The cold rain of Lawrenceville, Georgia, did not care about the misery of the Brookshire family. It beat down relentlessly on the tin roof of a dilapidated farmhouse where Kelly Renee Brookshire spent her earliest years, watching her family toil in the mud for a handful of cotton.
There was no warmth inside those walls, nor any guidance to speak of from parents worn down to the bone by poverty and exhaustion. Her childhood was an empty canvas of neglect, leaving her to navigate the chaotic impulses of her own youth entirely alone.
By the time she was a teenager, she was already drowning in a sea of unstable relationships, seekings fleeting comfort in any man who looked her way. Infidelities and sudden breakups defined her high school years, leaving her with a child out of wedlock before she even understood the weight of motherhood.
In 1987, at the age of nineteen, Kelly married a young man named Jeff Banks in a desperate bid for security. The marriage brought her a second child but offered absolutely nothing in the way of emotional or financial stability.
Constant arguments echoed through their cramped apartment as bills piled up and mutual resentment poisoned whatever affection they initially shared. The tension grew so heavy that the relationship completely collapsed in July 1989, lasting barely six months before the divorce papers were finalized.
“I just need a fresh start,” Kelly told her few remaining friends, wiping away tears of frustration. “I need to meet someone who actually has a future, someone who can help me change my life.”
Her friends convinced her to go on a blind date later that summer, setting her up at a quiet local diner. Sitting across the table from her was Douglas Gissendaner, a kind-hearted, hardworking mechanic with a gentle smile.
From the very first moment, the connection between them was undeniable as they talked for hours over cold coffee and laughed about their past mistakes. For a brief moment, it felt to Douglas as though the fragmented pieces of his life were finally falling perfectly into place.
“You don’t have to worry about the past with me, Kelly,” Douglas said, reaching across the table to hold her hand. “Your daughter is part of you, and that means she’s welcome in my life too.”
The romance moved with a dizzying velocity that blindfolded them both to the deep flaws in Kelly’s character. On September 2, 1989, just two months after their initial meeting, they stood before a preacher and swore their vows.
They soon welcomed a daughter together, adding a third child to the household, but the financial hardships of the early nineties spared them no mercy. Both Douglas and Kelly lost their jobs in rapid succession, forcing them to pack up their meager belongings and move into her mother’s crowded home.
“There’s nothing left for us here in Georgia,” Douglas whispered one evening, staring at the ceiling of their cramped bedroom. “The army is recruiting, and it’s the only way I can see to give our kids a real life.”
Douglas enlisted, and the military quickly deployed the young family across the Atlantic to a base in Germany. What was meant to be a grand opportunity for a fresh start instead ripped open the fragile seams of their marriage.
The isolation of living in a foreign country amplified their underlying incompatibility, and Kelly grew deeply resentful of the military lifestyle. She began seeking attention outside the home, eventually entering into a passionate affair that resulted in a pregnancy by another man.
“How could you do this to us?” Douglas shouted when the truth finally came to light. “I brought you here to build a life, not to destroy it!”
“I never wanted this life, Douglas!” Kelly screamed back, packed bags already waiting by the front door. “I’m sick of the rules, sick of the army, and sick of you!”
The breaking point had been reached after years of explosive arguments, emotional distance, and toxic, impulsive decisions. The couple officially divorced in 1993, with Kelly returning to the United States with the children while Douglas finished his service.
Yet, like a moth drawn back to a dying flame, neither of them could seem to stay away for very long. In February 1995, Douglas returned to Georgia, and the familiar pattern of codependency pulled them right back into each other’s arms.
By May 1995, they had remarried in a quiet ceremony, convincing themselves that the second time would somehow be different. It was a tragic delusion born of loneliness and the desperate desire to provide a normal home for their three young children.
The reconciliation was incredibly brief, lasting only until September of that same year before the old arguments flared up and they separated once more. It seemed like the final nail in the coffin, but their destructive dance was far from over.
In May 1996, Douglas begged her to try one last time, offering a vision of a stable, middle-class existence. By December 1996, they took their biggest leap yet, moving to the quiet town of Auburn, Georgia, and buying a house together.
Douglas believed the new house was a monument to their survival as a couple, a safe haven for their family. What he did not know was that during their last separation, Kelly had met a man named Gregory Bruce Owen.
