JARRATT, Va. – Teresa Lewis spent the last days before her
execution as she had spent one side of her life _ singing hymns and
praying. That devotion to Christianity, by her own admission, was
countered by outrageous bouts of sex and betrayal.
That dark side led her life to a deadly turn in 2002 when she
plied two men with sex and cash to kill her husband and stepson to
collect on a $250,000 insurance policy. For that, the 41-year-old
on Thursday was the first woman put to death in the U.S. since
2005.
Lewis died by injection at 9:13 p.m., apologizing first to the
sole surviving daughter of the husband she had killed. She was the
first woman in Virginia since 1912 put to death. Her supporters and
relatives of the victims watched her execution at Greensville
Correctional Center in Jarratt.
"She was very peaceful," before she entered the death chamber,
said her attorney, James Rocap III.
"We thought that we were supposed to be helping her, while she
was actually helping us," he said about the days leading to her
death during which she laughed, sang and prayed _ for
everybody.
Lewis promised the killers a cut of a life insurance policy to
shoot her husband, Julian Clifton Lewis Jr., and his son, Charles,
as they slept in October 2002. Both triggermen were sentenced to
life in prison and one committed suicide in 2006.
Lewis appeared fearful, her jaw clenched, as she was escorted
into the death chamber. She glanced tensely around at 14 assembled
corrections officials before being bound to a gurney with heavy
leather straps.
Moments before her execution, Lewis asked if her husband's
daughter _ her stepdaughter _ was near. She was. Kathy Clifton was
in an adjacent witness room blocked from the inmate's view by a
two-way mirror.
"I want Kathy to know that I love her and I'm very sorry," Lewis
said.
Then, as the drugs flowed into her body, her feet bobbed but she
otherwise remained motionless. A guard lightly tapped her on the
shoulder reassuringly as she slipped into death.
More than 7,300 appeals to stop the execution had been made to
the governor in a state second only to Texas in the number of
people it executes.
Texas held the most recent U.S. execution of a woman in 2005.
Out of more than 1,200 people put to death since the U.S. Supreme
Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, only 11 have been
women.
Lewis, who defense attorneys said was borderline mentally
disabled, had inspired other inmates by singing Christian hymns in
prison. Her fate also had drawn appeals from the European Union, an
indignant rebuke from Iran and the disgust of thousands of
people.
The execution stirred an unusual amount of attention because of
her gender, claims she lacked the intelligence to mastermind the
killings and the post-conviction emergence of defense evidence that
one of the triggermen manipulated her. Her spiritual adviser, the
Rev. Julie Perry, stood sobbing as she later witnessed the
execution, clutching a religious book.
Throughout her life, a faith in God had been a seeming constant
for Lewis _ whether it was the prayer with her husband hours before
he was killed or her ministry behind bars.
But there was another side.
"I was doing drugs, stealing, lying and having several affairs
during my marriages," Lewis wrote in a statement that was read at a
prison religious service in August. "I went to church every Sunday,
Friday and revivals but guess what? I didn't open my Bible at home,
only when I was at church."
Her father said she ran off to get married, then later abandoned
her children and ran off with her sister's husband. Then she had an
affair with her sister's fiance while at the same time having an
affair with another man.
Lewis married Julian in 2000 and two years later, his son
Charles entered the U.S. Army Reserve. When he was called for
active duty he obtained a $250,000 life insurance policy, naming
his father the beneficiary and providing temptation for Teresa
Lewis.
Both men would have to die for Lewis to receive the payout.
She met at a Walmart with the two men who ultimately killed
Julian Lewis and his son. Lewis began an affair with Matthew
Shallenberger and later had sex with the other triggerman, Rodney
Fuller. She also arranged sex with Fuller and her daughter, who was
16, in a parking lot.
On the night before Halloween in 2002, after she prayed with her
husband, Lewis got out of bed, unlocked the door to their mobile
home and put the couple's pit bull in a bedroom so the animal
wouldn't interfere. Shallenberger and Fuller came in and shot both
men several times with the shotguns Lewis had bought for them.
-- AP
