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Jeffrey Landrigan was sentenced to death 20 years ago today for the 1989 murder of Chester Dean Dyer in Phoenix.
Now the clock ticks as he sits on death row in Florence, wondering if he will be executed at 10 a.m. Tuesday or if an eleventh-hour legal maneuver will cause his execution to be put off for a third time.
On Sunday night, Gov. Jan Brewer announced that she would not grant a reprieve to Landrigan based on new evidence.
And today, a federal judge will question whether the state legally obtained one of the drugs needed for the execution by lethal injection. A nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental has raised questions by Landrigan's defense attorneys on whether the state went outside of U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations to get its supply.
Despite a federal judge's order late Saturday, the state is balking at revealing where it obtained the drug, saying the information is protected by a state law concealing the identities of those involved in executions.
Last week, the Arizona Supreme Court refused to consider either the drug controversy or the new evidence.
These are the latest twists to Landrigan's long and troubled story, which, according to court records and media accounts, is a tale of crime, substance abuse and a life mostly spent in correctional facilities.
As Tuesday's scheduled execution approaches, Landrigan awaits his fate.
Landrigan was born into a family of criminals.
His birth father, whom he never met face to face, died on death row in Arkansas. His grandfather was shot to death by police while robbing a drugstore.
And even before a court found that he killed Dyer, ostensibly by stabbing and strangling him, he had already been convicted of another murder.
According to court filings, Landrigan was born March 17, 1962, to a woman who had used drugs and alcohol all through her pregnancy. His birth name was Billy Patrick Wayne Hill, and his father abandoned him when he was a month old. His mother later abandoned him at a day-care center when he was 8 months old.
He was put up for adoption in Oklahoma. As an adolescent, he abused drugs and alcohol and spent time in juvenile-correctional facilities.
In 1982, when he was 20, he got into an argument with a childhood friend while both were drinking. The other man was about to become a father and he wanted Landrigan to be the boy's godfather. Instead, the two went outside the man's trailer where Landrigan stabbed him to death.
Landrigan was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, but the conviction was overturned on appeal and Landrigan entered a plea agreement to second-degree murder and a 20-year prison term.
Landrigan actually came to know his birth father, Darrel Hill, while in prison. A fellow prisoner in Oklahoma had known Hill from prison in Arkansas and remarked that Landrigan bore such a strong resemblance that he must be Hill's son. He was. Landrigan and Hill struck up correspondence.
Despite his murder plea, Landrigan was put on a minimum-security work crew, and he would sneak away to have sex with a woman he had met in a park. On Nov. 11, 1989, he walked for good, escaping from prison. He headed for Yuma, where he hoped to find his birth mother.
He met Dyer in Phoenix. Dyer, 42, worked in a health club and was known to pick up men and take them home. He met Landrigan at a Burger King.
On Dec. 13, 1989, Dyer called friends at a bar to tell them he was having sex with a man named Jeff. Days later, Dyer was found strangled by an electrical cord and stabbed to death in his apartment. A deck of pornographic playing cards were strewn over the bed and the ace of hearts was dramatically propped up on Dyer's back.
Days later, Landrigan and another man were seen by police stealing a car and breaking into an abandoned house. Landrigan's shoes matched a footprint left in sugar in Dyer's apartment.
According to media accounts at the time, Landrigan told police that he had beaten Dyer after Dyer made sexual advances, but that another man had done the killing.
Landrigan was offered a plea deal to second-degree murder but opted to go to trial. On June 28, 1990, a jury found him guilty of burglary, theft and first-degree felony murder.
Landrigan was uncooperative and disruptive during his trial, and as the judge pondered whether he should be sentenced to death or to life in prison, he refused to let his adoptive mother or his ex-wife testify on his behalf.
When it was time to be sentenced, he dared the judge to sentence him to death.
"If you want to give me the death penalty, bring it on," he told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Cheryl Hendrix. "I'm ready."
Hendrix complied with his wish on Oct. 25, 1990.
Hendrix, now retired, has since sworn in an affidavit that if she had known about Landrigan's background, she would probably have sentenced him to life in prison.
Landrigan was first scheduled to die in 1996, but his attorneys found grounds for appeal.
In September 2007, his appeals ran out, and the Arizona Supreme Court scheduled his execution for Nov. 1, 2007.
But then the execution was stayed because the U.S. Supreme Court was deciding whether lethal injection, as practiced by Kentucky, constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
The Supreme Court approved the Kentucky protocol in April 2008 and a new Arizona protocol was hammered out in state and federal courts in 2009.
Landrigan's appeals ran out again, and he was rescheduled for execution on Tuesday.
Last week, however, Landrigan's attorneys received preliminary analysis of DNA from the case. It was not tested at the time because there was no reliable DNA testing in 1989, when the crime took place.
In 2007, attorneys had sent Dyer's pants to a crime lab to have blood and semen stains tested. Two samples of semen were found, neither of which matched Landrigan. Dyer's DNA profile is unknown. But the blood was not tested.
After Landrigan had already been scheduled to die, a Superior Court judge approved sending the pants back to the lab to test the blood. The blood was found to belong to two individuals, one assumed to be Dyer, the other a third person who was not Landrigan. The implication, defense attorneys argue, is that someone else had sex with Dyer and then the two struggled, ending in Dyer's death.
Assistant Arizona Attorney General Kent Cattani maintained that the new DNA findings were only cumulative and that because other evidence placed Landrigan at the scene of the crime, they didn't matter.
On Friday, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency recommended that Brewer issue a reprieve on the execution based on that evidence. Brewer denied the motion Sunday night.
The sodium-thiopental shortage first became evident in May, when the state of Ohio nearly postponed an execution because it wasn't sure it could obtain the drug.
On Sept. 30, the Arizona Department of Corrections announced that it had obtained thiopental, though court hearings revealed it had not come from the FDA-approved source.
On Saturday, U.S. District Court Judge Roslyn O. Silver ordered that the state "immediately and publicly disclose" its source for the drug, its expiration date and other information about its manufacture.
Cattani told The Republic on Sunday that he would reveal only the expiration date in a motion to reconsider the ruling. And if the judge insisted, he would offer to provide the other facts under seal.
In an Oct. 18 sworn deposition, Landrigan claimed he had spoken to Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan about the drug. A Corrections Department spokesman would not confirm the conversation.
"I asked the director if he was going to tell me where he got the drugs to kill me with," Landrigan said. "The director said it was all on the up and up."
