A man who was high on drugs and alcohol when he killed a bartender, a cook and his ex-wife was executed by injection early Saturday.
Three minutes after the drug began flowing through his veins, Richard Allen Moran, 42, was pronounced dead at 12:10 a.m. at Nevada State Prison.Just two days before his execution, Moran said he was ready to die for the August 1984 murders of bartender Sandra Devere, 24, and off-duty cook Russell Rhodes, 27, in a Las Vegas barroom. He killed his ex-wife, Linda Vandervoort, nine days after those murders and then tried to kill himself.
On Thursday, Moran apologized to his victims' families.
"You can't even begin to imagine what it feels like to know you've killed somebody," Moran said in a jailhouse interview with The Associated Press. "Innocent people, you know, not self-defense, not some scumbag who was beating his wife and you were coming to her rescue or something."
It's like "you turned in your membership card to the human race," he said.
Moran decided against any more last-minute appeals Friday after a federal court rejected his request for a stay of execution.
In the 90-minute interview, Moran said that while he didn't want to die, he also didn't like the alternative: spending the rest of his life in prison.
"I'm looking at Saturday as being out of prison, you know what I mean? That's not a bad thing," he said.
Moran, on Nevada's death row for 11 years, had been spending his last days in a high-security wing at Nevada State Prison, writing letters, having a final visit with his family and reading books - including "Dead Man Walking," the story of a nun who counsels death row inmates.
Moran said he had found inner strength by going back to the Catholic faith.