Owen was a co-worker of hers, a quiet but easily manipulated man who quickly became obsessed with Kelly’s charm. Their friendship rapidly evolved into a passionate romantic relationship, one that Kelly had absolutely no intention of ending when she returned to Douglas.
“Why are you going back to him if you claim you love me?” Gregory asked her one night in the front seat of his car. “It makes no sense to live with a man you despise.”
“I’m only back with Douglas to take advantage of his credit and his money,” Kelly replied coldly, lighting a cigarette. “He’s the only reason I could get the bank to approve the loan for that house.”
As the winter weeks rolled on, Kelly began to push Gregory toward an idea that grew more disturbing by the day. She would spend hours whispering into his ear, convincing him that Douglas was the only obstacle to their eternal happiness.
“If you truly want the life we’ve been dreaming about, Greg, you need to get rid of him,” she whispered. “A divorce won’t work; he’ll never leave me alone, and I’ll lose everything.”
“Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?” Gregory asked, his voice shaking as the reality of her words sank in. “That’s murder, Kelly.”
“It’s the only way we can be together safely, Greg,” she pressured, her eyes locking onto his with absolute certainty. “Think about the life insurance money—hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus the house will be completely ours.”
Prosecutors would later show that Kelly was utterly obsessed with collecting Douglas’s one-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. She feared a legal separation would leave her destitute and strip her of the home she had just acquired.
Day by day, Kelly systematically chipped away at whatever moral hesitation Gregory Owen had left in his heart. The psychological pressure she applied was constant and unrelenting, transforming him from a lover into an assassin.
In the frantic days leading up to the scheduled crime, the digital footprint of their conspiracy grew massive. Kelly called Gregory forty-seven times and sent him eighteen text messages in a desperate bid to keep him from backing out.
On the afternoon of February 7, 1997, they were spotted by a witness near a set of public payphones. They were finalizing the absolute last details of the trap they had spent three months carefully constructing.
As darkness fell over Auburn that Friday night, Kelly drove her car down the familiar streets, pulling up to the curb near her home. Gregory sat in the passenger seat, his heart hammering against his ribs as he stared at the dark windows.
Before he opened the door to step out into the freezing air, Kelly reached between the seats and handed him two heavy items. He took the wooden baton and the large, silver hunting knife from her hands without saying a word.
“Make sure it’s done before I get back,” Kelly whispered, her voice entirely devoid of fear. “I’ll see you at the spot.”
She drove away immediately, leaving her lover to commit the slaughter while she went to establish an airtight alibi. She drove straight to a friend’s house to ensure she was seen, and later arrived at a crowded local nightclub.
For the next several hours, Kelly smiled, drank heavily, and danced with strangers under the flashing neon lights. Every single laugh was a calculated gesture, a performance designed to prove she was just another wife enjoying a carefree Friday night out.
Meanwhile, Gregory Owen let himself into the Gissendaner home using a key Kelly had provided, moving silently through the dark rooms. He found a hiding spot near the back entryway, sitting in the shadows with the knife resting across his knees.
A few minutes after ten o’clock that evening, the headlights of Douglas’s truck illuminated the driveway as he returned home from work. He walked up the steps, completely exhausted from a long shift at the mechanic shop, looking forward to seeing his kids.
The moment he stepped through the door and turned around to shut it, the shadows in the hallway seemed to come alive. Gregory Owen stepped out into the light, the hunting knife pointed directly at Douglas’s chest before he could even register the intrusion.
“Don’t make a sound, and don’t yell,” Gregory ordered, his voice surprisingly cold. “Get back in your truck and drive.”
Douglas looked at the weapon, his hands raised in surrender as confusion and terror flooded his mind. “What do you want? Take whatever money is in the house, just don’t hurt my family.”
“Shut up and move,” Gregory barked, shoving Douglas out the door and forcing him into the passenger seat of his own vehicle.
The drive that followed was a nightmare of pure silence, spanning miles of pitch-black country roads with no witnesses in sight. Gregory gave short, sharp directions until they reached a heavily wooded, isolated area in Gwinnett County.
“Pull over right here,” Gregory commanded, pointing toward a dirt turn-off shrouded by dense pine trees.
He forced Douglas out of the truck at knifepoint, marching him deep into the woods where the highway noise completely faded away. The cold wind howled through the bare branches as Gregory pushed the mechanic roughly to the damp earth.
