With country music playing on his headphones, a man was executed by injection Wednesday 20 years after being convicted of murdering a schoolteacher.
Duncan McKenzie Jr. was the first person to be executed since 1943 in Montana, a state that was legendary for dispensing swift frontier justice.Corrections officials said McKenzie, 43, was cooperative and even joked with staff as the execution neared. After a last meal of steak, french fries, salad, milk and orange sherbert, he was taken to the execution chamber at 11:40 p.m., listening to an album by singer Marty Robbins.
Asked if he had any last words, McKenzie shook his head. The lethal drugs were injected with the headphones still on his ears.
After McKenzie stopped breathing, the music was audible in the silence of the chamber.
A spokesman for Gov. Marc Racicot said officials granted one of McKenzie's last requests, to be allowed to listen to music during his execution. The prison provided the tape player, and the tape was McKenzie's.
McKenzie maintained his innocence in the 1974 kidnapping and murder of 23-year-old Lana Harding, the teacher in a one-room rural school near the town of Conrad in Montana's wheat country.
McKenzie, then 22, was fresh out of prison after a three-year sentence for assaulting a woman. He had just bought an old truck and was heard boasting that he "broke in" his vehicles by having sex in them.
Hours later, Harding was attacked in her living quarters next to the school. Her body was found in a snowy field. She had been raped, choked and beaten.
McKenzie's truck was seen heading toward the field the night of the murder. His bloody gloves were found nearby. Blood was found in the bed of his truck.
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