Texas: Eric Nenno executed

A former plumbing supply salesman convicted of snatching a 7-year-old girl from his neighborhood then strangling and raping her and hiding her body in his attic was executed Tuesday.

Asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Eric Nenno replied, "No, warden."

8 minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow, he was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. CDT.

The girl's father and grandfather were among the witnesses, but Nenno did not acknowledge them. Nicole Benton's grandfather walked up to the window separating him from Nenno and then turned around and walked to the back of the chamber.

Nenno, 47, confessed to the abduction and attack on Nicole 2 days after she disappeared from her dad's birthday party almost 14 years ago. Then he led officers to her remains in his home in Hockley, about 35 miles northwest of Houston.

"It's a parent's worst nightmare," Joan Huffman, the Harris County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Nenno at his 1996 trial, recalled. "Mr. Nenno was an evil person."

Nenno's appeals were exhausted and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously against commuting his sentence to life.

In a recent interview from death row, Nenno took responsibility for the girl's death and said he was prepared to die.

"My salvation is secure," he told The Associated Press. "I know where I'm going when this is all over."

Asked where that would be, he replied: "Heaven."

Nenno, born in Olean, N.Y., went to high school in nearby Smethport, Pa., then joined the Navy, where his attorneys said he was exposed to toxic chemicals during a four-year duty tour that left him brain damaged.

Nenno, however, said nothing could excuse his crime.

"I can't apologize enough," he said.

He lured the girl from his front yard into his house by telling her he needed to retrieve a guitar so he could join her father's band playing at the birthday celebration down the street. Once inside, he attacked her, strangled her to keep her quiet, then raped her at least twice after she
was dead.

Police investigating her disappearance knocked on his door and when his nervousness attracted their attention, deputies had him accompany them to a command post.

Under questioning, Nenno said he thought the girl had been abducted, raped and murdered. Asked what kind of person he thought might do such a thing, he replied: "Someone like me."

"I was not cognizant I had committed the crime," he said from death row. "I had blacked out the memory."

He took a polygraph and underwent additional questioning.

"Things kind of fell apart," recalled Anthony Osso, Nenno's trial lawyer.

"I think she's still in the attic," Nenno told detectives.

In his confession, Nenno said he'd been having sexual fantasies involving young girls for most of his adult life.

"There was no evidence to suggest he ever acted on those fantasies," Osso said. "But for the most part, when you confess to elements of an offense, you make it much easier for the state. His statement led them to the body. He himself took them to it."

From death row, Nenno said he was addicted to pornography and had been drinking the day of the slaying.

"During the years that I have been imprisoned, I have often thought about the devastating grief and pain I caused Nicole Benton, her family, and her friends," he wrote in the clemency petition rejected by the parole board. "There is no excuse nor rationale which would be sufficient to justify this heinous act of violence perpetrated by me."

Osso said he believed Nenno's remorse was sincere.

"It's a sad case for all involved," he said. "It ripped apart Nicole Benton's family, and they were genuinely nice people. I don't think anybody could ever grasp the horror of that situation."

Huffman said she remembered questioning a medical examiner at Nenno's trial about the girl's fatal injuries.

"That had to be one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life," she said. "The family, they were right in back of me on the front row. I could hear them quietly crying. Some of the jurors were crying. It was heart-wrenching.

"She had been strangled and brutally raped and then she was raped again after she was dead. That's what the evidence showed. How could anyone sit in a courtroom and listen to testimony that that had happened to their 7 year-old child?"

Nenno becomes the 13th condemned Texas inmate to be put to death this year and 4th this month in the nation's most active death penalty state. Another execution is scheduled for Thursday. He becomes the 418th condemned inmate to be put to death in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment on Dec. 7, 1982, and the 179th overall since Rick Perry became Governor of Texas in 2001. On Thursday, Gregory Wright, 42, was set to follow Nenno to the death chamber. Wright was a homeless man convicted of taking part in the fatal stabbing of Donna Duncan Vick, a sympathetic Dallas County woman who had given him food, shelter and money. Another 6 Texas prisoners have execution dates for November.

Nenno becomes the 29th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1128th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Sources: Associated Press & Rick Halperin