Macalester, Okla.– An Oklahoma man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her 7-month-old daughter after setting fire to their home nearly 20 years ago is scheduled to go on trial. It has been implemented Thursday.
Raymond Johnson, 52, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection at Oklahoma State Prison.
He was convicted in the June 2007 deaths of 24-year-old Brooke Whittaker and her 7-month-old daughter, Kia.
After Johnson and Whitaker got into an early morning altercation at her Tulsa home, he repeatedly hit her in the head with a metal hammer, prosecutors said.
Whitaker’s skull was fractured, and she suffered more than 20 lacerations to her face and scalp. But she was still conscious and begged Johnson to save her and Kia, who was sleeping in the bedroom, prosecutors said in documents prepared for Johnson’s clemency hearing in April.
“She begged him to call 911. She begged him to let her mother come deliver her baby Kia. She begged him to think about her children,” the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office said. Whitaker had three other children.
Johnson retrieved a gas can from a backyard tool shed, doused Whitaker and the house with gasoline, set a dish towel on fire, threw it at Whitaker and then left, the prosecutor’s office said. Whitaker died from head injuries and smoke inhalation while her daughter died from severe burns.
“Raymond Johnson is a cruel killer who inflicted unimaginable pain and suffering on his victims,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said in a statement.
Johnson’s lawyers filed a last-minute appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court to try to stop his execution. His attorney did not return multiple calls and emails seeking comment.
His lawyers had argued unsuccessfully in previous appeals that Johnson’s arrest was illegal, that police coerced his confession, and that his lawyer without his permission admitted guilt in Whitaker’s death.
In April, Oklahoma’s five-member Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to deny clemency to Johnson.
At the clemency hearing, Johnson apologized to the victims’ family and asked for forgiveness, saying he was a changed person.
“I apologize. No excuses, no justifications, a sincere apology,” Johnson said in an interview with Death Penalty Action, a national anti-death penalty group. “And to know it’s sincere, look at my actions. Look at my life. Look at how it’s changed. I’m living a remorseful life. I’m living it.”
At Johnson’s clemency hearing, Whitaker’s family members asked to go ahead with lethal injection.
“Executing him will not bring back my mother or my sister, nor will it take away nearly 20 years of pain. What it will do is finally stop him from continuing to hurt us,” Logan Click, Whitaker’s eldest daughter, said in a letter to the board.
In addition to his first-degree murder conviction, Johnson was convicted in 1996 of manslaughter and served nine years of a 20-year prison sentence in that case.
If the death sentence is carried out, Johnson will be the second person executed this year In Oklahoma And the eleventh person in the country.
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Lozano reported from Houston. Follow Juan A. Lozano: https://x.com/juanlozano70