The early evening news anchor shuffled his papers, the stark fluorescent lights of the studio catching the sharp lines of his face. His voice carried that familiar, practiced gravity reserved for the finality of the state.
“Breaking news from the Missouri State Prison in Bonne Terre,” he said, staring directly into the lens. “A man convicted of killing his former lover and her husband, David Hosier, died by lethal injection. He was convicted of killing Angela Gilpin and her husband, Rodney, in Jefferson City in 2009. Governor Mike Parson denied his final request for clemency last night.”
The date was June 11th, 2024. In Bonne Terre, Missouri, the digital clock on the wall of the execution chamber clicked toward 6:00 p.m. Inside the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center, a sixty-nine-year-old man lay flat, his arms outspread, leather straps securing his thick frame to a padded gurney. He was a Navy veteran, a former EMT, and a former firefighter. He was a man who had spent his entire adult life running toward the kinds of emergencies that made other people run away.
A single, lethal dose of pentobarbital began to flow through the intravenous line. The old man turned his head twice, his eyes scanning the glass window of the witness room, then he breathed hard, his chest rising and falling in two heavy, ragged gasps. Then he went perfectly still.
At 6:11 p.m., David Russell Hosier was pronounced dead by the state of Missouri.
The execution was clean, efficient, and entirely legal, but the details of the case remained jagged. There had been no confession during the fifteen years he sat on death row. There was no DNA evidence linking him to the bloodied hallway, no fingerprints on the doorframe, and not a single eyewitness who could place him at the crime scene on the night the couple died.
Before the chemical took his speech, Hosier looked at the ceiling and offered his final words to the quiet room.
“I’ve been able to speak the truth of my innocence,” he said, his voice flat and steady.
To understand how a man who once carried a top-secret clearance and walked the halls of the Pentagon ended up on a leather gurney in Bonne Terre, you have to look past the year 2009. You have to travel backward through the decades, away from the brick apartment complexes of Jefferson City, down into the limestone quarries and quiet streets of Logansport, Indiana. This story did not begin with a murder; it began with one.
David Russell Hosier came into the world on February 10th, 1955, born into a household where public service was not just a job, but a foundational truth. His father, Sergeant Glenn R. Hosier, was an Indiana State Police officer and a World War II Navy veteran. Glenn had spent seven years walking a beat for the Logansport City Police Department before donning the blue uniform of the state force the exact same year his son was born.
Glenn Hosier was not the distant, stoic father common to the mid-century Midwest. He was an active, looming presence in the boy’s life. David was his little pal, his shadow, his constant sidekick.
The two of them spent autumn mornings tracking deer through the thick Indiana brush and summer nights camped out under the stars. On weekends, David would sit in the passenger seat of his father’s patrol car, watching the crisp reflection of the trees pass over the hood, utterly mesmerized by the authority and respect his father commanded. For a boy growing up in Logansport, life was simple, secure, and perfect.
That security vanished on the evening of April 13th, 1971.
A warrant had been issued for a fugitive named Lindsey Mallard, a man wanted for the brutal murder of Judy Rucker Wells in the nearby town of Peru, Indiana. Informants had tipped off the authorities that Mallard was hiding out in a weathered, two-story residence at 268 West Canal Street in Peru, located in Miami County. Sergeant Glenn Hosier, alongside a contingent of officers from the Peru Police Department and the Miami County Sheriff’s Department, surrounded the house under the cover of dusk.
They moved inside, their flashlights cutting through the dark, dusty interior. Glenn led the way, his boots heavy on the wooden staircase as he ascended toward the second floor. He reached the top landing, turned the corner into a narrow hallway, and came face-to-face with the dark.
Lindsey Mallard was waiting in the shadows. He raised a .32-caliber handgun and fired at close range, striking Sergeant Hosier directly in the head.
The hallway erupted in gunfire as the backing officers returned fire, killing Mallard where he stood. But the floorboards were already slick with the sergeant’s blood. Glenn Hosier was rushed by emergency transport to a hospital in Indianapolis for immediate surgery.
He held on for thirteen agonizing days, his family hovering by the bedside, watching the machines do the work of his fading body. He finally succumbed to his wounds on April 26th, 1971, and was laid to rest at Mount Hope Cemetery in Logansport. David was just sixteen years old.
