JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

This may be the only time, I ever agree with Attorney General William Barr.

But, boy, is he right to proceed with the executions of Wesley Purkey and Keith Nelson, perpetrators of three ghastly and grizzly murders in the Kansas City area.

The Department of Justice issued a press release Monday scheduling execution dates for four federal death-row inmates “who were convicted of murdering children in violation of federal law and who, in two cases, raped the children they murdered.”

These would be the first federal executions in 17 years.

I will never forget either of these cases…

Wesley Ira Purkey

A handyman, Purkey, had driven to Kansas City from Lansing in January 1998 to interview for a plumbing job. After the interview, he smoked some crack and, on the street, spotted 16-year-old Jennifer Long, who had earlier left East High School after having an argument with some other students. Purkey pulled his truck alongside Jennifer and said, “Do you want to party?”

Her answer did her in.

He stopped at a liquor store to buy gin and orange juice and then told her he needed to go back to his home in Lansing.

A federal court filing tells the rest…

“She asked to be let out of his truck. Instead, Purkey reached into the glove box, grabbed a boning knife, and placed it under his thigh, making it clear that he would not let her go. When they arrived at his home, Purkey took Jennifer into a room in his basement. Holding a knife, he ordered her to take her clothes off and lie down on the floor, where he raped her. After Purkey finished raping her, Jennifer told him that she had been a virgin. He then grew fearful, and as Jennifer tried to escape his house, he grabbed her leg and forced her to the ground. The two briefly struggled before Purkey became enraged and repeatedly stabbed Jennifer in the chest, neck, and face with the boning knife, eventually breaking its blade inside her body. When he confessed, he told FBI Agent Dirk Tarpley, “It’s not like in the movies. They don’t die right away.”

He then stuffed Jennifer’s body into a toolbox and over the next few days used a chainsaw to dismember her. Later, he enlisted his stepchildren to help him clean the basement with bleach.

Purkey would have gotten away with that murder except for the fact that nine months later he was arrested for beating to death 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales with a claw hammer. Bales, who walked with a cane as a result of having had polio as a child, had called the company where Purkey worked for some service at her KCK home. After killing Bales, he hooked up with some friends, including women, brought them back to the house and “partied,” with Ruth’s body nearby.

Purkey pleaded guilty to murdering Bales and was sentenced to life. In October 2001, he admitted to killing Long. Having transported her across the state line, a federal crime, Purkey hoped he could serve his life sentence in what he deemed to be a more comfortable federal prison rather than a state prison. Instead, he got the death sentence.

Purkey is now 68, and his attorneys say he suffers from advancing Alzheimer’s disease and does not understand why the government wants to execute him. His attorneys have argued the execution would thus violate his constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment.

He is scheduled to be executed by injection with pentobarbital on July 15.

Editor’s Note: Purkey was executed at Terra Haute, IN, early on July 15. He was pronounced dead at 8:19 a.m. His last words were: “I deeply regret the pain and suffering I’ve caused Jennifer’s family…This sanitized murder really does not serve no purpose whatsoever.” Jennifer’s father, William Long, was quoted as saying: “He needed to take his last breath because he took my daughter’s last breath. There is no closure. There never will be because I won’t get my daughter back.”

Keith D. Nelson

Who could ever forget the Pamela Butler case?

My God, I think about that poor girl and her mother, Cherri West, at least once or twice a week.

On an Indian summer day in October 1999, Nelson lay on the seat of his work truck near 11th Street and Kansas Avenue in KCK, about to hatch a vile plot he had fashioned in his twisted brain. Ten-year-old Pamela, an A-student and a girl with a brimming personality, was rollerblading on the sidewalk outside her home. When she rolled by Nelson’s truck, he sprang out and snatched her and started to drive off. A few people were nearby, including an older sister of Pamela, Casey Eaton, then 16 or 17, saw what was happening and began yelling.

So bold and brazen was Nelson that he slowed down and yelled out the window, “You’ll never see her alive again!”

A guy in a vehicle nearby was chatting with another man when he heard a commotion and people yelling something like, “He’s got her!” The man took off after Nelson, who, I believe had tied Pamela to the driver’s door, near the floorboard, and chased him a few miles, first along 18th Street Expressway and then into Rosedale Park. The man giving chase later said he had several opportunities to cut Nelson off and get him stopped, but he didn’t because he wasn’t sure what was going on. Apparently he didn’t or couldn’t see Pamela. (He certainly can’t be blamed for not being more aggressive if he wasn’t sure the fleeing man had kidnapped someone.)

Nelson lost the pursuer somewhere in or near Rosedale Park and got onto northbound I-35 and later onto eastbound I-70. He then drove to a secluded area behind a Grain Valley church, where he raped Pamela and strangled her with speaker wire.

In 2001, Nelson pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to a charge of interstate kidnapping resulting in death.

An awful tangent of the Pamela Butler story is that Casey Eaton was murdered in April 2017 by a low life she was dating named Enemencio Lansdown. Lansdown shot Casey after the two had argued in a vehicle outside a house where Lansdown lived. The house was less than two blocks from where Pamela had been kidnapped and almost adjacent to a park that had been named for Pamela.

In April 2018, Lansdown pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years and seven months in prison. In court that day, Cherri West said, “My heart is broken beyond repair for the loss of my daughters.”

(I wrote about the Casey Eaton case right after the murder occurred.)

Cherri got out of Armourdale several years ago and moved to Mound City, KS.

Nelson is now 45. He has been on death row in a federal prison in Terre Haute, IN. He is scheduled to be executed Aug. 28.

**

I am a liberal. I profess to be against the death penalty. But I want these two guys dead as soon as possible.

In his statement, Barr said: “We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

Just this once, I’m on his side.