On December 15, 1998, a prisoner in the Wyandotte County Jail in Kansas City, Kansas, got in touch with Detective Bill Howard of the city police. Wesley Ira Purkey, a 46-year-old plumber, was awaiting prosecution for the murder of an 80-year-old woman, and he wanted to talk about a kidnapping and homicide from earlier in the year. He also wanted an FBI agent there. His reason, as he told it, was simple: he expected a life sentence in Kansas, and he would rather serve it in a federal prison.
The killing he described was that of Jennifer Long, a 16-year-old from Independence, Missouri, who had vanished eleven months earlier. Until Purkey spoke, no one knew where she was. His confession solved her disappearance, and it led, five years later, to a federal death sentence he had not expected. He was executed on July 16, 2020, after the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, lifted a lower court's order that would have allowed him to argue that dementia had left him unable to understand why he was being put to death.
Purkey was born in 1952, according to the Eighth Circuit's 2005 opinion in his case. Most of what is on the record about his childhood comes from his federal sentencing hearing in 2003, where relatives and expert witnesses testified for the defense, and from filings his lawyers made later.
At that hearing his brother, Gary Hamilton, his daughter and an aunt testified that both parents abused him physically and emotionally. His father was an alcoholic who repeatedly assaulted Wesley and his brother and who later killed himself. His mother, Velma, also drank heavily; she mocked her son for stuttering and once threw a drink in his face while he struggled to speak. Two defense experts, Dr. Stephen Peterson and Dr. Mark Cunningham, told the jury that his mother sexually abused him from about the age of six until fourteen, and that his father, when Wesley was about fourteen, began paying for prostitutes for him. Dr. Peterson found a 1982 report from the Kansas State Reception Diagnostic Center that described Purkey as "having a serious personality disorder centered on psychosexual problems of identification." A clinical psychologist, Dr. Bruce Leeson, testified to significant frontal lobe damage that affected his ability to control impulses, and measured his IQ at 90. A later federal appeals court said his experts traced the brain damage mainly to injuries from car accidents.
In 2019 his lawyers added that he had been molested by a parish priest and mistreated by nuns, and said that he was diagnosed at fourteen with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression and psychosis. Those are his lawyers' statements, reported by the Associated Press; the jury did not hear about the priest.
By 1998 Purkey had spent much of his adult life in prison. At his federal trial the government put in evidence of thirteen earlier felony convictions: first-degree burglary in 1970; robbery and theft in 1976; aggravated escape from custody in 1978; and several counts of aggravated robbery, kidnapping, aggravated battery and firearms offenses in 1981. A man named Gregg Carlberg testified that in 1980 Purkey and a friend kidnapped him, drove him into the woods, shot him in the head and left him for dead. Another man, Gary Hatfield, who had been held with Purkey in an Oregon prison, testified that Purkey raped him at knifepoint in a prison kitchen. A prison gang expert told the jury that Purkey's tattoos, which included a swastika, "Aryan Pride" and Ku Klux Klan symbols, showed involvement with the Aryan Brotherhood. Defense witnesses later said he had asked the Bureau of Prisons to remove those tattoos and had tried to cover them with flesh-colored ink.
In 1998 he was living in Lansing, Kansas, a small city near Leavenworth, with his wife, Jeanette, and his stepchildren, and doing plumbing work. A 2002 Associated Press report said that around 1998 he had also lived in a trailer on land in Sedgwick County, near Wichita.
Jennifer Long was sixteen, a sophomore at East High School, a magnet school in Kansas City, Missouri, that has since closed. She lived in Independence. Her parents were William Long and Glenda Lamont; her father later married Olivia Long, Jennifer's stepmother. The court records and press reports say little else about her life, her interests or her friends.
On the morning of Thursday, January 22, 1998, she went to her first two classes at East High and left school at about 9:30 a.m., according to an FBI spokesman quoted by the Associated Press in 2002. A federal appeals court later wrote that she told the man who picked her up that she had left after an argument with some friends.
The account of what happened next comes almost entirely from Purkey himself: his statements to investigators in December 1998 and his own trial testimony, as the Eighth Circuit summarized them in 2013. There were no other witnesses.
