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North Carolina Executes Earl Richmond Jr. for the 1991 Murders of Helisa Hayes and Her Two Children

Richmond, a friend of the family, was a pallbearer at their funerals. He was also serving a federal life sentence for killing an Army clerk at Fort Dix months earlier.

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Illustration of people holding candles on a path beside a razor-wire prison fence on a foggy night. Not an actual scene from the case.

Earl Richmond Jr. served as a pallbearer at the funerals of a woman and two children he had killed. On May 6, 2005, North Carolina executed him for their murders.

Richmond, 43, was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 2:19 a.m. at Central Prison in Raleigh. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to hear his final appeal the evening before, and Gov. Mike Easley then denied clemency. He was the second person executed in North Carolina that year and the 36th since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977. "I am a new man, not in the eyes of man, but in the eyes our creator," Richmond said in a handwritten statement released after his death.

Helisa Stewart Hayes, 27, and her children, Phillip, 8, and Darien, 7, were killed in Cumberland County in November 1991. Richmond, the best friend of Helisa Hayes's former husband, knew the family well. A Cumberland County jury convicted him on May 24, 1995, of the first-degree murders of all three and the first-degree rape of Hayes, and sentenced him to death for each killing.

After his arrest in North Carolina, Richmond was charged in the April 1991 killing of Army Spc. Lisa Ann Nadeau, 24, of Plainfield, Connecticut, who was found dead in her residence at the Fort Dix base in New Jersey. He was convicted of her murder in federal court in New Jersey on May 28, 1993, and sentenced to life in prison.

The Associated Press dated Lisa Ann Nadeau's killing to April 5, 1991, while the federal appeals court gave April 4.

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