“Please,” Douglas begged, kneeling in the dirt, his tears mixing with the mud on his face. “Tell me what this is about. I have three children who need me.”
Gregory did not answer the plea; instead, he raised the heavy wooden baton and struck Douglas across the head with full force. The sound of fracturing bone cracked through the quiet woods as Douglas collapsed onto his stomach, groaning in agony.
Gregory struck him repeatedly until the older man stopped crying out, then flipped him over and pulled the hunting knife from his belt. He stabbed Douglas multiple times in the neck and back, the blade tearing through muscle and bone until the body went completely limp.
Leaning over the bloody remains, Gregory remembered Kelly’s specific instructions and reached down to unfasten Douglas’s wristwatch. He twisted the gold wedding ring off the mechanic’s finger, pockets the items to make the scene look like a random robbery.
At the exact same time, Kelly Gissendaner was walking out of the nightclub, checking her watch under the canopy. She knew that miles away, her husband was taking his final, ragged breaths on the frozen forest floor, his blood soaking deep into the Georgia clay.
There was no panic in her chest, no sudden wave of regret or grief as she climbed into her driver’s seat. She sent a pre-arranged, coded message to Gregory’s pager, indicating that her alibi was secure and she was en route.
She drove directly to the remote wooded meeting point, the headlights cutting through the darkness until she spotted Gregory waiting by the truck. She killed the engine, stepped out into the cold night air, and walked toward him with steady steps.
“Is he dead?” Kelly asked, looking directly into Gregory’s eyes without a single tremor in her voice.
“Yes, it’s done,” Gregory replied, wiping a smear of dark blood from his cheek with the back of his hand.
Kelly nodded smoothly, reaching into her pocket to pull out a heavy plastic flashlight she had brought for this exact moment. She walked past him, stepping into the thick brush and navigating the trees until the beam of light found the crumpled shape of her husband.
She stood over Douglas’s body for several seconds, shining the light directly on his horrific wounds as if inspecting a piece of work. There was no hesitation, no tears for the father of her children, only a silent confirmation that the job was finished.
She walked back to Gregory, completely focused on completing the final step of the plan they had written together. They grabbed a jug of kerosene from the back of the truck, doused the interior of Douglas’s vehicle, and tossed a lit match inside.
The truck erupted into a massive ball of orange flame, lighting up the night sky and casting long, dancing shadows across the trees. They did not run or panic; they simply climbed into Kelly’s car and drove back to town at a normal speed.
Kelly dropped Gregory off at his house, where he immediately began trying to destroy the evidence of the slaughter. He threw the blood-stained hunting knife, the wooden baton, his ruined jeans, and Douglas’s wedding ring into a dumpster down the street.
In his haste and exhaustion, however, he made a critical mistake that would ultimately prove to be his undoing. He left a pair of gray sweatpants, heavily stained with Douglas’s blood, sitting in the bottom of his laundry hamper.
The next morning, February 8, 1997, Kelly waited until a reasonable hour before picking up the telephone to call the Auburn Police Department. Her voice was a masterclass in artificial panic, trembling perfectly as she spun her web of lies to the dispatcher.
“My husband Douglas left last night around seven to help a friend with a broken-down car,” she sobbed into the receiver. “He never came home, and he hasn’t called. This isn’t like him at all; I’m terrified something happened on the road.”
At first, the local authorities had absolutely no reason to suspect the distraught mother of three who stood weeping on her porch. It appeared to be a standard missing person case, and the officers followed their protocols to the letter.
They contacted area hospitals, checked local impound lots, monitored Douglas’s credit cards, and sent a patrol car to scout the route he allegedly took. Days turned into a week, and not a single trace of the mechanic or his truck appeared anywhere.
As the detectives dug deeper into Douglas’s background, the narrative Kelly had provided began to conflict with reality. They found a man who was fiercely dedicated to his children, a reliable mechanic who never missed a shift and had no debts or enemies.
“Men like Douglas Gissendaner don’t just vanish into thin air on a Friday night,” Detective Smalls remarked during a morning briefing. “He had no reason to run away, which means someone chose to remove him from the picture.”
Kelly’s constructed reality began to fracture around the edges as she repeated the exact same story for eleven straight days. She completely hid the fact that her marriage was a toxic cycle of separation, and completely omitted the existence of her secret lover.