The night his father was shot, David had been upstairs in his bedroom, confined to bed with a heavy fever. Downstairs, his mother, Martha, had been sitting in the living room with a book, waiting for the sound of Glenn’s cruiser in the driveway, a routine she had kept for nearly two decades. Then came the heavy, syncopated knock at the front door.
David heard the murmur of deep voices, followed by a sound that would remain lodged in his memory for the rest of his life.
“I heard Mom downstairs crying,” David said decades later, his voice dropping into that specific, quiet register of old grief. “And when that happens, you know what it usually means.”
The grief that descended upon the Hosier home was vast and unyielding, a heavy weight with no structural support to hold it up. Martha was utterly consumed by her own sudden widowhood, drowned in a sorrow so thick she could not reach out to guide her children through theirs. In 1971, small-town Indiana did not offer grief counseling or trauma therapy for the children of fallen officers; neighbors brought casseroles, the department offered a formal salute, and then the world expected the family to move on.
David, caught in that volatile transition between a boy and a man, was suddenly cut adrift from his anchor. His family would later recount how the teenager would disappear from the house after dark, walking the quiet paths of Mount Hope Cemetery just to sit by his father’s fresh grave in the dirt and weep into the night.
His sister, Keysha Dyne, described the devastation with stark clarity.
“My dad’s death was just like a crater,” she said, clearing her throat against an old tightness. “And David fell into that crater.”
In the wake of the funeral, the family decided David needed discipline and structure to keep from unraveling, so they sent him away to a strict military academy. The transition was brutal. Isolated from his friends, socially severed from the small community that knew his name, he had lost his father, his home, and his sense of belonging all within the span of a few months.
Yet, despite the trauma, something inside David pulled him toward the very concept that had cost him his father: service.
In September 1974, at the age of nineteen, he walked into a recruiting office and enlisted in the United States Navy. He did not just serve out a quiet enlistment; he excelled, earning an assignment to the elite Naval Communications Unit. The position required a top-secret security clearance, granting him access to classified data and allowing him to walk the secure, polished hallways of the Pentagon during the height of the Cold War.
He transitioned to the Naval Reserve in 1976 and served until 1980, completing six years of combined service before receiving an honorable discharge.
Looking for a fresh start in the late 1970s, David traveled to Jefferson City, Missouri, to visit his sister. He liked the quiet flow of the Missouri River and the slow pace of the state capital. He stayed, found a small apartment, and began to build what looked to the world like a solid, honorable second life.
He joined the local volunteer fire department and trained as an emergency medical technician. For years, David was the man who jumped into the back of the ambulance when the tones dropped, the man who buckled his turnout gear and ran into thick, black smoke while the rest of the neighborhood watched from the sidewalk.
To anyone looking at his resume, David Hosier was a model citizen, a textbook example of a son successfully honoring his father’s supreme sacrifice. But beneath the uniform, the crater was widening.
By 1986, the psychological pressure began to fracture his daily life in ways he could no more hide than a broken bone. His mood swings grew wild, his behavior erratic, and in 1987, following a severe mental breakdown, he was involuntarily committed to a state psychiatric hospital. The doctors who evaluated him stamped his medical file with a heavy diagnosis: severe clinical depression with psychotic features and bipolar disorder.
The diagnosis explained the chaos, but it could not save his personal life. His second marriage, which had begun in 1980 and produced a son and a daughter, shattered under the strain of his illness and ended in a bitter divorce that same year.
Without the structure of his family or his mental health, the trajectory of David’s life turned dark. In 1992, after a volatile domestic dispute, he was arrested for battering a girlfriend.
Realizing the weight of the evidence against him, David entered a guilty plea. The judge was not lenient, sentencing him to eight years in a state correctional facility. He served his time quietly, adjusting to the gray rhythm of the cellblock, until he was finally released on parole in 1997.
Then, in 2007, his body betrayed him in a different way. David suffered a massive ischemic stroke.
He was rushed to the Audrain Medical Center in Mexico, Missouri, where doctors worked to dissolve the clot, but the damage was already done. His appellate public defender, Amy Bartholow, would later stand before the high justices of the Missouri Supreme Court in 2019, holding his brain scans aloft.
“David Hosier’s brain,” she told the courtroom, her voice echoing off the wood paneling, “is dead in places.”
