As Indiana seeks to resume lethal injections, 2 Evansville-area men sit on death row

EVANSVILLE – After a 15-year pause, Indiana plans to resume lethal injections – but there’s no word on when the eight convicted killers on death row, including two Southern Indiana men, may have their sentences carried out.

Erin Murphy, a spokeswoman for Gov. Eric Holcomb, declined to tell the Courier & Press where the state will get the pentobarbital it plans to use to kill people, saying it’s confidential information under state law. And when asked if officials will work to schedule new execution dates for everyone condemned to die, she didn’t answer and instead resent the news release that announced the initial decision.

“Nothing additional to add,” she said.

According to the news release, Holcomb and Attorney General Todd Rokita are “seeking the resumption of executions in Indiana prisons.” Rokita officially filed a motion with the Indiana Supreme Court on June 26.

They’ll attempt to start with Joseph Corcoran, a Fort Wayne man convicted in the 1997 killings of four people – including his brother. The conviction came five years after he was acquitted in the shooting deaths of his parents.

According to Rokita’s motion, Corcoran has exhausted his appeals both at the state and federal level. It “respectfully requests that this court set the date for Corcoran’s execution.”

Two Evansville-area men on death row: Roy Lee Ward and Jeffrey A. Weisheit

The motion says nothing about Roy Lee Ward or Jeffrey A. Weisheit .

Ward was sentenced to lethal injection in 2002 for the July 11, 2001 murder and rape of 15-year-old Dale, Indiana, honor roll student Stacy Payne. She worked at Jenk’s Pizza, was a cheerleader and won awards for public speaking, her obituary stated.

When Ward appealed and was granted a second trial, a jury handed him a second death sentence in 2007. The state supreme court then scheduled his execution for Dec. 11, 2012, but U.S. District Court issued an initial 90-day stay, and a series of other stays and lawsuits have pushed the execution back since then.

Weisheit was sentenced to the death penalty in 2013: three years after he set fire to a Northern Vanderburgh County home while his girlfriend’s children – 8-year-old Alyssa Lynch and 5-year-old Caleb Lynch – were trapped inside.

According to their joint obituary, Alyssa was a second-grader at Cynthia Heights who devoured “Junie B. Jones” books, while Caleb attended preschool and liked to help his mom cook.

Due to the media attention around the case, defense attorneys successfully lobbied to move his trial to Clark County. On July 12, 2013, Circuit Court Judge Daniel Moore sentenced him to die the following June.

That never happened, and the case spent years winding through appeals. In November 2018, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld his conviction and sentence, and less than a year later, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision.

A third Evansville-area man, John Stephenson, escaped death row in 2017 when the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his death sentence for the March 1996 murders of Jay Tyler Jr., Tyler’s wife Kathy, and Brandy Southard.

Southard, 21, worked at Allied Sporting Goods, while Jay and Kathy, both 29, had a daughter and loved to hunt and fish together, their obituaries stated.

During Stephenson’s 1997 trial, court officials strapped him with an electric stun belt meant to prevent “outbursts.” Although Stephenson’s shirt hid the belt, the jury could still see it bulging under his clothes. That, the court ruled, could have prejudiced them.

What is pentobarbital?

According to the National Library of Medicine , pentobarbital is a barbiturate meant to manage epilepsy and insomnia. Veterinarians also use it to put pets to sleep.

Holcomb’s news release doesn’t explicitly say whether Indiana will utilize pentobarbital as part of a lethal injection cocktail or as the sole deadly drug, like several other states do.

Indiana has struggled to maintain stockpiles of lethal injection drugs as pharmaceutical companies increasingly moved to block their products from being used in government-sanctioned deaths. So in 2017, Holcomb pushed state lawmakers wrapping up that year’s budget bill to tuck in a provision shielding the drug distributors’ identities from public view.

Two years later, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr issued an addendum for federal executions that replaced a previously used three-drug mix with a single dose of pentobarbital. In the final six months of the Trump administration, the federal government used it to carry out 13 executions at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute – the first federal prisoners to get executed since 2003.

Now Rokita and Holcomb are attempting to end a slightly shorter pause on the state level. The last Indiana prisoner to die by lethal injection was former Evansville resident Matthew Eric Wrinkles.

On July 21, 1994, Wrinkles shot and killed his estranged wife Debra Jean Wrinkles, her brother Mark “Tony” Fulkerson, and Fulkerson’s wife, Natalie. He died more than 15 years later in Michigan City prison from a deadly mix of sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.

Tony Fulkerson, 28, was a Central High School graduate who had purchased a Honda 750 motorcycle shortly before his death. Natalie, who was 26 and went by “Chris,” worked as a secretary for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Debra was a 31-year-old mother of two who managed the Colonial Bakery on Covert Avenue. The day after the murders, a sign hung on the door: “closed due to death.”

Additional information taken from the Courier & Press archives.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: As Indiana seeks to resume lethal injections, 2 Evansville-area men sit on death row