Oklahoma executed James Dwight Pavatt on Thursday for the shotgun slaying of his lover's husband in Oklahoma City in 2001, a killing prosecutors said was staged to collect an $800,000 life insurance payout. Pavatt, 73, was pronounced dead at 10:12 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
The victim, Rob Andrew, a 39-year-old Oklahoma City advertising executive, was shot on November 20, 2001, in the garage of his home when he came to pick up his 7-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter for Thanksgiving. Prosecutors said Pavatt and Brenda Andrew, Rob Andrew's wife, conspired to kill him so they could cash in on the life insurance policy. Pavatt, an insurance salesman, had helped Rob Andrew set up the $800,000 policy. Brenda Andrew was also shot in the arm with a .22-caliber pistol, prosecutors said, to make it look as if she had been a victim too.
Pavatt maintained his innocence to the end. "I am not guilty of shooting anyone," he told the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board on October 14. The board voted 3-2 to deny him clemency, and he was put to death by lethal injection after losing a request for a stay at the U.S. Supreme Court. Pavatt, a former U.S. Air Force master sergeant who served nearly 22 years, met Brenda Andrew at church, where they taught a Sunday school class together. After the killing, the pair fled to Mexico with her two children for more than three months before being arrested at the border in February 2002.
Brenda Andrew, 62, is the only woman on death row in Oklahoma. She is still appealing her murder conviction and death sentence, arguing that her trial was unfair because prosecutors shamed her over the affair. She was convicted at a 2004 trial; Pavatt was convicted in 2003. For his last meal on Wednesday, Pavatt requested a three-meat barbecue dinner and a strawberry milkshake.
It was the 21st execution in Oklahoma since the state resumed executions five years ago after a lengthy hiatus, and the next is expected to be scheduled in March or April. Pavatt's was the first of two executions scheduled in the United States on Thursday: Texas death row inmate John Allen Rubio was to be put to death by lethal injection Thursday evening for beheading his common-law wife's three children in 2003. Three executions were carried out in the United States on November 5, the same day California Governor Gavin Newsom commuted the death sentences of the state's 548 death row inmates to life in prison.
