Bio

Donald Lee Gilson was reportedly born on November 10, 1960. By the early 1990s, he lived in Cleveland County, Oklahoma, and worked as a janitor at Little Axe Schools. He met Bertha Jean Coffman while they were both employed there and later helped repair her unsanitary trailer so that child-welfare authorities would allow her children to return home.

Gilson suffered serious head injuries in a March 1993 motor-vehicle accident. Experts consulted during his appeals later reported permanent damage to parts of his frontal and temporal lobes, while relatives and coworkers described personality and behavioral changes after the accident. His trial lawyers knew generally about the accident but pursued a defense that Coffman was responsible for the fatal abuse rather than presenting brain damage as mitigation. The appellate courts ruled that this strategy did not amount to constitutionally ineffective representation.

By mid-1995, Coffman and five of her children had moved into Gilson’s trailer, where he became the dominant authority figure and was permitted to discipline them. The household became severely restrictive and abusive. The children were isolated, denied ordinary schooling and subjected to repeated beatings, starvation and prolonged physical punishments.

Murder Story

On August 17, 1995, Shane Coffman was punished after being accused of wetting the bed or soiling the living-room floor. His siblings testified that Gilson repeatedly struck him with a board before he and Coffman placed the child in a bathtub. At another point, the two adults took Shane outside, where the other children heard him screaming. When he was carried back inside, his arms were swollen, his breathing was abnormal and his head had a soft area. Gilson returned him to the bathroom, where the children heard further screams and banging.

Gilson and Coffman gave conflicting accounts of the final events. Gilson claimed that he fell asleep while Coffman remained with Shane, while Coffman testified that she saw Gilson leaving the bathroom shortly before discovering that Shane was no longer breathing. Both acknowledged attempting CPR and failing to call for medical assistance. After Shane died, they wrapped his body, waited for the other children to fall asleep and placed him in a broken freezer outside Coffman’s former trailer. They told his siblings that he had run away.

The body remained concealed until February 9, 1996, when the property owner found Shane’s skeletal remains inside the freezer. Deputies traced Gilson through a photograph found in the former home and went to his trailer on February 11. The four children still living there were taken to a hospital. Isaac and Tia were severely malnourished, unable to walk normally and covered with wounds or scars. Gilson and Coffman initially offered a false story that they had found Shane dead outside, but both later admitted knowing more about his death and helping conceal his body.

Coffman entered Alford pleas to all charges in August 1997 and later received life imprisonment without parole. At Gilson’s 1998 trial, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder by child abuse, two counts of injury to a minor, conspiracy to remove a body and unlawful removal of a body. The jurors agreed that he was guilty of murder but were divided over whether he directly inflicted the fatal abuse or knowingly permitted Coffman to do it. They found that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel and that Gilson represented a continuing threat, then recommended death.

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his convictions and sentences in 2000. The Tenth Circuit upheld the denial of federal habeas relief in 2008, although one judge dissented from part of the ruling and believed the jury should have been allowed to consider a lesser manslaughter offense. In April 2009, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended commuting the sentence to life without parole by a 3–2 vote, partly because the jury had not agreed on whether Gilson personally killed Shane. Governor Brad Henry rejected the recommendation on May 11. Gilson was executed three days later.