Carroll Edward Cole was put to death by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison in Carson City on December 6, 1985. He was 47, according to the Las Vegas Sun, and he was the first person in Nevada to die by injection. He had been sentenced to death for strangling Marie Cushman in Las Vegas in 1979, a killing to which he pleaded guilty, and he had earlier been convicted of killing four other women: three in Dallas, by jury verdicts, and Kathlyn J. Blum in Nevada, on a guilty plea.
Those five convictions are the proven part of his record. The rest rests on his own word. At his Nevada sentencing hearing he told the judges he had killed at least 13 people and felt no remorse. United Press International reported on the eve of his execution that he had admitted killing 13 people besides Marie Cushman, most of them women, and described him as a drifter who had courted at least 10 women before strangling them. The Nevada Supreme Court recorded that, apart from a childhood companion, all of his victims had been women. Only five of these deaths ever led to a conviction.
Once he had changed his Nevada plea to guilty, he turned down every chance of escaping the death penalty. He acted as his own lawyer at the penalty hearing, objected when others tried to present mitigating evidence on his behalf, asked to be sentenced to death and filed no appeal. By 2005, the Las Vegas Sun reported, ten of the 11 men executed in Nevada since capital punishment resumed in the 1970s had been volunteers who gave up their appeals, and the paper counted Cole among those who wanted to be executed.
Little was reported about Cole's life before the killings for which he was convicted: not his date or place of birth, his schooling, his work, his military record or his marriages.
What was reported comes mostly from Cole himself. In several interviews in the last years of his life, UPI reported, he said the killings were "for revenge against my mother." He said his mother had abused him when he was a child and had made him keep her affairs secret from his father. Those statements were never tested in court, and no account from a relative was reported.
The Nevada Supreme Court's opinion contains one more detail from his past. It says that, except for a childhood companion it described as eight or nine years old, all of the people Cole had killed were women. The opinion does not name that child, give the year or place, or explain how the court came to include the death in its account. No charge was ever brought over it, and it rests only on his own account as the court recorded it.
Cole told different listeners different things about how many people he had killed, but the figure he gave the Nevada court was at least 13. He said he had usually been drinking. At the sentencing hearing he said he had been drunk when he committed a murder, but he insisted that he had known what he was doing. "I was drunk, but that's still not an excuse," he told the judges. "I was in my right mind."
UPI described him as a man who courted women and then strangled them. He also told interviewers about a killing in Oklahoma City. No charge in Oklahoma, and no identification of a victim there, was reported. The same is true of the other killings he described beyond the five for which he was convicted: they are his confessions, and no court ever weighed them.
One conviction on Cole's record came from Missouri. The three-judge panel that later sentenced him in Nevada found that he had pleaded guilty in Missouri to assault with intent to kill, a conviction for trying to strangle a woman. The panel listed the Missouri conviction among the earlier crimes of violence that made him eligible for the death penalty in Nevada.
Kathlyn J. Blum was killed in Nevada. The Nevada sentencing panel found that Cole had pleaded guilty to her murder, that he had strangled her with his hands, and that a judgment of conviction had been entered. The date and place of her death, her life and the sentence Cole received for her murder were not reported.
Marie Cushman lived in Las Vegas, and she was the woman for whose death Cole was executed. UPI reported that he met her in a bar in 1979, went with her to a motel and then killed her. In his own account to the Nevada court, as the Supreme Court summarized it, he said that after he and the victim went to a motel room he strangled her with his hands and a cord he had in his pocket.
Little else about Marie Cushman was reported: not her age, her work or her family. The Espy file of American executions, an archival record now held at the University at Albany, lists the crime for which Cole was executed as a 1979 murder in Clark County, Nevada.
Three women were killed in Dallas: Sally Thompson, Dorothy King and Wanda Faye Roberts. A jury in Texas found Cole guilty of murdering all three, and the Nevada sentencing panel found that he had strangled each of them with his hands. UPI reported in 1985 that he had received a life prison term for the Dallas killings.
