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Wesley Purkey executed for 1998 kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Long

The federal government executed Wesley Purkey, who also beat 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales to death, after the Supreme Court rejected his dementia claims 5-4.

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AI-generated illustration, not the real place or event: a press staging area outside a prison on a summer night, folding chairs and TV lights

Twenty-two years after he stabbed a 16-year-old girl to death in his basement, Wesley Ira Purkey was put to death by lethal injection at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. His time of death was 8:19 a.m. EDT on Thursday, July 16, 2020. He was the second federal prisoner executed that week, after a 17-year pause in federal executions.

Jennifer Long was walking along a sidewalk in Kansas City, Missouri, on January 22, 1998, when Purkey pulled over and asked her if she wanted to party. The rest of the story comes from his own confession to the FBI, as the federal appeals court later summarized it. He bought her gin, and when he said he had to go home to Kansas she asked to be let out of his truck. Instead he slid a boning knife under his thigh and drove her to his house in Lansing, Kansas. In the basement he raped her, and when she tried to get away he stabbed her again and again. Over the following days he cut up her body, burned it in his fireplace and dumped what was left in a septic pond in Clearwater, Kansas.

No one knew. Nine months later Purkey was working for a plumbing company when he answered a service call at the Kansas City, Kansas, home of Mary Ruth Bales, an 80-year-old woman who had suffered from polio and walked with a cane. He came back and beat her to death in her bedroom with a claw hammer. A neighbor saw him in her back yard when he returned to the house, and he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to her murder and faced life in a Kansas prison.

It was Purkey himself who brought Jennifer's death to light. From his state prison cell he contacted a Kansas City, Kansas, police officer about the killing, hoping, the appeals court found, to serve his life sentence in the more comfortable surroundings of a federal penitentiary. Instead, in November 2003, a federal jury convicted him of Jennifer's interstate kidnapping, rape and murder and decided he should die.

His lawyers fought the execution to the end. They argued that his mind had deteriorated so badly that he no longer understood why he was being executed, and said he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other conditions. Hours before he died, the Supreme Court cleared the way in a 5-4 ruling. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, wrote that going ahead "despite the grave questions and factual findings regarding his mental competency, casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries."

Strapped to the gurney, Purkey lifted his head slightly when asked for a final statement. "I deeply regret the pain and suffering I caused to Jennifer's family," he said. "I am deeply sorry." He apologized to his own daughter too. His last words were: "This sanitized murder really does not serve no purpose whatsoever. Thank you."

Jennifer's father, William Long, watched with her stepmother. "He needed to take his last breath; he took my daughter's last breath," he said afterward. "There is no closure, and there never will be because I won't get my daughter back."

The account of both murders comes from Purkey's confession to the FBI and his trial testimony, as summarized by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in 2013. The court places his service call at Mary Ruth Bales's home on the evening of October 26, 1998, and the killing after he returned; published accounts differ on the exact date of her death, so this story gives only the month.

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