That morning Purkey drove from Lansing to Kansas City, Missouri, for a job interview with a plumbing company. Afterward he smoked half a rock of crack cocaine. Sources differ on where he first saw Jennifer: the Eighth Circuit says she was walking on a sidewalk; the Seventh Circuit and an Associated Press report from the 2003 trial say it was at a small grocery store. He stopped and asked if she wanted to "party," then took her to a liquor store and bought her gin and orange juice. When he said he had to go home to Kansas, she asked to be let out of the truck. Instead, by his confession, he took a boning knife from the glove box and put it under his thigh, making it clear he would not let her go, and drove her across the state line to his house in Lansing, about thirty miles away.
In the basement, holding the knife, he raped her. When she tried to get away he caught her, and in the struggle he stabbed her repeatedly in the chest, neck and face. He told FBI Special Agent Dirk Tarpley afterward: "it's not like in the movies. They don't die right away. It took her a little time to die."
Over the following days he hid her body in a large toolbox, bought an electric chain saw at Sears, dismembered her and burned the remains in his fireplace while his wife and stepchildren were at work and school. He had his stepchildren help him clean the basement with bleach, though there is nothing in the record to show they knew why. He took what would not burn to a septic pond in Clearwater, Kansas, southwest of Wichita, about 200 miles from Kansas City, and dumped it there.
Jennifer's family did not know any of this. For the next eleven months she was a missing teenager.
Mary Ruth Bales was eighty and lived alone in Kansas City, Kansas. As a younger woman she had had polio, and she walked with a cane. Little more about her was reported, not her family, her work or how long she had lived in her house.
By the fall of 1998 Purkey was working for a plumbing company. On the evening of October 26, 1998, he answered a service call at her home. He told her that his employer would charge a great deal for the job she needed and offered to come back and do it privately if she paid him $70 in advance. She paid. He used the money to hire a prostitute and buy crack cocaine the next morning, spent several hours with the woman in a motel room, and then drove with her to Mrs. Bales's house, telling her that someone who lived there owed him money.
He went inside carrying a toolbox from his truck and beat Mary Ruth Bales to death in her bedroom with the claw side of a hammer. She had defensive wounds on both hands. He stayed in the house for several hours afterward with the other woman, using drugs and eating food from the kitchen. The next day he came back with two gallons of gasoline, meaning to burn the house down. A neighbor saw him in the back yard and called the police, and he was arrested. An Associated Press photograph from 1998 shows him being led away by officers in Kansas City, Kansas.
She died in late October 1998, though published accounts give different dates, because of how the events ran across two or three days. This account of her death follows the Eighth Circuit's 2013 opinion, which drew on the evidence the federal jury heard at sentencing.
Purkey was held in the Wyandotte County Jail on the Bales charge. In December 1998, by the Seventh Circuit's account, he sent Detective Howard a letter offering to talk about a kidnapping and homicide, and asked that an FBI agent come too. Howard brought Agent Tarpley.
They met on December 16. Purkey signed a waiver of his rights, said he intended to plead guilty in the Kansas case, and offered to confess to the kidnapping, rape and murder of a Missouri girl on condition that he could serve his state time in a federal penitentiary. The officers told him they could not promise anything but would take what he said to the U.S. Attorney. He described the crime, then stopped and said he would not go further without assurance that the case would be prosecuted federally.
That afternoon Howard and Tarpley met Kurt Shernuk, an assistant U.S. attorney in Kansas, who was skeptical but said his office might take the case if Purkey cooperated fully and produced the victim's remains or other evidence to back up his story. The officers went back to the jail and told Purkey that the prosecutor wanted a body and full cooperation. Purkey then took them to the crime scene and to the places where he said he had left the victim's undergarments and jawbone. He told them the rest of her remains could not be recovered because he had cut up and burned the body.
On December 17 he wrote out a detailed confession. On December 18, shown a photo lineup, he picked out Jennifer Long's picture "without hesitation," in the appeals court's words. Three days later he confessed to Agent Tarpley again.
