US government executes killer obsessed with witchcraft

CHICAGO » The U.S. government on Tuesday executed a former soldier who said an obsession with witchcraft led him to kill a Georgia nurse he believed had put a spell on him.

WilliamEmmett LeCroy, 50, was pronounced dead at 9:06 p.m. EDT after receiving a lethal injection at the same U. S. prison in Terre Haute, Indiana where five others have been executed i n 2020 following a 17-year period without a federal execution.

Lawyers had asked Trump in a petition to commute LeCroy’s sentence to life in prison, saying that LeCroy’s brother, Georgia State Trooper Chad LeCroy, was killed during a routine traffic stop in 2010 and that another son’s death would devastate the LeCroy family. Another execution, of Christopher Vialva, is scheduled Thursday. He would be the first AfricanAmerican on federal death row to be put to death in the series of federal executions this year.

Critics say President Donald Trump’s resumption of federal executions this year is a cynical bid to help him claim the mantel of law-and- order candidate leading up to Election Day. Supporters say Trump is bringing long- overdue justice to victims and their families.

LeCroy broke into the Cherrylog, Georgia, mountain home of 30-year- old Joann Lee Tiesler on Oct. 7, 2001, and waited for her to return from a shopping trip. When she walked through the door, LeCroy struck her with a shotgun, bound and raped her. He then slashed her throat and repeatedly stabbed her in the back.

LeCroy had known Tiesler because she lived near a relative’s home and would often wave to her as he drove by. He later told investigators he’d come to believe she might have been his old babysitter he called Tinkerbell, who LeCroy claimed molested him as a child. After killing Tiesler, he realized that couldn’t possibly be true. Two days after killing Tiesler, LeCroy was arrested driving Tiesler’s truck after passing a U. S. checkpoint in Minnesota heading to Canada.