The dates of the three deaths, the date and circumstances of Cole's arrest, the name of the court and the date of the trial were not reported. The women themselves appear in the record only as names, recorded in the findings of a court that had to list them to decide whether Cole should die.
Cole was charged in Nevada with the first degree murder of Marie Cushman. On his lawyer's advice he first pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Several psychiatrists then examined him. All agreed that he had been sane at the time of the crime and that he was competent to be tried. Cole then changed his plea to guilty of first degree murder. The court record does not give the date of the change.
His sentence was to be decided by a panel of three judges. Cole insisted on representing himself at the penalty hearing. The district court questioned him at length, as required by the United States Supreme Court's decision in Faretta v. California, before allowing it. The court also appointed standby counsel, whom Cole could consult if he chose, and separate amicus counsel to assist the panel.
At the hearing Cole made no objection to any of the evidence against him. He declined to offer any mitigating circumstances, and when amicus counsel tried to present some, he objected to that as well.
He spoke for himself. He told the panel he had killed at least 13 people. "I have no remorse," he said. He said that if he had the chance, he would kill again. "There's nothing good about me," he told the judges. He also said that if he were given a prison term instead of death, he would make every effort to escape. "I don't think anybody likes to do the rest of their time in a penitentiary," he said. He asked to be sentenced to death.
The panel found one aggravating circumstance under Nevada law: that he had previously been convicted of another murder or of a felony involving violence to another person. It supported that finding with five earlier convictions: the three Texas murders, the Nevada murder of Kathlyn J. Blum and the Missouri assault. It found no mitigating circumstances at all, and it concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that none outweighed the aggravating circumstance. The three judges voted unanimously for death, and the judgment of conviction and sentence of death was entered on October 12, 1984.
Cole did not appeal. Nevada law at the time gave a defendant who had pleaded not guilty, or not guilty by reason of insanity, an automatic appeal in a death case, which the defendant could waive within 30 days. The general deadline for an appeal was also 30 days, and Cole let it pass.
On April 25, 1985, the Nevada Supreme Court ordered the district court to appoint counsel for Cole to brief whether he had validly waived his right to appeal. Edward G. Marshall of Las Vegas was appointed and filed what the court called a detailed brief. Marshall's affidavit said that Cole had told him clearly and repeatedly that he wanted no appeal from his conviction and sentence, and that he wanted the case expedited.
The state was represented by Attorney General Brian McKay and by Robert J. Miller, the Clark County district attorney.
The Nevada Supreme Court decided the case on October 22, 1985, in an unsigned opinion, Cole v. State, 101 Nev. 585, 707 P.2d 545. It held that a decision to give up an appeal must be made intelligently and with full understanding, and it found that Cole was competent and had made such a decision.
The statute on automatic appeals in death cases did not mention defendants who had pleaded guilty. The court reasoned that a defendant who pleaded guilty must have at least the same right to waive review as one who went to trial, and it concluded that Cole had let the deadline pass deliberately, intending to waive his appeal and understanding the consequences.
The waiver did not end the court's work. Nevada law required the Supreme Court to review every death sentence, appeal or not. The court found that the record supported the panel's finding of an aggravating circumstance and its finding that there were no mitigating circumstances. It found nothing to suggest that passion, prejudice or any arbitrary factor had influenced the sentence, and it pointed to the care the district court had taken, including the appointment of amicus counsel. Weighing both the crime and the defendant, it found the sentence neither excessive nor disproportionate, citing its earlier decisions in Deutscher v. State and Bishop v. State. It affirmed the conviction and the sentence of death.
On the eve of his execution, as UPI reported on December 5, 1985, Cole was received into the Roman Catholic Church. The warden, Harol Whitley, told UPI that Cole had not listed any religion before; Father Dave Casaleggio baptized him. He spent his last hours talking with guards, watching television, playing Monopoly and talking with Catholic and Protestant chaplains. "He has a good attitude and is not displaying any anger," the warden said. For his last meal he ate jumbo shrimp, french fries, a tossed salad with French dressing and clam chowder.
