Florida Executes John Ruthell Henry, Paroled Killer Who Murdered His Estranged Wife and Her 5-Year-Old Son in 1985
Henry asked for forgiveness before he died. Courts turned away his lawyers' last appeals over his mental capacity.
Published
In 1983, John Ruthell Henry walked out of a Florida prison on parole after serving less than eight years for stabbing Patricia Roddy to death. Two years later he killed his estranged wife and her 5-year-old son. On June 18, 2014, Florida executed him.
Henry, 63, was pronounced dead at 7:43 p.m. in Starke after a lethal injection for the stabbing death of Suzanne Henry in Pasco County. Before he died he asked for forgiveness. "I can't undo what I've done. If I could, I would. I ask for your forgiveness if you can find it in your heart," he said. The U.S. Supreme Court and a federal appeals court had refused his lawyers' last efforts to stop the execution. His attorneys had argued that his childhood, family history and mental impairment left him functioning at the level of a person with an IQ of 70; in May, a panel of mental health experts concluded that he had no mental illness or intellectual disability and understood why he was to be put to death.
His was the third execution in the United States in less than 24 hours, after executions in Georgia and Missouri, and all three were the first since a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma that April revived concerns about capital punishment. Florida used a three-drug combination beginning with the sedative midazolam, and Henry's execution appeared to go normally.
Three days before Christmas 1985, prosecutors said, Henry, an unemployed bricklayer, went to Suzanne Henry's home to talk about buying a gift for her son, Eugene Christian, and the two fought over his living with another woman. He killed her, then drove the boy around for hours before killing him near Plant City in Hillsborough County.
The Associated Press described Patricia Roddy as Henry's common-law wife and said he pleaded no contest to second-degree murder in her 1976 death. Suzanne Henry's family said she had married him without knowing it.
Sources
- Florida man becomes 3rd executed in US in 24 hours, WSVN 7News (Associated Press)