An Oklahoma panel on Friday rejected a plea for clemency for a person convicted of torturing and killing a 10-year-old woman as a part of a cannibalistic fantasy, paving the way in which for him to grow to be the twenty fifth and closing particular person executed within the U.S. this yr.

Three members of Oklahoma’s Pardon and Parole Board voted unanimously towards clemency for Kevin Ray Underwood, who’s scheduled to obtain a deadly injection on Thursday, his forty fifth birthday. An Indiana man, Joseph Corcoran, is about to die Wednesday for killing 4 males in 1997 in what can be the Hoosier State’s first execution in 15 years.

Underwood was convicted of killing 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin in 2006. The woman was a neighbor at his Purcell house advanced who Underwood admitted to luring into his house and beating her over the pinnacle with a reducing board earlier than suffocating her to dying.

Underwood admitted to investigators in a videotaped confession performed to the board on Friday that the killing was a part of a cannibalistic fantasy and that he almost beheaded the woman in his bathtub earlier than abandoning his plans to eat her.

“I want to apologize to the sufferer’s household, to my circle of relatives and to everybody in that room right this moment that needed to hear the horrible particulars of what I did,” Underwood stated to the board by way of a video feed from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. “I am unable to imagine I did these issues. The particular person I used to be within the weeks main as much as that occasion is just not who I’m now.”

Underwood’s attorneys argued that he deserved to be spared from dying due to his lengthy historical past of abuse and severe psychological well being points that included autism, obsessive-compulsive dysfunction, bipolar and panic problems, post-traumatic stress dysfunction, schizotypal character dysfunction and numerous deviant sexual paraphilias.

His mom, Connie Underwood, tearfully requested the board to grant her son mercy.

“I am unable to think about the heartache the household of that treasured woman resides with each single day,” Connie Underwood stated. “I want we understood his ache earlier than it led to this tragedy.”

Assistant Lawyer Common Aspen Layman urged the board to reject clemency, calling Underwood’s crime “one of the infamous and wicked murders in Oklahoma historical past.”

“Mr. Underwood selected Jamie as a result of he thought that she was small and defenseless and straightforward prey,” Layman stated. “And whereas we, as an enlightened society, may give grace to these battling psychological sickness, we will nonetheless count on them to chorus from planning the homicide, rape, torture and cannibalism of 10-year-old little ladies.”

A number of members of Bolin’s household requested the board to reject Underwood’s clemency bid. The woman’s father, Curtis Bolin, was scheduled to testify to the board, however grew to become choked up as he held his head in his hand.

“I am sorry, I am unable to,” he stated.

Underwood is scheduled to obtain a three-drug deadly injection Thursday contained in the dying chamber on the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It will be Oklahoma’s fourth execution of the yr and the twenty fifth nationally if each his and Corcoran’s are carried out subsequent week.