Wilkerson said in a final statement. "What I did was wrong. I just hope everybody is satisfied with what's about to happen."
Wilkerson, a 10th-grade dropout, was 19 when he and two companions murdered the manager of a Houston amusement center from which Wilkerson had been fired two weeks earlier. Anil Varughese, 18, was stabbed 42 times and had his throat slashed.
One witness said that after the slayings, Wilkerson laughed as he recalled how he "jiggled that knife" inside Varughese's head. One companion is on death row while the third, 16 at the time of the killings, got a life sentence.
The trio were also believed to have killed three other young men during the robbery.
In the Delaware case, prosecutors said DeShields killed Reed for her car and money so he could take his girlfriend to a family reunion.