(ST. LOUIS, AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court was considering final appeals from a man scheduled to be executed Tuesday in Missouri for the kidnapping, rape and stabbing death of a 15-year-old girl more than two decades ago.
Roderick Nunley, 50, is scheduled for lethal injection at 6 p.m. CDT. Investigators say he and his co-defendant randomly targeted and kidnapped Ann Harrison as she waited outside her Kansas City home for the school bus in 1989. The girl was then raped and fatally stabbed.
Gov. Jay Nixon was also weighing a clemency request. If neither Nixon nor the courts step in, Nunley would be the sixth death-row inmate to be executed this year in Missouri. Nunley’s co-defendant in the case, Michael Taylor, was executed last year.
Nunley’s attorney has three appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court, including one that says the death penalty amounts to cruel and unusual punishment — an argument rebuffed by a detective who helped break the case.
Retired Kansas City detective Pete Edlund said the only thing cruel and unusual is how long Nunley and Taylor remained on death row. He said Nunley should have been put to death long ago.
“They just take forever to do the deed,” Edlund told The Associated Press. “The delay in executing these two is just nuts because it didn’t have anything to do with their guilt. It was legal mumbo jumbo nonsense.”
The other two pending appeals take issue with Missouri’s process of secretly acquiring its execution drug and argue that Nunley should have been sentenced by a jury, not a judge.
The clemency petition to Nixon, filed by death penalty opponents, alleges that racial bias played a role in the case because a prosecutor refused a plea deal that would have given Nunley life in prison without parole. Nunley is black, as was Taylor, while the victim was white.
According to prosecutors, Nunley and Taylor binged on cocaine and stole a car in the pre-dawn hours of March 22, 1989. At one point, a police officer from neighboring Lee’s Summit chased the car but was called off by a supervisor when the stolen car crossed into Kansas City.
Later that morning, the men were driving around Kansas City when they saw Ann, her school books and flute on the ground beside her.
“They were just cruising and she’s out at the driveway waiting for the school bus,” Edlund said.
He said Ann’s mother had stepped inside to get a younger daughter ready for school. When she heard the bus, she looked outside. Ann’s books and flute were there, but her daughter was gone.
“She knew something was wrong,” Edlund said.
Taylor and Nunley had grabbed the girl and taken her to Nunley’s mother’s home. She was raped and sodomized, then stabbed repeatedly in the stomach and neck.
Taylor and Nunley put the girl’s body in the trunk of the stolen car, then abandoned it in a residential area. The body was found three days later.
Edlund said the case was cracked months later when a man in jail for robbery — and seeking a $10,000 reward in the case — turned in Taylor and Nunley. Both men confessed, and some of Ann’s hair was found in carpeting at the home where the crime occurred.
Edlund said the killing was haunting. He noted that her father was a former reserve officer with the police department, and her uncle was a Kansas City officer.
“To all of us, she was part of our police family,” Edlund said. “That made it even more important that we solve the case.”