In a final interview with KLAS-TV, as UPI reported it, Cole laughed often but trembled and admitted he was frightened. He said he would be lying if he claimed not to be worried, since everyone wants the easiest and most comfortable way to go, and he acknowledged that something might go wrong and cause him to suffer. None of it changed his decision. He said again that his crimes deserved the death penalty and that he would kill again if released. "I'm a danger to society," he said. He refused offers to appeal.
The state prison director, George Sumner, told UPI that Cole should die almost at once, unlike prisoners in the gas chamber, who had lived for several minutes. Guards were assigned to watch him for any risk of suicide in a seven by seven foot cell used for the last night. An hour before the execution, set for 2 a.m., he was to receive a sedative; he would then be strapped to a table and three drugs would be injected.
Outside the prison, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Quakers planned a vigil in protest against the death penalty.
Cole was executed by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison in Carson City on December 6, 1985. The Las Vegas Sun, recalling the execution in 2007, reported that when the drugs took effect his lips quivered, his eyes closed slowly and his stomach convulsed, and that he was pronounced dead five minutes later.
UPI had reported beforehand that his would be the first execution in the 13 western states since 1979, when Nevada executed Jesse Bishop in the gas chamber. Bishop, who had also refused his appeals and insisted on being executed, was the last person put to death by gas in Nevada, the Las Vegas Sun reported. Nevada had since switched to lethal injection, UPI noted.
Cole agreed that his brain could be removed after his death for research. Before the execution, UPI reported, a Las Vegas psychologist, Jan Bruener, wanted to learn whether cuts or disease in his brain might help explain his crimes. Shortly after he died, the neurosurgeon Lonnie Hammargren, who later became Nevada's lieutenant governor, removed the brain to look for lesions, holes, cuts or signs of disease. "But the brain was normal," Hammargren told the Las Vegas Sun.
Five women are named in the court record of Cole's convictions: Sally Thompson, Dorothy King and Wanda Faye Roberts in Texas, and Kathlyn J. Blum and Marie Cushman in Nevada. Almost nothing was reported about any of them beyond their names, where they died and how. The other people he said he killed, including the child he described, were not identified.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Sally Thompson, Dorothy King and Wanda Faye Roberts (jury verdicts, Texas); the murder of Kathlyn J. Blum (guilty plea, Nevada); the first degree murder of Marie Cushman (guilty plea, Las Vegas, death sentence affirmed); and assault with intent to kill in Missouri (guilty plea).
Confessed but never tried: the other killings he described, which brought his own total, as he gave it to the Nevada court, to at least 13. UPI reported that he admitted killing 13 people besides Marie Cushman; the Las Vegas Sun said he claimed more than a dozen. These counts differ slightly and none was tested in court.
Attributed only, on his own account as the court recorded it: the death of a childhood companion, whom the court described as eight or nine years old.
Not reported: his date and place of birth; the dates of the Dallas killings and the date of his arrest; and the date and place of Kathlyn Blum's death and his sentence for it.
Dates not reported: the death of a childhood companion, which Cole described and the Nevada Supreme Court recorded, never charged; his Missouri plea to assault with intent to kill; the killing of Kathlyn J. Blum in Nevada and his plea to her murder; the killings of Sally Thompson, Dorothy King and Wanda Faye Roberts in Dallas, his Texas jury convictions and life term; his Nevada insanity plea, psychiatric examinations and change of plea to guilty.
1979: he meets Marie Cushman in a Las Vegas bar and kills her.
October 12, 1984: a three-judge panel, after a hearing at which he represents himself and asks for death, sentences him to death.
April 25, 1985: the Nevada Supreme Court orders counsel appointed to examine his waiver of appeal.
October 22, 1985: Cole v. State; the court finds the waiver valid and affirms the conviction and sentence.
December 5, 1985 (UPI report): on the eve of his execution he is baptized a Catholic and eats his last meal.
December 6, 1985: executed by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison, Carson City, the first execution by injection in Nevada; his brain is removed for study and found normal.