OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma man who killed a 10-year-old girl in a cannibalistic fantasy died by lethal injection Thursday in the nation’s 25th and final execution of the year.
Kevin Ray Underwood was pronounced dead at 10:14 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It was Oklahoma’s fourth execution of the year, and it took place on Underwood’s 45th birthday.
Oklahoma uses a three-drug lethal injection process that begins with the sedative midazolam followed by a second drug that paralyzes the inmate and a third that stops their heart.
Underwood, a former grocery store worker, was sentenced to die for killing Jamie Rose Bolin in 2006. He admitted to luring Jamie into his apartment and beating her over the head with a cutting board before suffocating and sexually assaulting her. He told investigators that he nearly beheaded Jamie in his bathtub before abandoning his plans to eat her.
Strapped to a gurney inside the death chamber on Thursday, Underwood apologized to Jamie’s family and to his own family “for all the terrible things I did.”