For all Eternity...
Posted on 06/16/2011 7:54:12 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The murder of Mattie Lee Wesson in 1995 was one of the most brutal killings in Tuscaloosa County history.
Eddie Duval Powell, 25 at the time, broke into the home of his 70-year-old neighbor in Holt during the early morning hours of March 25, 1995.
He raped her. He sodomized her. He beat her in the head so hard that her scalp split open, her skull was cracked and she was likely knocked unconscious. After he left, Wesson was able to regain consciousness and free herself from the restraints with which he had tied her up. She escaped from the house and had made it across the street to a neighbor's yard, where he shot her five times at arm's length with the revolver he had stolen from her house.
For the past 16 years, Wesson's three sons have relived the pain of knowing what the last few hours of their mother's life was like in two court trials and dozens of appeals and other hearings. That ends tonight.
Powell, 41, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. at Holman Prison in Atmore.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday turned down Powell's plea to stop his execution. His attorneys argued that he should not be executed because the state of Alabama recently began using pentobarbital in executions, which they said might cause him pain and suffering.
Wesson, whose friends called her Polly, raised her sons, Andy, Jerry and Wayne, at the house on 19th Street Northeast in Holt. They were in their 20s and early 30s when their mother was killed. All three plan to attend tonight's scheduled execution.
“As individuals, we are responsible for what we do. His crime was a brutal one. I believe the punishment should be equally severe,” said Andy Wesson, an investigator in the Tuscaloosa Police Department's Criminal Investigations Division. “Mr. Powell is in a unique situation because he knows when he is going to die. I hope he has made his peace with God.”
Andy Wesson was a young patrol officer working the midnight shift at the Police Department's front desk on the night his mother was killed. He rushed to the neighbor's home where his mother had been shot and rode in the ambulance with her to DCH Regional Medical Center, where she died. He often stopped by his mother's house to visit on breaks from late-night patrolling, but didn't that night because he was planning to mow her grass the next day, in exchange for some home-cooked stuffed peppers.
Powell was arrested less than 24 hours after killing Polly Wesson. According to police, he cut the screen of a front window, but was unable to open it because it had been painted shut. He left an implicating palm print on the window before circling to the back of the house and seeing a bathroom window open and a light on. The house is on a downward-sloping lot, making it one story in front and two-storied in the back.
Powell then broke into the unfinished basement and found a couch that he dragged outside and propped on the side of a storage shed so he could reach the window, about 14 feet off the ground.
Andy Wesson said he believes Powell thought his mother was wealthy because she drove an older-model Cadillac. She wasn't.
Polly Wesson had retired from Bryce, where she worked as a cook and an attendant for many years. In the 1950s, she served in the U.S. Army in Europe, where cooking was one of her duties. Her husband died in 1982, when her boys were teenagers.
“She was a wonderful mother, she was always there for us,” Andy Wesson said. “We miss her a lot.”
Powell is a native of Zion, Ill. His mother told a Tuscaloosa News reporter in 1998 that he had been addicted to drugs and alcohol. She said that she had sent him to live with relatives in Hale County to get him away from “the wrong crowd.” He had been convicted of four residential burglaries in Illinois, and was out of jail on $10,000 bail for a robbery in Tuscaloosa when he attacked and killed Polly Wesson, according to newspaper archives.
After he attacked Polly Wesson, Powell pulled the phones out of the walls and stole some items, including the gun he would later shoot her with, and a box of nickels and dimes that she used when playing bridge with friends. He left the house and visited a prostitute, who turned him down. He then went to a gas station, where the clerk thought it was unusual for a customer to buy two bottles of cheap wine with nickels and dimes.
Powell had been staying with the family that lived across the street from Polly Wesson, in the house where Wesson had gone after the attack to try to get help. The woman who lived there noticed scratches on the back of Powell's neck and told police. Investigators found that the clothes he was wearing were still bloody. Forensic testing would later identify the blood as Polly Wesson's and DNA collected at the crime scene as Powell's.
Andy Wesson and his brothers, who both work in construction in Tuscaloosa, released a statement from their families. They noted that their mother was never able to know four of her grandchildren or four great-grandchildren.
“These children will never be able to hear her sweet voice and her infectious laugh. They will never be able to know about her gentle spirit or her wonderful sense of humor. She'll never be able teach them about her loves in life — fishing, playing cards with friends for nickels and dimes, and cooking. While nothing can ever replace our mother, mother-in-law, grandmother or aunt, or replace the times we've missed, we take comfort in knowing that justice will soon be served.”
What suffering her family went through.
16 years of waste??
In rural Goliad Texas, the town square hosts the county court house. On one side of the square, there still stands the old oak hanging tree.
The court would make a judgement, the guilty would be taken outside and hanged. Ten minutes max.
No meals, no appeals. You’re guilty, you die.
Life was so much simplier in the late 1800’s!
For all Eternity...
stop? let?
Keep it moving and toss him off... kinda like tossing him off a bullet train and wide open throttle.
His attorneys should be executed first to demonstrate that no pain is caused...
His attorneys should be executed first to demonstrate that no pain is caused...
Awww, poor baby!
Too bad he can’t be tied to a post and lashed to a bloody pulp by the poor lady’s sons. I don’t think my whip hand would ever tire.
He’s been consuming oxygen for 16 years to many.
Take away the peoples 2nd amdmt. rights and these home invasions will soar. Bet on it.
Life was so much simplier in the late 1800’s!
We need to bring things back as near as possible to that old time justice. Until then, criminals and their lawyers will not fear the power of the people, which must be exercised through the court system. Instead, they will see ordinary people as powerless and the labyrinthine justice system as a game to be 'played'. Plea bargains, phony appeals, bribes and even extortion of jurors are common. Bet they didn't have much of that in the 1800's!
Now I am going to read a Louis L'Amore western I'm in the middle of. It's called Tucker, and describes in accurate detail the western attitudes and practice of justice back then. Thank God for Louis L'Amore!
Absolutely correct. I would not take your bet.
I’m o.k. with that.
In my minds eye, sitting on death row for 16 years is the quintessential definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
If only she had gotten to her own revolver before the animal did....
I inherited about 65 acres of the home-place and have the area that has a hanging tree on it too. It was just to the south of the Old Spanish Trail and now is just off SH 21.
**How long has it been since your state executed a vicious criminal?**
Yay for Texas - yesterday.
Last name - Taylor - First - Lee - age 32 - Date 06/16/2011 - race - White - county Bowie
As Ron White says, “If you kill someone in Texas, we kill you back”.
http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/executedoffenders.htm
Hey Eddie, whatcha doin’ tomorrow?
What’s that?
Nothing - cause you’ll be dead?
Wow, that must suck.
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