The two latest death row executions to be carried out in the US have taken place within hours of each other.
A killer convicted of beheading three young children and a man who shot his girlfriend’s ex-husband were both put to death yesterday.
The first of these was carried out in Oklahoma as James Pavatt, 73, was executed by lethal injection for the killing of Rob Andrew, 39, in 2001.
Pavatt, who was pronounced dead at 10.12am local time, according to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in relation to the crime.
According to NBC he did not offer any last words, although appeared to mouth something inaudible as a chaplain read from the Bible.
Rob Andrew, an advertising executive, was fatally shot in the garage of the home he shared with his estranged wife Brenda Andrew, as he collected their two young children before Thanksgiving.
Pavatt, who attended the same church as the Andrew family, was having an affair with Brenda, with prosecutors arguing that the pair had plotted Rob’s death.
Rob had told police weeks earlier that someone was trying to kill him, after the brake lines on his car were cut.
Brenda and Pavatt fled to Mexico with her two children after the shooting, and were arrested as they attempted to return to the US three months later.
Pavatt claimed at a clemency hearing last month that Brenda had manipulated him into the murder, saying he was ‘not guilty of shooting anyone’.
However, prosecutors argued that both were equally guilty regardless of who fired the fatal shots. Brenda, who was convicted of the crime at a separate trial, was also sentenced to death — and to this day remains the only woman on death row in Oklahoma.
On the same day, in Huntsville, Texas, 47-year-old John Allen Rubio was put to death by lethal injection for the killings of three-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E. Rubio, and Mary Jane Rubio — who was just two months old — in 2003.
(Picture: Texas Department of Criminal Jus)
Rubio was convicted of stabbing and beheading the children in the squalid flat he shared in the city of Brownsville with his common-law wife Angela Camacho, who is currently serving a life sentence for the murders.
Prior to his execution he thanked his family for their ‘love and understanding’ as well as the prison staff for helping him to find God during his time on death row.
He also apologized to Camacho’s family, saying: ‘I can’t change the past but I can tell you my life is going to be over. But that’s not going to make you happy.
‘I’m going to be with my kids in a little bit. I’m ready to go to heaven to be with my lord and saviour.’
He was pronounced dead at 6.47pm local time, 21 minutes after the first injection had been administered.
Rubio, who wasn’t the biological father of the children, had his original murder conviction overturned by a court after ruling that statements given by Camacho were wrongly given as evidence in the trial.
However, a second trial again convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death, despite defense experts arguing that his childhood of abuse and ‘toxic’ parents had left him developmentally damaged, and that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
The trial also heard that Rubio believed the children to be ‘possessed’ at times and that he regarded himself as ‘the chosen one’ who had to save the world.
The apartment building where the shocking crime happened has since been converted into a community garden.
The two executions bring the number carried out in the US this year to 37 — 19 of which have been in Florida as governor DeSantis speeds up the process of carrying them out before he leaves office in January.