A Missouri man was executed Tuesday for breaking into a woman’s home and killing her, despite calls by her family and the prosecutor’s office that put him on death row to let him serve out the rest of his life in prison.
Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted in the 1998 killing of Lisha Gayle, who was repeatedly stabbed during the burglary of her suburban St. Louis home.
Williams’ hopes of having his sentence commuted to life in prison suffered dual setbacks Monday when, almost simultaneously, Republican Gov. Mike Parson denied him clemency and the Missouri Supreme Court declined to grant him a stay of execution. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene Tuesday.
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.
“The family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live,” the petition stated. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”
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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.
Williams was among death row inmates in five states who were scheduled to be put to death in the span of a week — an unusually high number that defies a yearslong decline in the use and support of the death penalty in the U.S. The first was carried out Friday in South Carolina. Texas was also slated to execute a prisoner on Tuesday evening.
Gayle, 42, was a social worker and former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. Prosecutors at Williams’ trial said he broke into her home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard the shower running and found a large butcher knife. Gayle was stabbed 43 times when she came downstairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.
Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to conceal blood on his shirt. His girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. She said she later saw the purse and laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later.
Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was jailed on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the killing and provided details about it.
Williams’ attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole were both convicted of felonies and wanted a $10,000 reward. They said that fingerprints, a bloody shoeprint, hair and other evidence at the crime scene didn’t match Williams’.
A crime scene investigator had testified the killer wore gloves.
Tuesday marked the third time Williams had faced execution. He was less than a week away from lethal injection in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court called it off, allowing time for his attorneys to pursue additional DNA testing.
Williams was hours from being executed in August 2017 when then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay. Greitens appointed a panel of retired judges to examine the case. But that panel never reached a conclusion.
Questions about DNA evidence also led St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new testing showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the prosecutor’s office who handled it without gloves after the original crime lab tests.
Without DNA evidence pointing to any alternative suspect, Midwest Innocence Project attorneys reached a compromise with the prosecutor’s office: Williams would enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without parole. A no-contest plea isn’t an admission of guilt but is treated as such for the purpose of sentencing.
Judge Bruce Hilton signed off, as did Gayle’s family. But Bailey appealed, and the state Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to proceed with an evidentiary hearing, which took place last month.
Hilton ruled on Sept. 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments all had been previously rejected. That decision was upheld Monday by the state Supreme Court.
Attorneys for Williams, who was Black, also challenged the fairness of his trial, particularly the fact that only one of the 12 jurors was Black. Tricia Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project said the prosecutor in the case, Keith Larner, removed six of seven Black prospective jurors.
Larner testified at the August hearing that he struck one potential Black juror partly because he looked too much like Williams — a statement that Williams’ attorneys asserted showed improper racial bias.
Larner contended that the jury selection process was fair.
Williams was the third Missouri inmate put to death this year and the 100th since the state resumed use of the death penalty in 1989.