The hospital records from Audrain confirmed her words with clinical coldness, showing clear, localized tissue death in areas responsible for cognitive function. The stroke occurred in 2007. The murders occurred in 2009.
Yet, when David Hosier stood in the center of a courtroom in 2013, fighting for his life before a jury of his peers, not a single expert witness, neurologist, or psychiatrist was called to the stand by his defense team to explain what that localized brain death actually meant. The twelve people in the box never heard how a stroke can permanently damage a person’s impulse control, emotional regulation, and basic judgment. They were left completely in the dark.
By 2008, David was living a quiet, solitary life on West Main Street in Jefferson City. He was in his early fifties now, a big man with a slow gait, his Navy days and firefighter runs long behind him. He rented a small, nondescript apartment in a multi-unit complex, the kind of brick building that bleeds into the background of any midwestern town.
Directly across the asphalt parking lot, facing West High Street, sat another residential building. Both properties were managed by a local landlord named Dennis Prenger.
Because David had a background in trades and needed to supplement his income, he struck a deal with Prenger to perform odd jobs around the complex—fixing leaky pipes, mowing the lawns, and handling basic structural upkeep. The arrangement came with a specific perk: David was given regular access to the property’s central storage room, the very room where the landlord kept the master keys to every single apartment door in both buildings.
It was through this small, insular world of shared parking lots and maintenance requests that David met Angela Yvonne Gilpin.
Angela was born on December 20th, 1963. She was forty-five years old, a mother of two grown sons, and possessed a quick, bright laugh that stood out in the drab apartment complex. At the time her path crossed with David’s, she was deeply estranged from her husband, Rodney Dean Gilpin.
Rodney was a sixty-one-year-old man, born August 4th, 1948, who had spent twenty-one years building a life with Angela. But that life had fractured, and Angela had moved out of their shared home, taking an apartment on West High Street while she worked her shifts as the general manager of the Bee Line convenience store in nearby Wardsville.
Sometime during the long months of 2008, David and Angela began to spend time together. The friendship quickly deepened into something more intimate.
A neighbor from across the hall, Jo Dean Scott, would later recall conversations with David where he spoke openly about the relationship, explicitly referring to it as an affair. According to those who lived in the immediate vicinity, the romance was neither casual nor particularly hidden. They looked like any other middle-aged couple in love, cooking dinners together, walking to the local stores, and leaning on each other for companionship.
But the ghost of twenty-one years of marriage is not easily laid to rest. In August 2009, Angela made a sudden, definitive decision. She was going to go back to Rodney.
She packed her things, talked to her sons, and told David that the affair was over, that she was going to give her marriage another chance. Rodney moved into the West High Street apartment with her, determined to rebuild what they had lost.
From the moment the door closed on the relationship, David’s mind began to slip into old, dangerous patterns. He simply could not accept that she was gone.
Jerilyn Bleckler, a neighbor who lived close to both David and Angela, became the unwilling sounding board for David’s growing obsession. He would knock on her door at odd hours, his face pale and strained, begging her to intervene on his behalf. He wanted Bleckler to go to Angela, to talk sense into her, to convince her that she was making a terrible mistake.
When Bleckler refused to get involved in the marital dispute, David’s desperation turned into something sharper. He told her he loved Angela, that he would always love her, and that Rodney was a shadow compared to what he could offer.
Then, during one late-night conversation in the parking lot, he dropped a phrase that Bleckler would never forget.
“I’ll put a stop to it somehow,” David said, his voice flat.
As the late summer turned into September, David’s behavior escalated from desperate to terrifying. Angela was no longer just managing a difficult breakup; she was living in a state of constant, low-grade panic. She sat down at her kitchen table and wrote a formal letter to her landlord, Dennis Prenger, stating that she could no longer live in the building if David was going to be lurking in the courtyard.
Her written words were stark, stripped of any polite hesitation.
“He scares me,” she wrote, the pen pressing hard into the paper. “I don’t know what he will do next.”
On September 15th, 2009, she walked into the Cole County Courthouse and filled out an application for a formal protective order against David Hosier. In the legal boxes provided, she tried to capture the suffocating nature of her daily existence.
“He knows everywhere I go,” she wrote, her handwriting tight and hurried. “He knows who I go with, and who comes to my home.”