He was not charged right away. In April 2000 he was sentenced to life in prison in Kansas for the Bales murder after pleading guilty, according to the Associated Press. (An earlier AP report, from 2002, described the Kansas sentence as 32 years.) On October 10, 2001, a federal grand jury in the Western District of Missouri indicted him for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Jennifer Long. The U.S. Attorney filed notice that the government would seek the death penalty.
In November 2002, FBI agents dug in a field in Sedgwick County, Kansas, on land where Purkey had once lived in a trailer, to see whether Jennifer's remains might be there. They found bone fragments, and the search stopped while a forensic anthropologist examined them. Jeff Lanza of the FBI's Kansas City office told the Associated Press the anthropologist would try to determine whether they were human. The result was not reported. William Long later said his daughter "was missing for five years before we found out what was happening."
The case was tried in Kansas City, Missouri, before U.S. District Judge Fernando J. Gaitan Jr. U.S. Attorney Todd Graves led the prosecution. Purkey was represented by Frederick Duchardt Jr. and Laura O'Sullivan.
Before trial, Purkey moved to suppress all his confessions. He said Howard and Tarpley had told him the prosecutor accepted his deal: a full confession in return for a life sentence in a federal prison. Both officers testified that they never said so. A magistrate judge, Sarah W. Hays, found the officers more believable, and Judge Gaitan adopted her findings: "No one told Purkey that a life sentence would be recommended if he confessed." The court added that Purkey "was apparently surprised to find out that the death penalty was a potential sentence," but that the officers had not misled him. Purkey also said notes he had kept of those conversations were destroyed in a search of his cell at a private jail in Leavenworth; the court refused to dismiss the case over it.
Testimony began at the end of October 2003. With Jennifer's family in the courtroom, prosecutors showed the jury the muddy toolbox, about five feet by two, the electric chain saw, and photographs of the fireplace. Graves told the jurors that Purkey had "painstakingly and methodically covered his tracks."
The defense did not dispute that Purkey had killed Jennifer. It disputed the kidnapping, which was what made the crime federal. Duchardt told the jury that she had gone with Purkey willingly to smoke crack and drink, and that Purkey had thought she was a prostitute. Purkey took the stand and said the same. He admitted the killing and the dismemberment, but said he had invented the part about forcing her into the truck so that the case would be a federal one. The government answered with his earlier statements, including testimony from his suppression hearing in which he had admitted taking her against her will. When the prosecutor asked whether Jennifer had seen his swastika tattoo while, by his account, she was willingly kissing him, the judge sustained an objection and told the jury to disregard the question; the defense asked for a mistrial and was refused.
A fellow inmate, Michael Speakman, testified for the government. Under cross-examination he agreed that the government had asked the court to reduce his own sentence. Asked whether his "sole point in being here" was to get that reduction, he answered, "Yes, ma'am."
The judge kept out some defense evidence: a nuclear medicine specialist, Dr. David Preston, who had found abnormalities on brain scans but could not connect them to Purkey's state of mind at the time, and testimony that Purkey's father had introduced him to prostitutes as a boy. After brief deliberations, the jury found Purkey guilty on November 5, 2003.
The sentencing hearing began on November 10. The government set out six statutory and four non-statutory aggravating factors, including the Bales murder, his criminal record, and the testimony of Carlberg and Hatfield. Jennifer's family told the jury what her death had done to them. "I can sit here for hours and tell you that he didn't murder her that day, he murdered me," her father said. Her mother said: "I lost my house. ... I lost my job. I lost my car. I lost my husband. I lost my will. I lost a lot of great things, but most of all I lost her."
Duchardt called eighteen witnesses over more than two days, among them Purkey's brother, daughter and aunt, fellow prisoners, and religious counselors who said he had renewed his Christian faith and expressed remorse. The experts testified to his brain damage and the abuse he suffered as a child. The judge did not let Dr. Cunningham give his opinion that Purkey had been exposed to alcohol before birth, or let the defense present evidence that Jeanette Purkey had put rat poison in her husband's drugs, which she said was to scare him off them. The Eighth Circuit later held that the first ruling was a mistake but a harmless one, and that the second was correct because there was no evidence the poison affected the mind.
