Wesley Purkey Case: Murder, Competency, and Execution

Wesley Ira Purkey was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on July 16, 2020, for the 1998 kidnapping, rape, and murder of sixteen-year-old Jennifer Long in Kansas City, Missouri. The Wesley Purkey execution was the second in a series of thirteen federal executions carried out under the Trump administration, and it was preceded by an overnight legal fight over whether Purkey, then diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, was mentally competent to be put to death.¹

The Murder of Jennifer Long

Jennifer Long, a sophomore at East High School in Kansas City, Missouri, left campus around 9:30 a.m. on January 22, 1998, after a fight with other students. She walked to a nearby grocery store, where she encountered Purkey, a local handyman who had been in the area for a plumbing job interview. She got into his white 1989 Ford pickup. Purkey drove her to his home in Lansing, Kansas, where he raped and murdered her, dismembered her body, burned the remains in a fireplace, and disposed of the ashes.²

Kansas City police initially classified Long as a runaway. Her family insisted she would not have run away, noting she had been preparing to take her driver’s license test.³ What happened to her surfaced only after Purkey was arrested for a separate killing — the murder of eighty-year-old Mary Ruth Bales in Kansas, whom he bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer.⁴ While in custody for the Bales murder, Purkey confessed in December 1998 to killing Long, giving investigators details known only to someone close to the case.²

FBI agents spent years searching for Long’s remains but recovered nothing; officials believe none remains to be found. Her case is still classified as a missing person, and a 2004 report that her remains had been located turned out to be false.³

Federal Conviction and Death Sentence

Federal prosecutors charged Purkey in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri on October 10, 2001. Purkey had told investigators he forcibly kidnapped Long and transported her across state lines into Kansas, later saying he had invented the interstate detail so the case would be handled in federal court rather than by Kansas state prosecutors.⁵ At trial he shifted again, claiming the encounter had been consensual. The jury rejected that account.³

On November 5, 2003, the jury convicted him of kidnapping a child resulting in the child’s death under 18 U.S.C. § 1201. He was sentenced to death on January 23, 2004, and committed to the Federal Bureau of Prisons on February 9, 2004.⁴ The Eighth Circuit affirmed the conviction in 2005.⁶

Purkey’s later attorneys argued the jury never heard the full picture of his life. According to court filings, Purkey had been sexually, physically, and emotionally abused from age five, including repeated rape by his mother beginning at age ten, and abuse by teachers and a parish priest. A psychiatrist who evaluated him identified eleven distinct categories of childhood trauma.⁷⁶ He had used alcohol and drugs since childhood, had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since age fourteen, and had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. He also had a documented history of traumatic brain injuries affecting the frontal lobe and multiple suicide attempts.⁸

Rebecca Woodman, who became Purkey’s lead counsel, said publicly that Purkey was “not ‘the worst of the worst'” and that had jurors heard the full history, “at least one of them might have voted for a life sentence.”⁹ A clemency petition to President Trump asked that his sentence be commuted to life without parole. It was not granted.

The Competency Question

By the time an execution date was set, Purkey’s mental state had deteriorated. He had been diagnosed with dementia in 2017, which progressed to Alzheimer’s disease.⁷ His attorneys said he could not remember the names of loved ones. He suffered delusions, including that prison staff were poisoning his food and urinating on his laundry, and that a government conspiracy was being waged against him.

On November 26, 2019, his counsel filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia arguing that under Ford v. Wainwright, Purkey was mentally incompetent to be executed.¹⁰ That precedent bars executing a person whose mental illness prevents them from rationally understanding their punishment and the reason for it.

A forensic psychiatrist who evaluated Purkey in late 2019 opined “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty” that Purkey “lacked a rational understanding of the basis for his execution.” Purkey, according to the evaluation, believed the government planned to execute him not for Jennifer Long’s murder but as retaliation for his legal filings exposing prison abuses. He could recite the fact that he was being executed for Long’s killing, but the psychiatrist concluded he parroted the information without genuine understanding. He also believed his own lawyers were part of the conspiracy against him.¹¹

The Overnight Court Battle

The final day before Purkey’s execution was consumed by a rapid sequence of injunctions, appeals, and emergency Supreme Court rulings, much of it in the middle of the night.

On July 2, 2020, the Seventh Circuit had already issued a temporary stay tied to Purkey’s ineffective-assistance claim, calling the underlying claims “serious” and noting that it was “troubling” no court had ever reviewed them on their substance.¹² On the morning of July 15, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction on the separate competency claim. Judge Chutkan found Purkey had made a “substantial threshold showing of incompetence” and was entitled to a competency hearing under Ford v. Wainwright and Panetti v. Quarterman. She wrote that “the public interest has never been and could never be served by rushing to judgment at the expense of a condemned inmate’s constitutional rights.”¹³ A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit upheld the injunction.¹⁴

That afternoon, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, vacated the Seventh Circuit’s earlier stay.¹⁵ At approximately 2:45 a.m. on July 16, the Court issued another set of 5-4 orders: vacating Judge Chutkan’s competency injunction, vacating a separate injunction regarding the federal execution protocol, denying Purkey’s petition to review the Seventh Circuit’s procedural rulings, and denying a stay application filed by his spiritual advisor.¹