The true depth of her cruelty became clear to the community when a local television news crew arrived at her home for an interview. Kelly stood on her front porch, looking directly into the camera lens with tears streaming down her face as she held her children close.
“He does not drink, he does not do drugs,” Kelly sobbed, her voice cracking with practiced emotion for the viewers. “He’s very family-oriented. If he’s not with me, he’s with his kids.”
“What is your ultimate hope right now, Mrs. Gissendaner?” the reporter asked, holding the microphone close to her trembling lips.
“I’m just hoping he’ll walk in this door or at least pick up the phone and call,” Kelly said, looking heartbroken. “We just want him home safe.”
She delivered the performance flawlessly, all while knowing that Douglas’s body was rotting in the woods less than twenty miles away. Her charade collapsed entirely on February 20, 1997, when a park ranger stumbled upon a horrifying scene deep in the Gwinnett County forest.
The ranger discovered the completely charred, skeletal remains of a vehicle hidden behind a thick wall of brush. The windows were melted into pools of glass, the license plates were gone, and the paint had been entirely burned down to rusted metal.
The arson had been so intense that the forensic team could not initially determine the make or model of the vehicle. Investigators had to use specialized tools to scrape away the soot and locate the vehicle identification number stamped onto the chassis.
When the computer database processed the number, the result sent a shockwave through the precinct—it was Douglas Gissendaner’s missing truck. Yet, the interior of the cab was completely empty, leaving them with a burning car but no sign of the victim.
“We need to stop looking at this as a missing person case,” the lead detective told his team, slamming the file on the desk. “This is a homicide cover-up, and we start with the wife.”
The police began combing through phone records, bank statements, and interviewing neighbors to find any hidden fractures in the household. It didn’t take long for an old acquaintance of Kelly’s to break the silence and mention a name the police hadn’t heard before.
“She was seeing a guy named Gregory Owen during the last separation,” the witness told detectives in an interview room. “They were pretty intense, but she told everyone it was over when she moved back in with Doug.”
Detectives hauled Kelly back to the station, confronting her with the evidence of her infidelity and asking why she had lied.
“I was just so embarrassed,” Kelly claimed, looking down at her lap and twisting a tissue between her fingers. “I didn’t want Douglas’s family to think badly of me during a time like this.”
“Is that the only reason, Kelly?” the detective pressed, leaning across the table. “Because your husband’s truck was intentionally burned to the ground.”
“There’s something else,” Kelly feigned terror, shifting her strategy on the fly. “When I told Gregory I was going back to Douglas, he went crazy. He threatened to kill him, and I think he actually went through with it.”
Armed with this new accusation, the police tracked Gregory Owen down to his apartment and brought him in for intense questioning. Gregory initially denied any involvement, calmly stating that he had spent the entire night of February 7 at a friend’s house.
A man named Ricky Lee Barrett initially backed up the alibi, giving Gregory a temporary shield against arrest while police gathered more evidence. The stalemate lasted for exactly two weeks until a canine search team made a breakthrough in the woods near the burn site.
Roughly three-quarters of a mile from the charred truck, a search dog began barking frantically near a deep ravine covered in dead leaves. The handler pushed past the branches and looked down to see a human body lying face down in the frozen dirt.
A crime scene technician carefully descended the slope, knelt beside the body, and reached into the back pocket of the denim jeans. He pulled out a leather wallet, opening it to find credit cards, cash, and a Georgia driver’s license belonging to Douglas Gissendaner.
The discovery of the intact wallet completely eliminated the theory of a random robbery or a carjacking gone wrong. Whoever had murdered Douglas had left his money behind, proving the execution was personal, targeted, and premeditated.
“We have a execution-style murder,” the medical examiner reported, noting the brutal blunt force trauma and the deep stab wounds. “This guy was butchered.”
Detectives met with Douglas’s immediate family to break the news, and the grief-stricken relatives immediately pointed the finger at Kelly. They revealed a critical financial detail that Kelly had omitted from every single one of her voluntary statements.
“She just took out a one-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on him a few months ago,” Douglas’s brother told the investigators. “She was pushing him to sign the papers as soon as they bought that new house in Auburn.”