At one point Purkey interrupted the government's cross-examination of a defense psychiatrist. With the jury out, he said something the prosecutor took as a threat, and the next day the prosecutor asked another defense expert whether he knew that Purkey had "threatened to run my head through yesterday in court." The objection was sustained.
The case went to the jury on November 19, 2003. After eleven hours and ten minutes, it found all six statutory aggravating factors: that Jennifer died during a kidnapping; that the killing involved torture and serious physical abuse; that she was particularly vulnerable because of her age; and three factors based on Purkey's earlier convictions. It found three of the four non-statutory factors, including the "vicious" killing of Mary Ruth Bales. The spaces on the verdict form for mitigating factors were left blank. The jury voted for death.
On Friday, January 23, 2004, Judge Gaitan imposed the sentence. Before he did, Purkey apologized to William Long. "It's cost me everything. It cost me my child," Long told KMBC-TV afterward. "There will be no closure until he does take that last breath, because every day I think about him." Purkey was committed to the federal Bureau of Prisons on February 9, 2004, as inmate number 14679-045, and was held on federal death row at Terre Haute.
On November 7, 2005, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (Judges Morris Arnold, Theodore McMillian and Steven Colloton) affirmed the conviction and sentence, rejecting challenges to the confessions, jury selection, the kidnapping instruction, the tattoo questions and the penalty phase. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2006.
Purkey then asked the trial court to vacate his sentence on the ground that Duchardt had been ineffective, listing seventeen failings. The government had Duchardt answer in a 117-page affidavit defending his work. Judge Gaitan denied the motion on September 29, 2009, without a hearing. In the middle of those proceedings Purkey filed his own motion asking to drop his appeals and set "an expeditious execution date"; he later withdrew it. On September 6, 2013, the Eighth Circuit (Judge Raymond Gruender writing) affirmed. It found that the new evidence Purkey's lawyers offered, affidavits from relatives, friends and a former prison psychologist, was "entirely cumulative" of what the jury had already heard, and that given the evidence against him there was no substantial likelihood that any juror would have voted differently. The Supreme Court declined review in 2014.
There had been no federal execution since 2003. On July 25, 2019, Attorney General William Barr directed the Bureau of Prisons to resume them, and Purkey was one of five men given dates. His was December 13, 2019.
His lawyers, led by Rebecca Woodman, pressed on two fronts. In August 2019 they asked for a stay to raise the claim that his trial lawyer had never properly investigated his childhood. "Mr. Purkey is not 'the worst of the worst,'" Woodman said. They also asked President Donald Trump for clemency, writing: "He has not forgiven himself, and so he cannot ask for forgiveness from you or your office. He asks only for your intervention, which would simply permit him to die in prison, at this late stage of his life."
On November 26, 2019, they filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., claiming that Purkey was not competent to be executed. In Ford v. Wainwright (1986), the Supreme Court held that the Constitution bars executing a prisoner who cannot rationally understand the punishment or the reason for it. The complaint said Purkey had Alzheimer's disease as well as schizophrenia and brain injuries. Dr. Jonathan DeRight, a neuropsychologist, had diagnosed Alzheimer's after testing him in August 2019. A forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Bhushan Agharkar, who examined him in person, concluded that Purkey could recite that he was to be executed for the murder of Jennifer Long but lacked a rational understanding of it. "Mr. Purkey has a fixed belief that he is going to be executed in retaliation for his legal work, to prevent him from being a hassle for the government," he wrote. Purkey had filed many complaints and lawsuits about prison conditions. According to his lawyers, he believed his own attorneys were part of a conspiracy against him, that people were spraying poison into his cell, and that drug dealers had planted a device in his chest. His lawyers' filings traced his paranoia back decades, citing a 1981 psychiatric evaluation and a May 1998 emergency room visit at which he said "they" had sprayed him with a "poisonous mist" while he slept. They also cited brain testing in 2003, 2016 and 2018 that, they said, showed his memory and reasoning steadily declining.
Liz Vartkessian, a mitigation specialist who had visited him dozens of times over five years, told the AP that he no longer had the stamina for long visits, often forgot key facts and dates, and needed correctional officers' help to write down when his lawyers were coming. "His case is replete with instances where he has expressed a deep remorse," she said.