She explicitly stated on the legal record that David was stalking and harassing her every single day, turning her short walk to her car into a gauntlet. Near the bottom of the form, where the document asked about the potential for violence, Angela typed out a prophetic fear. She wrote that she was terrified David Hosier was going to bring a gun to the complex and shoot both her and her husband.
The fear was infectious. Another neighbor would later tell detectives that David had looked at the windows of Angela’s apartment during this period and muttered a final, absolute ultimatum.
“If I can’t have her,” David reportedly said, “then no one can.”
The tension broke on Sunday, September 27th, 2009.
Jerilyn Bleckler spent the afternoon inside apartment number two on West High Street, sitting on the couch with Rodney and Angela. The television was loud, broadcasting a Kansas City Chiefs game, the room filled with the ordinary domestic sounds of a Sunday football afternoon. Angela was laughing; Rodney was relaxed. They were two people actively doing the quiet work of mending a twenty-one-year-old bond.
Outside that room, David was pacing his floorboards, a cell phone clutched in his thick hand.
He dialed Bleckler’s number repeatedly throughout the evening. When she finally stopped answering his calls, frustrated by the constant interruption, the red light on her answering machine began to blink steadily in the dark. The voicemails he left that night would later be extracted by digital forensics experts and played through the high-quality speakers of a Cole County courtroom, his voice sounding dry and mechanical over the tape.
“I’m tired of the situation,” David told the machine in one recording, his breathing audible between sentences. “You haven’t done what I asked.”
Then came the sentence that caused the detectives to stop the tape.
“I’m going to finish it,” David said.
Shortly before 10:00 p.m., as the rest of the city began to turn off their lights, David made one final phone call to Jo Dean Scott. He told her he needed to come by her apartment immediately to drop off some personal items—a set of keys and a detailed sheet of written instructions explaining how to distribute his belongings if anything should happen to him in the coming days.
Scott, exhausted from the weekend, told him it was far too late for a visit and asked him to wait until morning.
“I’ll just leave them on your car instead,” David replied, his tone chillingly casual.
Before he hung up the phone, he left her with a phrase that would haunt her morning.
“I’m going to eliminate my problems,” he said.
The sun rose over Jefferson City on Monday, September 28th, 2009, revealing a crisp, late-September morning, but the peace of the 1100 block of West High Street had already been shattered hours before.
Somewhere between 3:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m., while the rest of the brick complex was asleep, a resident named Jennifer Stubbs was returning home from an extended out-of-town trip. She pulled her car into the dark parking lot, grabbed her luggage, and walked up to the heavy front entrance of the West High Street building. She turned her key in the lock, pushed the door open into the dimly lit foyer, and stopped dead in her tracks.
There, sprawled across the linoleum floor in the open doorway of apartment number two, lay two bodies.
Stubbs dropped her bags, stumbled backward out of the building, and dialed 911, her voice shaking as she spoke to the dispatcher.
When the emergency medics and police officers arrived minutes later, they found Angela Yvonne Gilpin lying near the threshold. She had been shot six times—four large-caliber entry wounds to her torso and two precise shots to the back of her head.
The medical examiner for Boone County, Dr. Carl Stacy, would later note during the autopsy that there was a complete absence of soot or stippling on the skin surrounding the wounds. In forensic terms, this meant the muzzle of the weapon had been held at least twelve to twenty-four inches away when fired; it was not a close-quarters struggle, but a execution-style ambush carried out from the darkness of the hallway.
Angela was dressed in her work clothes, her keys lying near her hand. As the manager of the Bee Line convenience store, she was scheduled for the early opening shift and had been stepping out of her apartment to go to work when the door opened into a hail of lead.
Rodney Dean Gilpin lay directly beside her, his body blocking the entrance to the living room. He had been shot three times in the chest and once through the left elbow, likely killed as he rushed toward the sound of the initial gunfire to save his wife.
Detectives moved through the building, knocking on doors and waking terrified residents. A few neighbors mentioned hearing faint, rhythmic popping sounds in the night, somewhere around 3:15 a.m., but they had dismissed them as old pipes or car backfires. No one had heard an argument, no one had heard a door being kicked in, and no one had heard a single scream. There was only the sudden burst of noise, and then the quiet.
