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Feature
No Mercy
Kevin Johnson was given the death penalty last week. But even as Missouri plans two more executions, its source of drugs for lethal injections has become a closely guarded secret
For the past month, in a series called “Shadow of Death,” the Riverfront Times and its partners have been examining the ongoing toll of St. Louis County’s use of the death penalty, which hit its sentencing peak during the 28-year tenure of former Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch.
Last week, another local man was added to the list of state executions. This week, we share an overview of Kevin Johnson’s failed effort to escape the ultimate penalty, as well as an in-depth look at how states like Missouri have adapted to (and, last week, overcome) previous woes obtaining drugs for lethal execution. We also look forward. On Tuesday, January 3, the state plans to execute its 94th person since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Advocates say Amber McLaughlin would be the first woman to be executed during that time.
These stories were commissioned and funded by the River City Journalism Fund. Learn more about our work at rcjf.org. — Sarah Fenske
The Execution
Missouri killed Kevin Johnson for a brutal act he committed as a 19-year-old
BY MONICA OBRADOVIC
AMissouri inmate who fought his death sentence up until the final hour of his life was executed November 29 by the Missouri Department of Corrections.
Kevin Johnson, 37, died by lethal injection at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre. He had been sentenced to death for the 2005 murder of Kirkwood Police Sergeant William McEntee as a teenager. ohnson declined to give a final statement through the Department of Corrections and declined to have a final meal. e died at 7:40 p.m. — 11 minutes after the lethal injection was administered.
“Tonight, the state of Missouri killed Kevin Johnson, an amazing father to his daughter Khorry, and a completely rehabilitated man,” Johnson’s attorney Shawn Nolan said in a statement. “Make no mistake about it, Missouri capitally prosecuted, sentenced to death and killed Kevin because he is Black.”
Johnson and his attorneys have been thwarted in every attempt to lessen his sentence from death to life in prison since a St. Louis ounty jury first convicted him of first degree murder in . On November 27, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled not to delay Johnson’s execution over a special prosecutor’s claims that racial bias infected Johnson’s conviction and judgment.
Johnson’s lawyers swiftly appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court
Kevin Johnson, 1985-2022. | JEREMY WEIS
the next morning in one final attempt to delay Johnson’s execution. he court filed its denial of Johnson’s request around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday night, 30 minutes after the 24-hour period for Johnson’s execution began.
Governor Mike Parson had previously announced he would not grant Johnson clemency. Parson issued a brief statement after Johnson’s execution.
“We hope that this will bring some closure to Sgt. McEntee’s loved ones who continue to anguish without him,” Parson said.
McEntee was the father of three young children. His widow spoke to reporters for the first time after the execution.
“It took 17 years of grieving and pushing forward to get to this point today,” Mary McEntee said. “This is something I hope no other family has to go through because you truly never forget or get over it.”
McEntee sounded collected and stern as she defended her late husband, who she said did not have a jury to decide whether he should live or die. ohnson’s was the first execution in Missouri since Carman Deck in July. It’s a rare case of Missouri executing someone for a crime they committed as a teenager. Missouri has executed only one man for a crime he committed as a teen since a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2012 required states to rethink how
KEVIN JOHNSON
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they treat youthful offenders.
Johnson’s age played a major role in the push for his clemency — as did his race. Johnson, a Black man, is far from a statistical anomaly in St. Louis County’s track record of capital punishment.
Former St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch won death penalty convictions against 23 men during his 28 years in office. ifteen were lac . Cases with white victims during McCulloch’s tenure were 3.5 times as likely to lead to a death sentence as those with Black victims, according to a recent analysis by an expert hired by Johnson’s attorneys.
The special prosecutor who investigated Johnson’s case claimed McCulloch had schemed to exclude jurors of color from the jury in Johnson’s second trial. Prosecutor E.E. Keenan’s claims are now unlikely to ever be heard in court.
Jim Salter of the Associated Press — one of two reporters approved by the Missouri Department of Corrections to witness the execution — said McCulloch was present for Johnson’s death.
“It’s been long delayed, but justice has been served,” McCulloch told Salter.
