Associated Press

BONNE TERRE, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri man was executed Tuesday for breaking into a woman’s home and killing her, despite calls from her family and prosecutors to sentence him to death and send him to prison for the rest of his life.

Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted of the 1998 murder 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 a double setback Monday when, almost simultaneously, Republican Gov. Mike Parson denied him a pardon and the Missouri Supreme Court refused to grant him a stay of execution. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene Tuesday.

Williams was put to death despite questions raised by his attorneys about the jury selection at his trial and the handling of evidence in the case. His request for clemency focused on the way Gayle’s family wanted Williams’ sentence commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“The family defines closure as allowing Marcellus to live,” the petition reads. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”

Last month, Gayle’s family members gave their blessing to an agreement between the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office and Williams’ attorneys to commute the sentence to life in prison. But acting on an appeal from the office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the state Supreme Court overturned the agreement.

Williams was among death row inmates in five states scheduled to be sentenced to death in the course of a week — an unusually high number that defies a years-long decline in the use of and support for the death penalty in the U.S. The first was executed Friday in South Carolina. Texas was also scheduled to execute an inmate Tuesday night.

Gayle, 42, was a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 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.

According to authorities, Williams stole a jacket to cover up the blood on his shirt. His girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. She said she later saw the bag 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 incarcerated on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the killing and provided details about the murder.

Williams’ attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole had both been convicted of crimes and were seeking a $10,000 reward. They said fingerprints, a bloody shoe print, hair and other evidence at the crime scene did not match Williams’.

A forensic examiner testified that the killer was wearing gloves.

Tuesday marked the third time Williams has faced execution. He was less than a week away from a lethal injection in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court stayed it, giving his attorneys time to conduct additional DNA testing.

Williams was hours away from execution in August 2017 when then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay. Greitens appointed a panel of retired judges to investigate the case. But that panel never reached a conclusion.

Questions about the DNA evidence also led St. Louis District Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams’ guilt. But just days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new tests showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the DA’s office who had handled the knife without gloves after the original forensic lab tests.

Without DNA evidence to point to an alternative suspect, attorneys for the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with the prosecution: 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 is not an admission of guilt, but is treated as such for sentencing purposes.

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 Sept. 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments had all 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 the seven black potential jurors.

Larner testified at the August hearing that he rejected a potential black juror, in part because he looked too much like Williams. Williams’ attorneys said the ruling showed undue racial bias.

Larner said the jury selection process had been fair.

Williams was the third inmate in Missouri to be put to death this year and the 100th since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1989.

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AP writer Mark Sherman contributed from Washington. Salter reported from O’Fallon, Missouri.