A former Lansing man is reportedly among among the first five men to be executed when the federal government begins carrying out death sentences for the first time since 2003.
Wesley Ira Purkey is scheduled to die by lethal injection Dec. 13. He was convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old Jennifer Long, who was a sophomore at East High in Kansas City, Mo. when she disappeared in 1998. Court records indicate Purkey took Long to his home in Lansing, raped her and stabbed her multiple times. He then cut up her body, burned the remains in his fireplace, and dumped the ashes in a septic pond near Clearwater, Kansas, near Wichita.
Purkey was also convicted in Kansas with using a hammer to beat 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales to death. He was working for a plumbing company in October 1998 when he was sent to Bales' home to fix a leaky faucet.
Purkey and the other four inmates scheduled to die have exhausted all legal remedies. The following is information about the other four condemned men, according to the Associated Press.Danny Lee, of Yukon, Oklahoma, was convicted in the 1996 deaths of an Arkansas family as part of a plot to set up a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest. He is the first inmate scheduled to be executed, on Dec. 9.
Lezmond Mitchell, a Navajo man, stabbed a 63-year-old woman to death in 2003 and then forced her 9-year-old granddaughter to sit beside her grandmother's lifeless body as he drove about 40 miles, before he slit the young girl's throat .He's scheduled to be executed Dec. 11.
Prosecutors say Alfred Bourgeois tortured, sexually molested, and then beat his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to death. Court records say Bourgeois repeatedly beat the young girl and punched her in the face, whipped her with an electrical cord and beat her with a belt so hard that it broke. He also allegedly burned her feet with a cigarette lighter and hit her in the head with a baseball bat until her head swelled. He was convicted in 2004. He's scheduled to be executed on Jan. 13.
Dustin Lee Honken was convicted in 2004 in connection with the killings of five people as part of a plan to thwart a federal investigation into his drug operation. The victims included two men who became informants and were going to testify against him, the girlfriend of one of the informants and her two young daughters, ages six and 10. Honken is scheduled to be executed on Jan. 15.
