A man who raped and suffocated two women days after escaping from a prison work crew was put to death by injection early Friday, hours after Virginia executed a man convicted of fatally stabbing a woman.
Frank Middleton Jr., 33, was sentenced to death for the 1984 slaying of Shirley Mae Mack in Charleston. He had escaped while serving a six-year sentence for stabbing a 13-year-old boy.
Before he died, Middleton glanced at reporters and shouted, "I'm going into the Promised Land."
In Jarratt, Va., on Thursday night, Ronald Bennett was executed by injection for the murder of Anne Keller Vaden, 28, in 1985. Vaden was bound and strangled with pantyhose, bludgeoned and stabbed four times. Bennett, 42, was a maintenance man in the apartment complex where Vaden lived. Her father found her body moments after she was killed.
A year after the murder, Bennett's ex-wife, Mary Bennett, talked to a friend about the killing, and the friend called police.