McCulloch recently told the RFT’s Ryan Krull that he had personally witnessed two other executions — one whose case he personally handled as a line prosecutor and the other, the 2015 execution of Richard Strong, the most recent handled by his office before Johnson.
The brutality of Johnson’s crime shook the St. Louis area in 2005.
At the time, Johnson was on probation for a misdemeanor assault charge and worried that two Kirkwood police officers lingering in front of his great-grandmother’s house would tow his car.
Johnson’s brother, Joseph “Bam Bam” Long, who was born addicted to crack and lived with a congenital heart defect, suffered a sei ure as the officers were as ing about Johnson. Long was pronounced dead soon after.
McEntee responded to the scene around the time an ambulance arrived for Long. Though Johnson would later acknowledge McEntee had nothing to do with his brother’s death, he believed that day that McEntee had somehow been responsible. McEntee barred his mother from tending to the boy, Johnson would later testify in court.
After a “chance encounter” with McEntee two hours later, Johnson walked up to McEntee’s patrol car and shot him in the head and upper torso. e delivered the final shot moments later, after McEntee attempted to speed away but hit a tree. All told, McEntee suffered about seven gunshot wounds and was unrecognizable to people who knew him at the scene.
A prison spokeswoman estimated that 125 people crowded outside Missouri’s prison in Bonne Terre on the night of Johnson’s death in support of Johnson (along with, she noted, one person who favored his execution). Among the pro-Johnson crowd was Reverend Darryl Gray, Johnson’s spiritual advisor who baptized him earlier in the month.
Gray said he was disappointed the government failed to understand that “all human life is sacred.”
“They’re killing someone who is different than they were 19 years ago, who made a mistake at 19 years old and spiritually, mentally and emotionally [has] been in a period of restoration and redemption,” Gray said.
Johnson’s daughter, Khorry Ramey, was seen outside of the prison with a large group of Johnson’s supporters. amey, 1 , had filed a lawsuit to allow her to witness her father’s execution. Missouri law bars anyone younger than 21 from witnessing an execution, and a federal judge on Friday denied her request.
Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said that Ramey would not give any statement or interview on her father’s execution.
At least two of Johnson’s former teachers traveled to Bonne Terre for Johnson’s execution. His elementary school principal and mentor, Pamela Stanfield, served as one of Johnson’s four selected witness-
Kevin’s daughter Khorry Ramey, 19, was barred from witnessing her father’s execution. | SARAH LOVETT
es, present in the room when he was given his lethal injection.
Melissa Fuoss, who taught Johnson English in high school, stood outside the prison.
Fuoss always remembered Johnson as the student who wrote a poem about giving his baby daughter a bath. They formed a friendship after Johnson’s crime and wrote to each other frequently.
“I’m grieving [Johnson] as someone who’s become a friend to me,” Fuoss said. “But what is breaking my heart the most is [that] the absolute injustice, the failure of our judicial system to protect and serve Kevin, is only going to add pain on top of pain.”
If there is any silver lining for Johnson, Fuoss said, it’s the lasting impact he made on the people who knew him.
“He gave Khorry really strong roots, like roots of love and strength,” Fuoss said. “He fostered her dreams and that can’t be undone.” n
Amateur Hour
Despite great difficulty obtaining drugs for lethal injection, states like Missouri keep killing. The result: botched executions and increased secrecy
BY KATHY GILSINAN
When Missouri executioners injected Kevin Johnson with a lethal dose of pentobarbital on November 29, few people were there to see it. One of only two reporters permitted to observe, Jim Salter of the Associated Press, described a quick and quiet end. Johnson closed his eyes while the drug took effect, and his spiritual adviser murmured Bible verses, including Psalm 23: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
“Within seconds,” Salter wrote, “all movement ceased.”