While searching the apartment, an investigator opened Angela’s purse, which was sitting on the kitchen counter. Inside, tucked next to her wallet, was the official paperwork for the protective order she had filed just thirteen days prior—the document detailing how David tracked her movements and expressing her specific fear that he would shoot her and her husband.
The timeline on those papers revealed a tragic judicial failure.
Judge John Beedham had set a formal hearing for the protective order on September 24th. Cole County deputies had taken the summons and driven to David’s West Main Street apartment to serve him the legal notice, but when they knocked, they were informed by neighbors that Hosier had already been evicted and had reportedly left the state. Because the law requires a target to be personally served before an order can take effect, Judge Beedham had no choice but to dismiss the petition on September 24th due to a lack of service.
Angela had reached out to the state for a shield, but the bureaucratic gears had turned too slowly, and the petition was dismissed exactly four days before she was murdered.
The landlord, Dennis Prenger, stood in the parking lot later that morning, watching the coroner’s assistants wheel the gurney out. He confirmed to detectives that he had been actively evicting David from his apartment specifically because of his aggressive, obsessive behavior toward Angela.
Prenger was visibly shaken, his voice cracking as he admitted to police that he had no idea David possessed prior out-of-state warrants or a history of domestic violence when he hired him for maintenance work. Angela’s mother arrived at the scene shortly after, weeping on the sidewalk, telling officers that David had been making her daughter’s life a living hell for months.
When detectives used a master key to enter David’s abandoned apartment across the parking lot, they found the rooms stripped of personal effects, but left behind in a drawer was a cache of live ammunition. David himself was gone.
Jefferson City Police Captain Mike Smith didn’t waste any time. He pushed an all-points bulletin across the national wire, flashing a description of David’s vehicle: a 2000 black Pontiac Grand Am with Missouri plates. They had one suspect, a clear motive, and a digital trail.
Technicians began pinging David’s cell phone, watching the digital dots leap across the map, moving rapidly south and west away from the borders of Missouri. He was driving hard, crossing into the wooded hills of eastern Oklahoma.
Roughly eight hours after Jennifer Stubbs had screamed in the hallway, law enforcement officers in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, spotted the black Grand Am speeding down a state highway. A massive multi-agency net—including the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, the Tahlequah Police, and armed rangers from the Oklahoma Scenic Rivers Commission—converged on the highway, their red and blue lights flashing against the trees.
When the cruisers attempted to box him in, David stomped on the gas, initiating a brief, high-speed pursuit through the winding roads. The chase ended when a phalanx of police vehicles forced him off the shoulder, his tires kicking up a thick cloud of dust.
David threw open the driver’s side door and stepped out into the bright Oklahoma sun, facing a dozen drawn service weapons. He didn’t raise his hands.
“Shoot me,” he shouted at the wall of officers, his face contorted. “And get it over with.”
The deputies didn’t oblige. They tackled him into the dirt, clicked the steel cuffs around his wrists, and transported him to the Cherokee County Detention Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
A team of Jefferson City detectives flew to Oklahoma the following morning, their notebooks ready as they began a systematic search of the black Pontiac. What they discovered tucked into the trunk and the back seat was enough to supply a small militia.
Stored inside the car was a World War II-era Sten submachine gun—a crude, heavy automatic weapon that David had assembled by hand from a mail-order parts kit. Alongside the submachine gun sat fourteen other firearms, ranging from hunting rifles to semi-automatic pistols, every single one of them fully loaded and ready to fire. Investigators pulled out more than four hundred rounds of spare ammunition, a heavy Kevlar bulletproof vest, a steel crowbar, boxes of latex gloves, a heavy knife, and a homemade police baton.
Sitting on the front passenger seat, next to a map of the interstate system, was a handwritten note scribbled on a piece of yellow legal paper.
“Be honest with them if there is something wrong,” the note read, the ink smeared. “If you do not, this could happen to you.”
When detectives sat across from David in the interrogation room and slid the note across the table, he stared at the handwriting with an expressionless face, claiming he had absolutely no memory of ever writing those words.
When asked about the rolling arsenal packed into his sedan, his explanation was equally detached. He told the investigators that he had simply been taking a long, quiet drive through the country to clear his head after his eviction, and that the fifteen firearms were strictly intended for hunting.
Four long years of legal wrangling, discovery motions, and psychiatric evaluations passed between the night Jennifer Stubbs found the bodies and the morning a jury was finally selected to determine David Hosier’s fate.
