12 June 2024 :
June 11, 2024 - Missouri. David Hosier, 69, White, was executed.
Hosier was pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m. after he was administered a 5-gram dose of pentobarbital at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
Hosier turned his head a couple of times and breathed hard twice as the drug was administered. All movement stopped within seconds, even as his spiritual adviser seated next to him, the Rev. Jeff Hood, continued to pray.
Hosier was convicted of murder in 2013 in Cole County in the 2009 shooting death of Angela Gilpin, his former lover. Gilpin, 45, a mother of two, was seeing Hosier while she was separated from her husband but had decided to make her marriage work and broke it off with Hosier, infuriating him, according to court records. A neighbor found the bodies of Gilpin and her husband Rodney, 61, in the threshold of her apartment in the early morning hours of Sept. 28, 2009. Prosecutors dropped a murder charge against Hosier in Rodney's killing.
“I leave you all with love,” Hosier had said as part of a final statement released before the execution. “Now I get to go to Heaven. Don’t cry for me. Just join me when your time comes.”
Hosier was the son of an Indiana State Police sergeant killed in the line of duty in 1971. David Hosier, then 16, was soon sent to military school and enlisted in the Navy after graduating. He served four years of active duty and later moved to Jefferson City, Missouri, where he worked for many years as a firefighter and EMT.
Hosier has always maintained that he didn't kill the couple, pointing to a lack of DNA evidence or anything tying him to the crime scene.
Hosier's spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, was in the death chamber and had his hand on Hosier's shoulder during the execution. Hosier's last name was mispronounced when death was declared, Weis said calling it, "irritating and disrespectful."
"I feel just profound sadness about the whole process," Weis told USA TODAY after the execution. "I'm confident we did all that we could for David, but that doesn't make me feel any better, because we ultimately didn't get relief."
Gov. Michael Parson Parson, a Republican and former county sheriff, turned down Hosier's request for clemency on Monday, his 11th such denial since taking office in 2018. Anti-death penalty activists gathered at Parson's office hours ahead of the execution and presented new signatures on a petition for clemency to the governor's office.
Hosier becomes the second execution in the state this year, the 99th since Missouri resumed executions in 1989, the seventh prisoner executed in the U.S. this year, and the 1,589th overall since the country resumed executions in 1977.
On Hosier’s case see also HoC October 25, 2013 and November 26, 2013.