That was it, after all the appeals and protests, and nearly two decades after Johnson, then 19, shot and illed ir wood police officer William McEntee. Johnson’s own life ended with a few grams of a sedative more often used to euthanize dogs. his specific drug is one that Missouri has gone to great and secretive lengths to procure in recent years, as major pharmaceutical companies have objected to the use of their drugs to kill people — or stopped making such drugs altogether. The state has argued that the secrecy is to protect from protest or harassment those involved in the execution process. But there’s another good reason: What’s become public through investigative reporting and court proceedings is just embarrassing, including a dyslexic doctor admitting to sometimes confusing
the names of drugs while overseeing more than 50 executions, and state-administered cash drug deals at a loosely regulated compounding pharmacy over state lines. As executions have declined across the country over the past decade or so, Missouri’s is ultimately a story of a state adapting to overcome severe pressure, both political and logistical, to ditch the practice altogether.
And it shows that if a state is determined to ill a man, it will find a way.
In the United States prior to 2009, practically all of America’s then-30-plus death-penalty states conducted lethal injections roughly the same way. The procedure involved a so-called cocktail of three different drugs: sodium thiopental to anesthetize the prisoner, pancuronium bromide to paralyze him, and potassium chloride to kill him.
That began changing more than a decade ago, with a combination of American business decisions and European regulations. In 2011, America’s only manufacturer of the anesthetic sodium thiopental announced it would no longer make the drug, which was also used in medical procedures, because the company couldn’t guarantee its product wouldn’t wind up in a death chamber. (According to manufacturer Hospira’s statement at the time, this decision was partly philosophical and partly practical, to avoid liability in Italy, a deathpenalty-opposing country where the company also operated.) The drug did have other manufacturers in Europe, but the European Union had stated a commitment to abolishing the death penalty worldwide, and was tightening up export controls on drugs that could be used in lethal injections. In the space of about a year, the U.S. lost much of its ability to either make or import what had been a key ingredient in executions.
By then, though, states including Missouri were already looking for alternative ways to kill deathrow inmates. If American companies and European governments hoped to stop or at least complicate executions in the U.S., they also helped generate a wave of state-level experimentation with other lethal drugs. Missouri briefly stopped executing people between 2011 and 2013 while it hunted for alternatives. At one point, the state chose a single drug, the anesthetic propofol — the one involved in Michael Jackson’s death. But that one was made by a German company whose American distributor demanded its supply back upon learning the drug had mistakenly ended up in an execution pipeline. In October 2013, the Missouri Department of Corrections found yet another solution: pentobarbital. The state resumed executions a month later, and executed nearly one inmate a month through 2014. (Then-Chief Justice Mary Russell of the Missouri Supreme Court said at the time that the state was working through a backlog.)
Meanwhile, dramatically botched executions involving various new drug cocktails proliferated elsewhere. In Ohio, Dennis McGuire snorted and choked for 25 minutes before he died. In Oklahoma, witnesses saw Clayton Lockett writhe in apparent pain for 15 minutes before they were instructed to leave the room, where he died nearly half an hour later. In Arizona, Joseph Woods gasped for nearly two hours before his death. Each incident involved a sedative called midazolam, which had apparently left each inmate conscious through a slow death.
“This is a process that’s only gotten worse,” says Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University who has studied execution methods for 30 years. When Denno first started wor ing on the issue, she says, people worried that scrutiny and criticism of execution methods would force states to find ways to ma e it easier, or at least more efficient, to execute people. (Botches were not uncommon under the old three-drug regimen.) “But now we’re executing even less and we have more eyes on the process than we ever had, but we’ve never had so many failed executions.” As in, full-on failed, in the sense that the prisoner actually survived the execution attempt. Out of four such instances documented by the Death Penalty Information Center, three have occurred since 2011, two in Alabama in 2022 alone. As a result, Alabama suspended all of its executions the week before Missouri executed Kevin Johnson.
Pentobarbital, too, has been associated with outcomes that advocates for death-row inmates have argued amount to unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment.” Missouri is one of five states that uses pentobarbital alone to execute prisoners. Autopsies of individuals killed this way have revealed the presence of frothy fluid in the lungs in more than half of the cases studied.
“They’re pretty much drowning in their own organs collapsing,” says Elyse Max, the co-director of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “There’s no evidence that any of it’s humane.”
The Department of Justice has once again paused federal executions, after they briefly resumed during the Trump administration, while it investigates the “risk of pain and suffering” associated with pentobarbital.