Cole County Prosecutor Mark Richardson had formally charged Hosier in late 2009 with two counts of first-degree murder, armed criminal action, first-degree burglary, and unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Hosier had entered a firm plea of not guilty on January 20th, 2010. By August of that year, after reviewing the sheer brutality of the crime scene, Richardson announced that the state of Missouri would officially seek the death penalty.
The capital trial finally commenced in October 2013.
Hosier’s defense team, led by veteran public defenders Janice Zembles and Donald Catlett, came into the courtroom with decades of capital experience between them. The state’s own assistant attorney general, Greg Barnes, would later remark to the Supreme Court that Hosier’s trial counsel possessed over one hundred and fifty trials’ worth of collective experience accumulated across the courtrooms of Texas and Missouri. These were seasoned, aggressive litigators who understood exactly how to break a prosecution’s case.
The state’s strategy rested entirely on a mountain of circumstantial evidence, woven together to form a seamless narrative of a jilted lover pushed to slaughter.
Mark Richardson stood before the jury during his opening statement, his voice booming through the quiet courtroom as he laid out the final hours of Angela and Rodney Gilpin. He alleged that around 3:00 a.m., knowing Angela’s strict routine as the manager of the Bee Line store, Hosier had used his access to the landlord’s master keys to slip into the West High Street building. He argued that Hosier had waited in the dark alcove of the hallway until the apartment door clicked open, and then opened fire with the homemade Sten submachine gun, spraying the doorway with 9 mm bullets until the couple lay dead on the floorboards.
Dr. Carl Stacy took the stand next, using color photographs to detail the entry and exit wounds on the victims’ bodies. Angela had been struck six times, with two devastating rounds delivered to the back of her head as she fell, while Rodney had taken three rounds to the center of his chest.
The prosecution then presented the physical contents of the Pontiac Grand Am, laying out the fifteen guns, the boxes of ammunition, the tactical vest, the crowbar, and the latex gloves on the evidence tables directly in front of the jury box. They read the full text of the handwritten note aloud, emphasizing the phrase, “people do not like being messed with, and after so much of this, they can go off the deep end.”
Then came the item that Richardson wanted the jurors to study with absolute focus: a legal notepad recovered from the front seat of David’s car. On the top sheet, written in clear block lettering, was a detailed physical description of Angela Gilpin’s car along with her exact license plate number.
To cap off the state’s case, the digital audio files from Jerilyn Bleckler’s answering machine were played for the court. The courtroom grew deathly quiet as Hosier’s own voice echoed through the room:
“I’m going to finish it. You don’t believe me. I’m tired of this.”
When the defense’s turn came, Donald Catlett stood before the jury and focused his energy on the one major weakness in the state’s forensic mountain: the ballistics report.
The state had called Highway Patrol criminalist Todd Garrison, who testified that he had attempted to test-fire David’s homemade Sten gun two days after its recovery in Oklahoma. Garrison admitted on the stand that the weapon was highly temperamental, jamming repeatedly and failing to fire consistently during laboratory testing; on multiple attempts, the gun either suffered a misfire or would only discharge a single round before locking up.
Catlett started and ended his closing argument by playing a video loop of the state’s own ballistics expert wrestling with the crude submachine gun in the lab, unable to make it fire automatically.
He then read directly from Garrison’s official forensic report, lingering on the single word that the defense needed the jury to remember.
“Inconclusive,” Catlett told the room, letting the syllables hang in the air. “The forensic result regarding the murder weapon is inconclusive.”
He reminded the jury that ten spent 9 mm shell casings had been recovered from the hallway where the Gilpins died, but the state’s lab could not definitively match those casings to the test bullets fired from Hosier’s Sten gun. Catlett suggested that a completely different 9 mm handgun—one that was never found and never linked to his client—was the actual murder weapon, though he conceded he could not prove who owned such a gun.
Richardson launched a fierce counterattack during his rebuttal. He pointed out that while the overall report was labeled inconclusive due to the gun’s poor construction, Garrison had found four specific shell casings at the crime scene that shared distinct toolmark signatures with casings ejected from the Sten gun during lab tests.