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan, dissented. She wrote that the government had failed to meet its “especially heavy” burden to justify overriding the lower court and criticized the majority’s “decision to shortcut judicial review and permit the execution of an individual who may well be incompetent,” which she said “casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries.” Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Ginsburg, wrote separately that the case illustrated the “arbitrariness, inevitable delay, procedural unfairness, and uncertain reliability of the death penalty process,” noting Purkey after sixteen years on death row was “frail and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.”¹¹

Defense counsel scrambled to refile the competency claim in the Southern District of Indiana, which briefly stayed the execution before denying the stay, finding the claim had been filed in the wrong court and that the error was “unfixable.”¹⁴ They filed an emergency motion with the Seventh Circuit at 7:58 a.m. Eastern time. Twenty-one minutes later, at 8:19 a.m., Purkey was pronounced dead. The Seventh Circuit later dismissed the pending appeal as moot, stating that the “sentence has been carried out.”¹

Final Words and the Long Family

Before the lethal injection was administered, Purkey addressed the Long family: “I deeply regret the pain and suffering I caused to Jennifer’s family. I am deeply sorry.” He also spoke of his daughter: “I deeply regret the pain I caused to my daughter, who I love so very much.” His final words were: “This sanitized murder really does not serve no purpose whatsoever. Thank you.”¹⁶

Jennifer Long’s father, William Long, was present with her stepmother, Olivia Long, and a family friend, Brooke Dolittle. He told reporters, “He needed to take his last breath. He took my daughter’s last breath,” and added, “There is no closure, there will never be because I can’t get my daughter back.” The family said they did not believe Purkey’s apology was sincere and expressed frustration at the seventeen-year wait and at the hours they spent in a van while courts ruled on last-minute appeals.¹⁷

The Execution Protocol and Autopsy Dispute

Purkey was executed using the federal protocol approved by Attorney General William Barr in 2019, which replaced a previous three-drug cocktail with a single massive dose of pentobarbital. An Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution noted that Purkey took several deep breaths and blinked repeatedly as the drug was administered.¹⁸

An autopsy performed by forensic pathologist Dr. Joyce L. deJong at the request of Purkey’s family found “severe bilateral acute pulmonary edema” and “frothy pulmonary edema” in his trachea and airways. His lung weight had increased to between 2.73 and 4.3 times that of normal lungs. Medical expert Dr. Gail Van Norman concluded that the findings indicated “flash pulmonary edema,” a condition she said occurs only while a person is alive, and described the sensation as “identical to that reported by victims of near drowning or suffocation” and “among the most excruciating feelings known to man.”¹⁹ Federal prosecutors disputed those conclusions, maintaining the execution was “implemented without any pentobarbital-related complications” and was humane.¹⁸

Where the Case Fits

Purkey’s execution was the second in a series of thirteen federal executions carried out between July 2020 and January 2021 at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The series began with Daniel Lewis Lee on July 14, 2020, the first federal execution since 2003. Dustin Lee Honken was executed two days after Purkey.²⁰ In July 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium on federal executions to review the protocols and changes Barr had put in place.²¹

The American Civil Liberties Union called the process a “rushed and truncated review” and noted that no court had ever heard Purkey’s competency claim on its merits before he was put to death. Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said the courts had “abandoned the constitutional prohibition on executing people who lack rational understanding of the reason for their execution.”²² The ACLU also criticized the government for pressing ahead with executions while the Terre Haute facility had an active COVID-19 outbreak; it later became the Bureau of Prisons facility with the most COVID-19 cases in the country.²³ Woodman wrote afterward that the government “used every weapon in its arsenal to prevent any court from deciding the merits of his incompetency claim,” describing the proceedings as the “rushed execution of a damaged and delusional old man.”¹

1
Death Penalty Information Center. U.S. Government Hurriedly Executes Wesley Purkey
2
Kansas City Star. Wesley Purkey Kidnapped, Raped and Killed Jennifer Long
3
The Charley Project. Jennifer Long
4
Federal Bureau of Prisons. Offender Information: Wesley Purkey
5
The Marshall Project. Wesley Purkey
6
U.S. Supreme Court. Purkey Certiorari Petition
7
American Constitution Society. Executing People With Serious Mental Illness Like Wesley Purkey Is Wrong
8
Death Penalty Information Center. Lawyers for Federal Death-Row Prisoner Say Schizophrenia, Brain Injuries, and Dementia Have Left Him Incompetent to Be Executed
9
Kansas City Star. Wesley Purkey’s Lawyers File for Clemency
10
Death Penalty Information Center. Wesley Purkey Execution Temporarily Halted
11
U.S. Supreme Court. Barr v. Purkey, No. 20A9
12
Findlaw. Purkey v. United States
13
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Purkey v. Barr, Preliminary Injunction Order
14
American Constitution Society. Wesley Purkey’s Execution Should Shock America’s Conscience
15
SCOTUSblog. Watson v. Purkey
16
Federal Defender Services. Wesley Ira Purkey Executed at Terre Haute
17
WWTV/WWTV. Supreme Court Clears Way for Second Federal Execution This Week
18
The Indiana Lawyer. Lawyers: Purkey Autopsy Suggests He Suffered During Execution
19
Death Penalty Information Center. Autopsy Results Provide Virtual Medical Certainty That Prisoners Will Experience Excruciating Pain
20
Washington Post. Supreme Court Clears Way for Wesley Purkey’s Execution
21
Death Penalty Information Center. Rush to Kill Documents Federal Execution Spree
22
ACLU. ACLU Statement on the Execution of Wes Purkey
23
ACLU. Federal Executions in the Time of COVID-19