Andrew Wessel Six was executed in Missouri on August 20, 1997, for the murder of Kathy Allen, a 12-year-old girl from Ottumwa, Iowa. He and his uncle, Donald Petary, were arrested in April 1987, and in 1988 a Missouri jury convicted Six of first-degree murder. The jury could not agree on a punishment, and the trial judge imposed a sentence of death. Six was 32 years old when it was carried out.
The case did not end with his death. In January 2014 Iowa's Division of Criminal Investigation announced that its cold case unit had linked Six by evidence to the 1984 deaths of three people in southeast Iowa: Justin Hook Jr., Tina Lade and Sara Link. Six was never charged with those deaths and no court has made a finding about them. They are attributed to him by investigators, who said the evidence tied him to two of the three and that they were confident he was responsible for all of them.
The case concerned the death of Kathy Allen, 12, of Ottumwa, Iowa, in April 1987. She died in Missouri. Six and Petary were arrested the following day, and both faced prosecution in federal and state court.
Kathy Allen was 12 years old. The charge on which Six was convicted was murder in the first degree, with other charges brought alongside it.
Six and Petary were first prosecuted in federal court on a kidnapping charge. Six had already been sentenced to 200 years' imprisonment on that charge before the state murder case came to trial, and Petary received a similar federal term.
Missouri then pursued a separate trial on a charge of murder in the first degree and sought the death penalty. The state continued with this second trial despite concern about the cost to the county where it was held. The jury found Six guilty of first-degree murder but could not agree on the punishment. Under the Missouri statute then in force, section 565.030.4, the judge was left to decide the sentence. In July 1988 he sentenced Six to death, having found three statutory aggravating circumstances and one further aggravating circumstance not listed in the statute. The judge also found several mitigating circumstances, and concluded that they did not outweigh the aggravating ones.
Six's lawyers argued afterward that the jury had never heard about his early treatment for hyperactivity, his mother's failure to give him prescribed medication, or the neglect and physical abuse of his childhood. A judge imposing death after a jury could not agree was an unusual course.
The Missouri Supreme Court heard the direct appeal together with an appeal from the denial of postconviction relief under Rule 29.15. Sitting as a full court, it affirmed the conviction and the sentence in a decision handed down on March 5, 1991. Six appealed, among other points, from the first-degree murder conviction itself. Rehearing was denied on April 9, 1991, and the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case later that year (502 U.S. 871).
The Missouri Supreme Court later summarily denied a motion to recall its mandate and a state habeas petition under Rule 91. Six then turned to the federal courts. In 1995 the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus (Six v. Delo, 885 F. Supp. 1265). The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that denial in 1996 (94 F.3d 469).
The Eighth Circuit rejected each ground he raised. These included claims that his lawyers were ineffective at the penalty phase, claims that several issues had been procedurally defaulted, challenges to the sentencing procedure and the jury instructions, complaints about the prosecutor's remarks and about judicial bias, the absence of an instruction on a lesser offense, and a challenge to the adequacy of the Missouri Supreme Court's proportionality review.
In Missouri, the governor has final authority over clemency, acting on recommendations from the Board of Pardons and Parole. In August 1997 Governor Mel Carnahan was urged to commute the death sentences of four prisoners, Six among them. The sentence was not commuted, and Six was executed in Missouri on August 20, 1997.
Petary, who had also been condemned for the murder, died in prison in 1998 while awaiting execution.
In April 1984, three people died within days of each other in the area of Drakesville in Davis County and Eldon in Wapello County, Iowa. They were Justin Hook Jr., aged 20, Tina Lade, aged 19, of Ottumwa, and Sara Link, aged 41. Nobody was charged in 1984.
Six was one of the people investigators looked at in 1984. They had no direct evidence connecting him to the deaths, and the sheriff of Wapello County later said there was not enough to charge him when he was first picked up. He did not cooperate when investigators approached him again before his execution.
In August 2011 the DCI Cold Case Unit, with the Davis County and Wapello County sheriff's offices, began a review of the case. On January 10, 2014, the DCI announced that evidence linked Six to Lade and Link, but not to Hook, and that the agencies were confident, on the grounds of the similar circumstances of the three deaths and their timing, that he was responsible for all three.
Because Six died in 1997, the 1984 deaths could not be brought to trial.
At the time of Six's trial, Missouri law allowed a trial judge to fix a sentence of death when a jury found a defendant guilty of first-degree murder but could not agree on punishment. That was the route taken in his case, and the Eighth Circuit upheld it against his challenges to the sentencing procedure. Missouri's capital cases were then reviewed on direct appeal by the state Supreme Court, which also considered whether the sentence was proportionate to those imposed in similar cases, and afterward by federal courts on habeas review. Six's case passed through each stage between 1988 and 1997.
Six was never charged with, tried for or convicted of the 1984 deaths. The attribution rests on the announcement of Iowa investigators in 2014 and was made after his death, so it was never tested in court. The evidence tied him to two of the three; the link to the third rests on the investigators' judgment about the similar circumstances and timing. A motive has not been established.
April 1984: Justin Hook Jr., Tina Lade and Sara Link die in the Drakesville and Eldon area of Iowa; no one is charged.
April 1987: Kathy Allen, 12, of Ottumwa, Iowa, dies in Missouri; Six and Petary are arrested.
1988: Six is sentenced to 200 years on a federal kidnapping charge and is convicted of first-degree murder in Missouri; in July 1988 the trial judge sentences him to death.
March 5, 1991: the Missouri Supreme Court affirms the conviction and sentence; rehearing is denied April 9, 1991; certiorari is denied.
1995: the federal district court denies habeas relief.
1996: the Eighth Circuit affirms.
August 20, 1997: Six is executed in Missouri.
1998: Petary dies in prison.
August 2011: the DCI Cold Case Unit begins its review of the 1984 deaths.
January 10, 2014: Iowa investigators announce the link between Six and the 1984 deaths.