The December date fell away for another reason. On November 20, 2019, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan blocked the scheduled federal executions in a separate challenge to the government's lethal injection protocol. The appeals court in Washington lifted that injunction on April 7, 2020. On June 15, 2020, the Justice Department set new dates for four men, all convicted of murdering children. Purkey's was July 15, 2020. His lawyers said they got about twenty minutes' notice.
The legal fight ran in several courts at once. On July 2, 2020, the Seventh Circuit, which covers Indiana, ruled against Purkey on a separate habeas petition that raised new failings by his trial lawyer, among them that one juror, whose first name was also Jennifer, had written on her questionnaire that she had been the victim of an attempted rape at sixteen, and that no one had objected to seating her. Chief Judge Diane Wood wrote that a motion to strike her might well have succeeded, and called that point and the mitigation investigation "worthy of further exploration," but held that federal law barred Purkey from raising them at that stage. The court granted a temporary stay while its proceedings were completed.
Daniel Lewis Lee, the first of the four, was executed at Terre Haute on July 14. At 5:09 the next morning, the day Purkey was to die, Judge Chutkan issued two injunctions. In the competency case she did not decide whether Purkey was competent; she found he had made the "substantial threshold showing" that entitled him to a hearing, and that he would suffer irreparable harm if he were executed before one was held. "The court finds that at least one of plaintiffs' claims has a likelihood of success on the merits, and that absent a preliminary injunction, plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm," she wrote. The government argued that he had filed in the wrong court: a claim like his, it said, belonged in a habeas petition in Indiana, where he was imprisoned. It also argued that the psychiatrist had confused Purkey's failure to understand why his execution was scheduled when it was with a failure to understand why he was being executed at all.
Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center told the AP the competency issue was "a very strong issue on paper." Three mental health organizations, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Mental Health America and the Treatment Advocacy Center, had already asked Barr to commute the sentence.
The government appealed both injunctions. The appeals court in Washington let the competency injunction stand. Early on July 16 the Supreme Court, without explanation, vacated it. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented, pointing to the sixteen years Purkey had spent under a death sentence and to his condition: he was "68 years old, frail, and suffering from Alzheimer's disease and other psychiatric conditions." Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Elena Kagan, wrote that the government had not shown the lower court was wrong, and that "proceeding with Purkey's execution now, despite the grave questions and factual findings regarding his mental competency, casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries." The Court also vacated Judge Chutkan's other injunction, in the protocol case, which had covered the next two executions as well. A federal judge in Indiana briefly stayed the execution and then lifted the stay hours later.
Jennifer's father and stepmother waited for four hours in a van outside the prison that morning while the last appeals were decided. They wore T-shirts with her picture.
In the execution chamber, strapped to the gurney, Purkey raised 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 adult daughter: "I deeply regret the pain I caused to my daughter, who I love so very much." His last words were: "This sanitized murder really does not serve no purpose whatsoever. Thank you." As the drug was injected he took several deep breaths and blinked repeatedly, then laid his head back down. He was pronounced dead at 8:19 a.m. EDT. His spiritual adviser stood in the room in a mask, praying. Purkey was sixty-eight. By the Bureau of Prisons' count he had served fifteen years and ten months in federal custody.
"After many years of litigation following the death of his victims, in which he lived and was afforded every due process of law under our Constitution, Purkey has finally faced justice," Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec said.
William Long said the delays had been excruciating. "He needed to take his last breath; he took my daughter's last breath," he said. "And there's some resolve. There is no closure, and there never will be because I won't get my daughter back." He told the AP he hoped Purkey would "rot in hell." Olivia Long said the apology "didn't mean much" and questioned the dementia claim: "there was obviously nothing wrong with him mentally because he remembered Jennifer's name to apologize to us." The family said the appeals had taken far too long and asked that the process be reviewed. "Every day, every day for the rest of my life I will think of it," William Long said. "It's not something any parent should have to live through."