With a clear financial motive established, detectives secured a federal warrant for Kelly’s complete cellular telephone records. The documents that arrived at the precinct placed Kelly Gissendaner at the absolute absolute center of the murder conspiracy.
On the exact night Douglas vanished, Kelly’s phone had exchanged over forty phone calls with Gregory Owen during the murder window. The frantic back-and-forth communication completely obliterated any claim that she was an innocent bystander unaware of the violence.
Detectives immediately brought Ricky Lee Barrett back into the interrogation room, laying the phone records out in front of him. Faced with perjury charges, Ricky broke down and admitted that he had lied to protect his friend.
“Greg wasn’t at my house that night,” Ricky confessed, shaking his head. “He left around nine in the evening and didn’t get back until the next morning. He begged me to tell the cops he was with me if anyone ever asked.”
The trap was set, and the next morning, Gregory Owen was brought back to the station for what would be his final interview. The lead detective didn’t say a word as he slid the phone records and Ricky’s signed confession across the table.
Gregory stared at the paperwork for a long minute, realizing that his alibi was gone and he was facing the electric chair alone. The weight of the betrayal and the reality of his situation broke his resolve completely.
“It was all her idea,” Gregory whispered, covering his face with his hands before looking up at the detectives. “Every single piece of it. She planned it for months.”
“Start from the beginning, Greg,” the detective said, turning on the tape recorder.
“She told me she wanted him dead so she could get the insurance money and keep the house without a divorce,” Gregory explained rapidly. “She said a divorce would ruin her financially. She bought the weapons, she dropped me off at the house, and she told me how to make it look like a robbery.”
Kelly Gissendaner was arrested that afternoon at her home, handcuffed in front of her weeping children and transported to the county jail. Her confidence began to shatter the moment the steel doors banged shut behind her.
Her first phone call from the jail booking desk was to her closest female friend, her voice frantic as she looked for a lifeline. “I helped plan it,” she confessed over the recorded line. “I wanted him gone, but I never thought it would actually go this far.”
A few hours later, after realizing that all jail calls are recorded, Kelly called her friend back to frantically alter her narrative. “Greg forced me to say those things,” she claimed, sobbing wildly into the phone. “He threatened to hurt the kids if I didn’t help him. I was coerced; I never had a choice!”
Instead of accepting her fate, Kelly decided to raise the stakes while she was confined to a cell awaiting her trial date. She smuggled a handwritten letter out of her cell, attempting to contact a criminal associate on the outside.
The letter contained a detailed plan to hire an assassin to kidnap and brutally beat the state’s key witnesses before the trial began. She offered money to anyone who would stand up in court and commit perjury to discredit Gregory Owen’s upcoming testimony.
The letter was intercepted by a sharp-eyed prison guard, providing the prosecution with an absolute mountain of evidence regarding her consciousness of guilt. Before the trial officially commenced, the district attorney offered both defendants an identical plea bargain to save the state the cost of a trial.
The deal was life in prison with the absolute guarantee of parole eligibility after serving twenty-five years, provided they pleaded guilty and cooperated. Gregory Owen looked at the evidence against him and immediately signed the paperwork, securing his survival.
Kelly Gissendaner, convinced she could manipulate a jury the same way she had manipulated the men in her life, arrogantly rejected the offer. She truly believed that twelve strangers would look at her as a victim of Gregory’s violent obsessions and acquit her.
It was a catastrophic gamble that would ultimately cost her life in exchange for Gregory’s cooperation with the state. In 1998, Gregory Owen took the witness stand as the prosecution’s star witness, looking directly at his former lover.
“She put the weapons in my hand,” Gregory testified to the hushed courtroom. “She told me that killing Douglas was the only way we could ever be together and keep the lifestyle she wanted. I was a fool, but she was the boss.”
The combination of Gregory’s detailed testimony, the phone records, and the intercepted prison letter left the jury with zero doubts. After a brief deliberation, Kelly Gissendaner was found guilty of malice murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection.
She was initially processed and transported to the Metro State Prison, before being moved to the maximum-security wing at Arrendale State Prison. For the first few years on death row, Kelly lived in a state of bitter anger, cursing the system and her former lover.
But as the years stretched into a decade, something fundamental began to shift within the dark corners of her isolation. She enrolled in a specialized theology certificate program offered to inmates through an initiative connected with Emory University.
