Is Missouri About to Execute an Innocent Man?

The answer is yes if you believe a story by Matalie Neysa Alund in USA Today.  The headline reads “Missouri set to execute `loving father’ whose DNA wasn’t on murder weapon, attorneys say.”  Habitual felon Marcellus Williams will be executed tomorrow barring a last minute stay. He was convicted of killing 42-year-old Felicia Gayle on August 11, 1998, while burglarizing her home. Her husband discovered her body, which had been stabbed 43 times. A 2003 Missouri Supreme Court decision describes a random and brutal killing.  Update:  Williams was executed without incident Tuesday.

On the day of the murder, Williams parked his grandfather’s car at a bus stop and rode the bus to a nearby town looking for a house to break into. When he knocked on the door of the Gayle home, nobody answered. He then broke an adjacent window, reached in and unlocked the door. Inside the house Williams heard a shower running upstairs. He went to the kitchen, found a butcher knife and waited. When she stepped out of the shower, Felicia thought she heard someone downstairs and called out.  When nobody replied she came down stairs and Williams attacked her with the knife. According to the coroner, seven of the 43 knife wounds would have been fatal. After the murder, Williams went upstairs and washed off. He stole one of the husband’s jackets to cover up the blood on his shirt. He then took Mrs. Gayle’s purse and her husband’s laptop computer.

After a bus ride home, Williams picked up his girlfriend. She noticed blood on Williams shirt and saw him throw the shirt and jacket into a sewer drain. She also saw the stolen laptop and purse in the trunk of Williams’ car. He sold the laptop days later to a man who later gave testimony at trial.  The girlfriend testified to seeing Felicia Gayle’s Missouri identification and other items belonging to her in the stolen purse. Two weeks after the murder, Williams was arrested and jailed for an unrelated crime. Directly after his release from jail, Williams’ cellmate went to the police and reported that, after they both saw a television news report in jail about the murder, Williams described how he had killed Felicia Gayle. At that time, the cellmate shared details of the murder which had not been revealed to the public.

Following his conviction and death sentence, multiple courts have reviewed and rejected Williams’ claims of innocence, trial error and challenges to the state’s execution method.

The major last minute-claims his attorneys and USA Today are now making is that forensic testing did not discover Williams’ DNA on the knife and that his former girlfriend and cellmate were lying. Those claims have been reviewed and denied. A lack of DNA most likely means he did a good  job washing off the knife. It is not evidence of innocence.

Some other interesting facts about Williams include; that while he was standing trial for murder he was serving a twenty-year sentence for other felonies, and that while in county jail he attempted to escape and attacked a guard with a metal pipe. None of this made it into the USA Today story. The  paper did portray him as the victim of an abusive childhood, and suffered from the tragic loss of his brother.

His sentence for butchering an innocent woman should be carried out.