The state also brought in a specialized ATF agent who explained that while buying individual gun parts online isn’t illegal, the moment Hosier assembled those raw pieces into a functioning automatic firearm, he had created an illegal “ghost gun”—a lethal weapon with no serial numbers and no paper trail.
Catlett attempted to raise doubt about the sound of the crime, pointing out that multiple neighbors testified to hearing only three distinct pops, rather than the continuous roar of a submachine gun.
“Three pops could easily be three short, controlled bursts from an experienced marksman,” Richardson countered, leaning over the jury railing.
The twelve jurors from St. Charles County didn’t need much time to sort through the arguments. They filed out of the courtroom, and after deliberating for less than two hours, they knocked on the heavy wooden door to signal they had reached a decision.
On October 23rd, 2013, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts: two counts of first-degree murder, armed criminal action, first-degree burglary, and unlawful possession of a weapon. Two days later, the penalty phase began, with the state presenting the impact of the loss on Angela and Rodney’s two sons. On October 26th, the jury emerged once more, unanimously recommending a sentence of death.
On November 26th, 2013, Cole County Circuit Court Judge Patricia Joyce ordered David Hosier to stand. Her face was completely devoid of emotion as she read the final judgment aloud, sentencing him to death by lethal injection, alongside two additional fifteen-year sentences and a seven-year sentence for the firearms charges.
David Hosier stood perfectly straight, his hands loosely clasped in front of him, his face as blank as stone as the words echoed off the walls.
It was only after the prison van had carried him away that the critical questions began to surface.
In April 2019, appellate public defender Amy Bartholow stood before the seven justices of the Missouri Supreme Court, launching a fierce post-conviction challenge. She argued that Hosier’s original trial lawyers had committed a fatal error by failing to present his complete medical history to the jury during the sentencing phase. She produced the documented records from the Audrain Medical Center showing that David had suffered a significant stroke in 2007, just two years before the murders.
“His brain is literally dead in places,” Bartholow argued, pointing to the neurological charts.
The medical records had been included in a massive stack of documentary evidence handed to the jury, but his trial lawyers had never called a doctor to explain what those records actually meant. No neurologist had taken the stand to explain how localized tissue death from a stroke can destroy a human being’s capacity for impulse control and emotional stability.
“The jury was handed paper,” Bartholow said. “They were never given understanding.”
The state’s representative, Assistant Attorney General Greg Barnes, pushed back hard against the medical defense, calling the stroke arguments a collection of “legal Hail Marys.” He reminded the justices that Hosier’s violent tendencies had existed long before the 2007 stroke, pointing to a 1986 domestic assault conviction and documented threats David had made during that same period to kidnap his children and kill local police officers.
However, Hosier’s post-conviction attorney, Jeremy Weiss, had spent months tracking down the original trial jurors to ask them about the missing medical context. He told reporters that when he asked the jurors if a live explanation from a medical professional regarding the stroke’s impact on David’s brain would have changed their minds about voting for the death penalty, their response was chilling.
“They almost universally answered yes,” Weiss said.
David Hosier, however, held a completely different view of how his appeal should have been handled. He didn’t want his lawyers talking about his brain damage, his childhood trauma, or the tragic death of his father on that Indiana staircase.
“I told them I didn’t want the boohoo, woe is me,” Hosier told reporters from his prison phone, his voice sharp with frustration.
What he wanted was for someone to stand up in court and shout about the absolute lack of physical evidence—the missing DNA, the absent fingerprints, the inconclusive ballistics. He wanted the system to acknowledge that they were condemning a man based purely on a chain of circumstances. But the legal machinery kept grinding forward, regardless of his wishes.
Following the formal sentencing in 2013, the heavy steel doors of the Potosi Correctional Center in Mineral Point, Missouri, closed behind David Hosier.
Potosi is a maximum-security facility set deep within the rural hills of southeast Missouri, a place specifically designed to house the state’s condemned population. Hosier arrived there at fifty-eight, beginning a decade-long legal battle that would ultimately lose at every single turn.
The Missouri Supreme Court first reviewed his direct appeal in 2015, issuing a comprehensive ruling in the case of State v. Hosier, which affirmed his convictions and death sentence in full. Every argument regarding the tracking of his cell phone or the admission of his voicemails was systematically dismantled by the state’s high judges.
Hosier then filed a motion under Missouri Rule 29.15, claiming his trial attorneys had been constitutionally ineffective. The local circuit court denied the motion without a full evidentiary hearing.
