Thomas Eugene Creech

Victims

5 murder convictions in 3 states - 2 in Idaho in 1976 for Edward Arnold and John Bradford, 2 further convictions elsewhere carrying life, and the 1981 killing of fellow prisoner David Dale Jensen to which he pleaded guilty. Authorities examined about eleven deaths and he claimed at one time to have killed as many as forty-two; NONE of the further claims was proved or charged

Years active

1967 - 1975 / 1981

Location

Nevada/Oregon/Wyoming/California/Arizona/Idaho, USA

Method

Shooting - Stabbing with knife - Beating - Strangulation

Status

Sentenced to death in Idaho on March 25, 1976 for the murders of Edward Arnold and John Bradford, commuted to life when the state’s mandatory death penalty was struck down, leaving him serving four life sentences. While serving them he beat a disabled fellow prisoner, David Dale Jensen, to death with a sock filled with batteries in 1981, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to death again in January 1983 by a judge rather than a jury. That sentence STANDS: he is the longest-serving prisoner on Idaho’s death row, held at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution. A death warrant set execution for February 28, 2024, but after the team spent over an hour and eight attempts trying to set an intravenous line in his hands, feet and legs, and his veins collapsed each time, the director halted it and the warrant expired. The Supreme Court had denied a stay that morning. Idaho amended its protocol to allow deep central vein access and issued a second warrant for November 13, 2024; a federal district court stayed that execution on November 6, 2024 to consider his claim that a second attempt after the first would be cruel and unusual punishment and offend double jeopardy. The parole board had refused him a clemency hearing in October 2024. He remains under sentence of death, aged seventy-five.

Creech was born in 1950 in Ohio and spent his twenties moving between western states. He was convicted of killing two men in Idaho in 1974 and sentenced to death in March 1976; the sentence was commuted to life when the United States Supreme Court struck down Idaho's capital scheme.

In 1981, while serving that sentence, he beat a fellow prisoner, David Dale Jensen, to death with a sock filled with batteries. He was sentenced to death again in January 1983.

Those named in the record are Edward T. Arnold and John W. Bradford, David Dale Jensen, Gordon Stanton and Charles Miller, Sandra Ramsamoog, nineteen; William Dean, Riogley McKenzie, Vivian Robinson and Paul Schrader, seventy.

He has told investigators over the years that he killed as many as forty people across several states, giving accounts involving contract killings, gang murders and human sacrifice. Detectives pursued these accounts and none produced a charge. The figure of ten in this roster is the middle of that range. Three murders are established.

His case has become the longest-running capital matter in Idaho and one of the longest in the United States. In January 2024 the state parole commission split evenly on clemency, which meant it failed.

On February 28, 2024 Idaho attempted to execute him by lethal injection. The medical team tried eight times to establish an intravenous line, in his arms, hands and legs, and could not. The execution was called off after about an hour and he was returned to his cell. It was the first execution attempt in Idaho in twelve years.

The state sought a further death warrant and the litigation that followed argued that a second attempt would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Idaho has since legislated to make the firing squad its primary method of execution, a change driven in part by what happened in that room.

The entry keeps the three convictions as the count and the forty as what he has said about himself. What the case is now cited for is not the killings but the failure of the machinery: a man kept alive for four decades to be executed, and then not executed because nobody could find a vein.