Glenda Lamont, Jennifer's mother, had told The Kansas City Star in 2019 that she planned to attend. "I don't want to say that I'm happy," she said. "At the same time, he is a crazy madman that doesn't deserve, in my opinion, to be breathing anymore." Whether she was there was not reported.
The case is closed. Purkey was executed on July 16, 2020, as the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons recorded. He was the second federal prisoner executed that week, after Daniel Lewis Lee, and the third of the four men given dates in June 2020 was due to die the next day.
In August 2020 his lawyers asked the court in Washington to dismiss his competency suit as moot, and used the filing to put their complaints on record. They said the Bureau of Prisons had turned over his medical records on July 2 to the government's lawyers rather than to them, and that the records were not passed on before he died. They said a physician they retained had found, on an MRI, brain abnormalities "consistent with cognitive impairment such as vascular dementia and other conditions." The government did not respond to KCUR's request for comment. No court ever ruled on whether Purkey was competent when he was executed.
Proven: Purkey was convicted by a federal jury of kidnapping Jennifer Long resulting in her death, and pleaded guilty in Kansas to murdering Mary Ruth Bales. Both convictions were final.
His own account: almost everything known about Jennifer Long's last hours comes from Purkey's confessions. No report says her remains were ever recovered in any identifiable form. The physical evidence the jury saw, the toolbox, the chain saw and the fireplace, was consistent with what he said.
Disputed at trial: whether Jennifer got into his truck willingly. Purkey confessed four times, by the government's count, that he took her by force, then testified that he had made that up to get a federal case. The jury rejected his recantation.
Disputed about his confession: whether officers led him to expect a life sentence in federal prison. The courts believed the officers, who said they promised nothing.
Never resolved: whether he was competent to be executed in July 2020. A district judge found he had made a strong enough showing to deserve a hearing; the Supreme Court vacated that order without explanation, and no hearing was held.
Alleged but not tested in court: his lawyers' accounts of abuse by a priest, of a schizophrenia diagnosis at fourteen, and of the government withholding his medical records before the execution.
No report links him, by charge or by suspicion, to any other killing.
1952: Wesley Ira Purkey born.
1970 to 1981: convictions for burglary, robbery, theft, aggravated escape, aggravated robbery, kidnapping, aggravated battery and firearms offenses; in 1980 Gregg Carlberg is shot and left for dead.
January 22, 1998: Jennifer Long, 16, leaves East High School in Kansas City, Missouri, at about 9:30 a.m. and is taken to Purkey's home in Lansing, Kansas, where he kills her.
October 26, 1998: Purkey answers a service call at the home of Mary Ruth Bales, 80, in Kansas City, Kansas.
Late October 1998: he kills Mrs. Bales; arrested after a neighbor sees him at her house.
December 15 to 21, 1998: he contacts Detective Bill Howard, confesses to Howard and FBI Agent Dirk Tarpley, leads them to the scene, writes a confession and identifies Jennifer's photo.
April 2000: sentenced in Kansas to life for the Bales murder (per AP, 2004).
October 10, 2001: federal indictment in the Western District of Missouri.
November 2002: FBI search of a Sedgwick County field finds bone fragments; the result was not reported.
November 5, 2003: federal jury convicts him.
November 19, 2003: jury votes for death.
January 23, 2004: sentenced to death.
November 7, 2005: Eighth Circuit affirms; Supreme Court denies review in 2006.
September 29, 2009: motion to vacate sentence denied.
September 6, 2013: Eighth Circuit affirms denial; Supreme Court denies review in 2014.
July 25, 2019: Justice Department sets execution for December 13, 2019.
November 20, 2019: federal executions blocked in the protocol case.
November 26, 2019: competency (Ford) suit filed in Washington, D.C.
April 7, 2020: protocol injunction vacated.
June 15, 2020: execution reset for July 15, 2020.
July 2, 2020: Seventh Circuit rules against him on habeas petition, grants temporary stay.
July 15, 2020: Judge Tanya Chutkan enjoins the execution.
July 16, 2020: Supreme Court vacates the injunction, 5-4; Purkey executed at Terre Haute, pronounced dead 8:19 a.m. EDT.
August 2020: his lawyers move to dismiss the competency suit as moot.