In this context, Missouri works hard to keep the source of its execution drugs a secret. The handful of companies the FDA approves to sell pentobarbital all have policies that forbid selling it to state correctional departments for executions. Missouri for a time used a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma to get the drugs, but was forced to switch suppliers after local reporters, including Chris McDaniel, then of St. Louis Public Radio, revealed the pharmacy’s name.
Thereafter, Missouri got a court order to prevent having to disclose other suppliers. Nevertheless, in 2018, McDaniel, then at BuzzFeed News, uncovered the name of the new supplier, a St. Louis-area compounding pharmacy. He tweeted that it took him “Two failed open records lawsuits … Three years of digging … Getting the cops called on me … [and] A state assistant attorney general calling BuzzFeed’s lawyers to complain about me.” But by the time his story was published, the supplier at issue had been bought by a subsidiary of Centene, which assured McDaniel that since being acquired the pharmacy “has never supplied, and will never supply any pharmaceutical product to any state for the purpose of effectuating executions.”
Centene did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Karen Pojmann, the communications director for the Missouri Department of Corrections, wrote in an email: “Missouri’s execution protocol, which is based in state statute, prohibits disclosing the identities of the execution team and the drug supplier. (In fact, I don’t have access to the information you’re requesting.)”
Next month, Missouri plans to execute another person from St. Louis County: Amber McLaughlin, who was convicted in 2006 of first degree murder. gain the state will frame the killing as being done on behalf of its citizens. It just won’t tell them where the drugs come from, or who’s profiting from their sale, before all movement ceases. n
Former St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch has now seen 11 men he prosecuted put to death. He personally witnessed three executions, including Kevin Johnson’s. | RYAN KRULL
The Next Person to Die
Barely one month after Kevin Johnson, another St. Louis County defendant is scheduled to be executed
On November 20, 2003, 45-year-old Beverly Guenther was abducted outside the office where she wor ed in Earth City, Missouri. She was stabbed and raped, her lifeless body left in the Patch neighborhood in south St. Louis, near the ban s of the Mississippi iver.
About a month prior, a 30-yearold then nown as Scott Mc aughlin had been charged with burglarizing Guenther’s Moscow Mills home. The two had been a couple until that summer, but Guenther had told others in recent months that she’d come to fear Mc aughlin. She had ta en out a restraining order.
Soon after Guenther’s neighbors reported her missing, police interrogated McLaughlin, who led them to Guenther’s body.
After a four-day-long trial in 2006, the jury found McLaughlin guilty of first degree murder, and the judge ruled McLaughlin’s crime warranted death. McLaughlin is now scheduled to die on Tuesday, January 3 — the second in a trio of St. Louis County defendants receiving execution dates this winter. Kevin Johnson was illed November , and eonard Taylor is scheduled for Tuesday, February 7.
All three were prosecuted by former St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, who saw 23 people sentenced to death during his long tenure. oters ousted him in the wa e of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, but that doesn’t change the fate of the people he prosecuted. Barring a last-minute reprieve, McLaughlin will be McCulloch’s 12th execution.
But McLaughlin’s story is different from any of the four other St. Louis County people on death row, and the 11 already executed.
When McLaughlin arrived in Potosi Correctional Center, Jessica ic lin had already been there for over a decade. t first, ic lin says she only new McLaughlin from a distance as
BY RYAN KRULL
someone “very full of anxiety, scattered.” hen, in 18, ic lin won a landmar transgender rights case against the Missouri Department of Corrections, allowing her and other transgender inmates access to hormone therapy.
“As a result of that [case], I became a sort of mom to a lot of girls who were coming out and trying to figure out how to have coming out conversations and how to get access to hormone therapy,” says ic lin, who was released from prison earlier this year after serving 26 years.
One day another inmate introduced ic lin to mber Mc aughlin. ic lin says she remembers thin ing to herself, “Now, this ma es sense. I’ve nown you for a long time, you didn’t necessarily seem very comfortable in your s in, and now you’re smiling.”
“I didn’t really come to now Amber until, well, Amber became mber,” ic lin says.
