Two men were scheduled to be executed in the United States on Thursday, including a Texas father convicted of beheading three young children in his care in a 2003 crime that shocked a community near the US-Mexico border.
In Oklahoma, James Pavatt was also scheduled to die by lethal injection for fatally shooting the estranged husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair.
Prosecutors maintain that Pavatt carried out the killing alongside the woman, who remains the only female prisoner on Oklahoma’s death row.
The United States is on course to record more than 40 executions for a second straight year, with Florida driving much of the increase as capital punishment faces renewed scrutiny.
Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would commute hundreds of death sentences before leaving office. Experts described the move as potentially the largest mass clemency action in US history.
Pavatt, 73, was scheduled to be executed at Oklahoma’s state penitentiary in McAlester.
John Allen Rubio, 46, was scheduled to be executed later in Texas at the state prison in Huntsville.
Texas man convicted in beheadings of three children
Rubio and his girlfriend, Angela Camacho, were accused of killing 3-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E. Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio inside the squalid, windowless apartment they shared in Brownsville, a Texas city on the border with Mexico.
Camacho pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence.
Rubio’s initial capital murder conviction was overturned by an appeals court, which found that statements from Camacho had been improperly admitted as evidence during his trial.
At his second trial, Rubio again pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was convicted once more and sentenced to death.
Court records show that Rubio was not the biological father of the two older children, but he raised them as though they were his own.
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Rubio claimed at various times that the children were possessed and that he was the “chosen one” destined to save the world. Defense experts diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, but prosecution experts rejected that assessment.
Defense experts testified that Rubio’s violent childhood, “toxic” parents, drug use and exposure to prostitution had impaired his development.
The apartment building where the children were killed was later demolished, and the site was converted into a park and community garden.
Oklahoma advertising executive killed in garage
Pavatt was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the 2001 killing of Rob Andrew, a 39-year-old advertising executive.
Andrew was fatally shot in the garage of the Oklahoma City home he had once shared with his wife while picking up their two young children before Thanksgiving.
Pavatt, who attended the same church as the Andrew family, was having an affair with Andrew’s wife, Brenda Andrew. The two were tried separately and each received a death sentence.
Several weeks before the shooting, Rob Andrew told police that someone was trying to kill him after the brake lines on his car had been cut.
After her husband’s death, Brenda Andrew told police that masked intruders had shot her in the arm and killed him.
Following the shooting, Pavatt and Brenda Andrew fled to Mexico with her two children. They were arrested three months later while returning to the United States.
During a clemency hearing last month, Pavatt said he was “not guilty of shooting anyone.” He said he had fallen in love with Brenda Andrew and believed “everything she told me.”
“It was not until my trial that I began to see the extent to which I had been manipulated by Brenda,” Pavatt told the board. “I can see why the jury believed that we were both involved in Rob’s murder.”
Prosecutors have said Pavatt and Andrew plotted to kill Rob Andrew and that, regardless of who fired the gun, both were equally responsible for the murder.
