Death Penalty News

After a man posing as a FedEx deliveryman forced his way into her family’s house and fatally shot her parents and four siblings, 15-year-old Cassidy Stay played dead until the killer fled the scene. Bleeding from a wound on her head where a bullet grazed her, Cassidy managed to call 911. “It was my Uncle Ronnie. He has been stalking my family for three weeks,” she told paramedics when they arrived at the Spring-area house, according to court documents. “He said he would shoot us and kill us.” Cassidy would be the lone survivor of the July 2014 massacre, which Harris County prosecutors say unfolded in a moment of rage as Ronald Haskell hunted for his ex-wife, Melannie Lyon. Cassidy’s parents had been providing support to Lyon, the sister of Katie Stay, Cassidy’s mother. Ronald Haskell didn’t find his intended target, prosecutors said, but opened fire on the entire Stay family. Cassidy’s phone call is believed to have prevented more violence, as Haskell was captured on...

Harper Lee Ms. Lee’s novel about racial injustice in a small Alabama town became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American. Harper Lee, whose first novel, “ To Kill a Mockingbird ,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 10 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, died on Friday in Monroeville, Ala., where she lived. She was 89. Hank Conner, a nephew of Ms. Lee’s, said that she died in her sleep at the Meadows, an assisted living facility. The instant success of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the next year, turned Ms. Lee into a literary celebrity, a role she found oppressive and never learned to accept. The enormous success of the film version of the novel , released in 1962 with Gregory Peck in the starring role of Atticus Finch, a small-town Southern lawyer who defen...

Dick Hickock and Perry Smith WICHITA, Kansas (AP) – The son of a Kansas law enforcement officer who helped investigate the 1959 killings that inspired the book “In Cold Blood” can publish his father’s field notes that he contended Monday substantially contradict the account found in Truman Capote’s literary masterpiece. In a ruling made public Monday, Shawnee County District Court Judge Larry Hendricks said he made an error when he initially blocked publication of the criminal investigation files in 2012. His decision means that Ronald Nye of Oklahoma City can use his father’s files for a book he plans about the slayings of prominent farmer and community leader Herbert Clutter, his wife and two children in Holcomb. The Kansas attorney general’s office had sued Nye to keep him from publishing the files. Nye had planned to auction the records, but later decided to write a book with author Gary McAvoy. Nye and McAvoy can now work with agents and find a publisher for their boo...

Hickock and Smith DNA testing so far has been inconclusive on whether 2 men executed in Kansas for the 1959 killings that inspired the book "In Cold Blood" can also be linked to the unsolved slayings of a Florida family weeks later, a senior investigator said Wednesday. Kansas Bureau of Investigation will continue testing material collected from the remains of convicted murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, Deputy Director Kyle Smith said. Investigators believe the men fled to Florida after killing the Clutter family in a gruesome case later documented by Truman Capote in his genre-forming classic. "The analysis is not completed," Kyle Smith told The Associated Press. "We are still trying." In Florida, the Sarasota County sheriff's office says it remains optimistic that it can resolve questions about the killings of 4 family members, just days before Christmas 1959. A detective there began investigating the case again in 2007. ...