In a brief phone interview with the RFT, McLaughlin says that when she was around 12 years old she started wearing women’s clothing, though she had to do so away from her parents and guardians.
“I new then this is what I wanted to be,” she says. “But I had to always do it secretly.”
McLaughlin describes her upbringing as “not always good. My adoptive parents were mean and strict.”
Court records indicate McLaughlin was in foster care for a time and that her adoptive father, a police officer, paddled her with what the family called a “board of education.” He also used his night stic and taser on her.
When McLaughlin moved out on her own, she ept her desire to dress li e a woman secret. ith her own place, she says, she “could be that way as much as I wanted to.”
Legal experts say it’s uncertain how, or even if, McLaughlin’s gender will have any effect on the late-stage appeals her attorneys
Amber McLaughlin was found guilty of murdering an ex-girlfriend. | COURTESY OF JESSICA HICKLIN
are now bringing. If McLaughlin is executed in January, she would be the first woman put to death by Missouri since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1 6. ic lin, who wor ed for a paralegal for decades while incarcerated, says that whether McLaughlin’s gender affects her remaining appeals depends on the judge.
“I cannot fairly say that I now it’s in a judge’s head,” she says. “I can just say I’ve seen some really horrible opinions where judges have gone out of their way to ma e sure that somebody’s being trans is made relevant to an otherwise irrelevant issue.” hat li ely is relevant, says McLaughlin’s attorney Larry Komp, is that McLaughlin is “borderline” intellectually disabled. At her 2006 trial, a psychologist testified that Mc aughlin had an I of 8 . ic lin calls her friend “a very simple person,” adding, “I don’t mean that in a derogatory way.”
Over the phone, McLaughlin conducts her side of the conversation in short, soft spo en replies.
About the death penalty, she says, “It’s cruel and unusual punishment. Nobody deserves to be executed li e this.”
About the murder of Beverly Guenther, she says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
She adds, “I thin if I’d been my true self, I probably would not have been there.” hen as ed what it’s li e to now the date she is scheduled to die, McLaughlin says, “It’s stressful, it’s ...” She trails off into a long silence.
During the sentencing phase of McLaughlin’s 2006 trial, a psychiatrist named Keith Caruso was supposed to present mental-health evidence regarding McLaughlin’s state of mind at the time of murder.
However, in what attorneys now term the “Dr. aruso fiasco,” the psychiatrist told defense attorneys that during cross-examination in a previous trial, allegations that he’d falsified research data had come to light.
Believing they would have to disclose this, the defense opted not to call Caruso as a witness. Komp says it was a devastating decision. There was no expert testimony regarding McLaughlin’s mental health — which the jury had been told would be integral to the case for life in prison instead of death.
“They made that promise to the jury,” Komp says. “That was the majority of their opening statement at the penalty phase. And then they bro e that promise.”
Furthermore, Komp says the academic dishonesty in Caruso’s past didn’t have to be disclosed in the first place.
“The reason for not calling him was based on ignorance, a misunderstanding of Missouri law,” Komp says. he jury deadloc ed on the question of death, leaving the decision to Judge Steven Goldman, who ruled that McLaughlin deserved to die. ast wee , omp says he read with great interest the Missouri Supreme Court’s denial of a stay of execution for Kevin Johnson, who was executed two days later. Surprisingly, Komp found a lot in that ruling to be optimistic about in McLaughlin’s appeal.
The court’s ruling placed emphasis on the fact that it was the jury, not the prosecutor, who handed down the death penalty. “In the end it was the jury — not the prosecutor — that found Johnson guilty of murder in the first degree; it was the jury that found the three statutory aggravators; it was the jury that weighed the aggravating and mitigating factors; and it was the jury that found death to be the appropriate sentence,” the court wrote.
“If you’re gonna rely on a jury,” Komp says, “then I don’t have a jury sentence. I have a judge that came in when the jury couldn’t do it. That’s a huge distinction.” n
Monica Obradovic provided additional reporting for this story.
For more on the River City Journalism Fund, which provided funding for this project and seeks to support local journalism in St. Louis, please see rcjf.org.