He appealed that denial back to the Missouri Supreme Court, which scheduled forty minutes of oral arguments in April 2019. Amy Bartholow stood before the seven-justice panel, arguing that Janice Zembles and Donald Catlett had failed their client by omitting the neurological experts and failing to strike two clearly biased jurors during jury selection. She pleaded for a new trial, or at the very least, a new sentencing hearing.
In December 2019, the high court handed down a unanimous 7-0 decision written by Judge Paul Wilson, ruling that Judge Joyce had been entirely correct in her findings. David Hosier had received a constitutionally adequate defense; every legal door was now firmly shut.
Years later, his attorney Jeremy Weiss compiled a final, nineteen-page clemency petition directed to the governor’s office. The document laid out David’s life in striking detail—his father’s murder in 1971, his honorable Navy service, his years saving lives as a firefighter, and the brain damage from the 2007 stroke. It also noted that during his eleven years at Potosi, David had accumulated only four minor disciplinary infractions and had spent years living in the prison’s coveted honor dorm.
But when the Associated Press asked David about the clemency strategy, the old veteran remained stubborn.
“I didn’t want them using my dad’s death as an excuse,” he said. “I wanted them to look at the evidence.”
On February 14th, 2024, the Missouri Supreme Court signed the official death warrant, setting his execution date for June 11th.
Then, on May 16th, 2024, just twenty-six days before his scheduled death, David was rushed from his cell to an outside medical facility following a severe cardiovascular collapse. A prison physician diagnosed him with advanced end-stage heart failure. His sister, Barbara Moral, confirmed to the media that his atrial fibrillation had grown catastrophic, causing his legs to swell to twice their normal size and leaving him in agonizing, constant pain.
“He could barely walk, and he could barely talk,” she said fiercely to reporters outside the gates. “Why did they wait so long to give him medical help?”
Reverend Jeff Hood, a spiritual advisor who had been ministering to David multiple times a day, called an immediate press conference to address the state’s handling of the dying inmate.
“How sick does a person have to be to not be executed in the state of Missouri?” Hood demanded, staring into the television cameras.
The state offered no response. On June 7th, four days before the scheduled lethal injection, David was photographed inside Potosi sitting in a standard wheelchair, his large hands gripping a wooden cane. His voice was a raspy wheeze when he spoke to journalists over the prison line, though he insisted he was at peace with whatever was coming.
“I’m not an angel, I know that,” David said quietly into the receiver. “I’m human. I make mistakes. We all make mistakes.”
On June 8th, United States Representatives Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II sent a joint letter to Governor Mike Parson, begging for a stay of execution based on Hosier’s severe brain damage and the statements of the original jurors.
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done,” the ministers wrote. “The same is true for Mr. Hosier.”
On June 10th, 2024, Governor Parson officially denied the clemency petition, issuing a stern press release to the public.
“Angela Gilpin had her life stolen by David Hosier because he could not accept it when she ended their romantic involvement,” the governor’s statement read. “He displays no remorse for his senseless violence. For these heinous acts, Hosier earned the maximum punishment under the law.”
The following morning, David released his final written statement to the world through the Associated Press.
“Now I get to go to heaven,” the statement read. “Don’t cry for me. Just join me when your time comes.”
Reverend Hood spent the final hours inside the holding cell with David, later telling reporters that the condemned man had reclaimed his dignity through his refusal to beg or lie.
At 6:00 p.m. on June 11th, 2024, the leather straps were tightened around David Hosier’s wrists inside the execution chamber at Bonne Terre. The pentobarbital entered his veins, his head turned twice toward the dark glass, his chest heaved with two final, heavy breaths, and the line went flat. He was sixty-nine years old, the second man executed by the state of Missouri that year.
He died as he lived—caught between a legacy of public service and a web of dark, unresolved circumstances.
Angela Gilpin was forty-five years old when she died in the doorway of apartment number two; her husband Rodney was sixty-one. They had spent twenty-one years together, raised two sons, and had simply been trying to piece a broken marriage back together when the gunfire found them in the dark.
The state carried out its final sentence, the courts moved on to the next docket, and the quiet hallway on West High Street grew silent once more, leaving the living to weigh the heavy, unanswered questions of guilt and circumstance.
