McALESTER − The 25th and final execution of 2024 in the United States was carried out Thursday when an admitted child killer was put to death on his birthday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
Kevin Ray Underwood, 45, was pronounced dead at 10:14 a.m., according to Lance West with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections..
Eight other states carried out executions in 2024, including Indiana on Wednesday for the first time in 15 years. Underwood was the fourth inmate to be executed this year in Oklahoma.
He was given a lethal injection for murdering a 10-year-old neighbor, Jamie Rose Bolin, in 2006 in his Purcell apartment.
Jamie Rose Bolin
The grocery store stocker hit Jamie over the head with a cutting board and then suffocated her on April 12, 2006. He was 26 at the time of the crime. The FBI found the girl’s nearly decapitated body in a plastic tub in his bedroom closet two days later.
He confessed he had prepared for months to carry out his sexual and cannibalistic fantasies. He said he chose Jamie because she was a “convenient” victim.
In his confession, he said his original plan was to cut off his victim’s head and set it on his desk “so it could like watch me.” He said he wanted to keep the corpse in his bed, “sleeping with it and having sex with it for a day or two,” before butchering and cooking it.
He said he did try to have sex with Jamie’s body but abandoned his plan to cook and eat it.
His attorneys described him as a mentally ill genius who gave in to his fantasies after becoming addicted to internet pornography. They also said he was a victim of bullying.
His diagnoses since his arrest included autism spectrum disorder. “He ultimately lost his ability to discern fantasy from reality,” said Kim Spence, an expert on that disorder who evaluated Underwood at the penitentiary for over 11 hours.
Jurors at a 2008 trial quickly found him guilty of first-degree murder. They were split 10-2 on punishment at first but reached a unanimous decision on a death sentence after eight hours.
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The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-0 on Dec. 13 not to recommend clemency. Attorney General Gentner Drummond and his assistants told the board Underwood’s crimes “remain some of the most depraved and notorious in Oklahoma history.”
The execution went forward after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his emergency request for a stay. His attorneys had complained his clemency hearing was unfair because it wasn’t before a full board of five members.
In dispute in his final days was whether he truly regretted what he had done. When he was caught, he had told the FBI, “I’m going to burn in hell.”
At his clemency hearing, he apologized for his crimes. “I recognize that although I do not want to die … I deserve to for what I did,” he said via a video feed from the penitentiary. “And gif my death could … change what I did, I would gladly die.”
However, the state’s attorneys called him remorseless and manipulative. They showed the board a recent message he sent a female acquaintance. “What I did doesn’t weigh on me and constantly torment me the way the state wishes it would, partly as I have virtually no memory of the event,” he wrote Nov. 12.
For his last meal Wednesday, he requested chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, pinto beans, a hot roll, a cheeseburger and fries, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections told the media in a fact sheet.
Oklahoma has now carried at 210 executions at the state penitentiary since they started there in 1915, according to the fact sheet.
The scheduling of Underwood’s execution on his birthday was a coincidence. Two years ago, death row inmate Richard Fairchild also was executed on his birthday.
The Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester is shown at sunrise Thursday. Kevin Ray Underwood was the 210th inmate executed there since December 1915.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals will schedule the next execution after being notified of Underwood’s death. Next on the list is Wendell Grissom, who was convicted of murder for a fatal shooting in 2005 during a burglary of a rural Blaine County home.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma executes Kevin Ray Underwood for 2006 murder of 10-year-old