She spent her days consuming dense Christian theology, finding a strange comfort in the writings of martyrs like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. She began a regular, deeply personal correspondence with the renowned German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who answered her letters for years.
The inmates housed around her began to notice a profound change in the woman who had once been defined by cold calculation. She became a source of spiritual counseling for young women entering the prison system, using her own ruin to teach them about redemption.
“She saved my life,” an inmate later wrote in a affidavit for Kelly’s defense team. “I was ready to hang myself in my cell, and Kelly stood by the bars for hours talking me down, giving me a reason to keep breathing.”
A group of these reformed women eventually formed a tight-knit support network within the prison, calling themselves the “Struggle Sisters.” They credited Kelly with helping them find a profound sense of self-worth and purpose in a place designed for punishment.
Yet, outside the prison walls, the machinery of state justice continued to grind forward without any regard for her spiritual transformation. Her execution was officially scheduled for February 2015, nearly eighteen years after Douglas had been butchered in the woods.
The date was suddenly delayed due to a massive winter storm that paralyzed the state, and a second date was pushed back due to issues with the consistency of the lethal injection drug. What followed those delays was an unprecedented wave of public appeals for clemency from across the globe.
Her three children, who had spent years processing the horrific reality that their mother had murdered their father, officially forgave her and begged the board for her life. Religious leaders, former federal judges, and even an official representative from the Vatican sent letters pleading for mercy.
“The sentence is fundamentally unjust,” her defense attorney argued passionately before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. “The man who actually drove the knife into Douglas’s neck is getting out on parole in a few years, while the person who didn’t drop a drop of blood is being executed.”
The board remained entirely unmoved by the theological arguments, focusing instead on her ruthlessness and her attempt to hire a hitman from jail. Under Georgia law, a conspirator who plans a murder is equally eligible for the ultimate penalty as the one who strikes the blow.
A final, immutable execution date was set for September 30, 2015, at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. As her final night on earth approached, Kelly Gissendaner requested an enormous feast for her ceremonial final meal.
The guards delivered two heavy trays containing two Burger King Whoppers, two large orders of french fries, a large jug of fresh lemonade, and a tub of cherry vanilla ice cream. The meal also included a bag of buttered popcorn, a thick slice of hot cornbread, and a massive salad loaded with boiled eggs, tomatoes, peppers, onions, carrots, cheese, and buttermilk dressing.
She ate slowly, savoring the flavors of a world she hadn’t seen in nearly two decades, before the execution team entered her cell. The officers strapped her securely to the heavy padded gurney, inserting the intravenous lines into both of her arms as she began to lose control of her emotions.
The tears flowed freely down her wrinkled cheeks as she sobbed, the reality of her impending death crushing her composure. She began to sing, her voice shaking violently at first before growing stronger as the words echoed through the stark white chamber.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me,” she sang, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
When she finished the hymn, she closed her eyes and began praying quietly, asking God to watch over the children whose lives she had shattered. The warden stepped forward, reading the death warrant aloud before asking if she had any final statements for the record.
“I just want to tell my children that I love them and I’m proud of them,” Kelly said, her voice clearing through the tears. “And no matter what happens tonight, love always overcomes hate.”
She took a deep, ragged breath, looking toward the glass viewing window where her legal team sat watching. “I love you, Sally, and I love you, Susan. Tell my kids that I left this world singing Amazing Grace.”
“And please tell the Gissendaner family that I am so incredibly sorry that amazing man lost his life because of me,” she choked out, her face contorting with genuine agony. “If I could take it back, if this would change it, I would have done it a long time ago. But it doesn’t, and I just hope you find peace and find some happiness. God bless you.”
The warden nodded, and the executioners began pumping the lethal dose of pentobarbital directly into her bloodstream through the tubes. Kelly Gissendaner continued to murmur the words of the hymn until her eyelids grew heavy and her head fell slightly to the side.
She was officially pronounced dead at 12:21 in the morning, at forty-seven years of age, leaving behind a dark legacy. She was the only female inmate sitting on Georgia’s death row at the time, and her death marked a historic chapter in the state’s judicial history.
Her execution was the first time in seventy long years, dating all the way back to 1945, that the state of Georgia had executed a female convict. Meanwhile, her co-defendant and former lover, Gregory Owen, served his time quietly and was officially released back into society on parole in early 2023.
