After spending more than 40 years on death row, an Oklahoma man convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering a 7-year-old girl was executed on Thursday.
Richard Rojem Jr. was given a three-drug lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and was declared dead at 10:16 a.m., prison officials confirmed. He’d been the longest serving inmate on Oklahoma’s death row.
“I’ve said my goodbyes,” Rojem uttered in his final moments, declining to offer any other last words.
Rojem was convicted in 1985 of raping and fatally stabbing his former stepdaughter, Layla Dawn Cummings. She was abducted from an apartment in Elk City on July 6, 1984, after her mother, Mindy Cummings, left to work a late shift at a local fast food joint.
The girl’s brutalized and partially clothed body was found the next day in a field in western Oklahoma near the town of Burns Flat, some 15 miles from where she lived.
The horrific incident came two months after Cummings finalized her divorce with Rojem, who was previously convicted of raping two teenage girls in Michigan.
Prosecutors contended he was angry with Layla because she reported him for sexually abusing her, resulting in his split from her mother and his return to prison for parole violation.
“For many years, the shock of losing her and the knowledge of the sheer terror, pain and suffering that she endured at the hands of this soulless monster was more than I could fathom how to survive day to day,” Cummings said in a recent statement to the parole board.
Rojem, meanwhile has long denied killing Layla.
“I wasn’t a good human being for the first part of my life, and I don’t deny that,” Rojem told the state’s Pardon and Parole Board via video link from prison. “But I went to prison. I learned my lesson and I left all that behind.”
The board denied his clemency plea earlier this month, clearing the way for his execution.
It was the nation’s second in as many days. On Wednesday, Ramiro Gonzales, a Texas man who admitted he kidnapped, sexually assaulted and fatally shot an 18-year-old woman in 2001 was executed Wednesday evening.
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