Bio

William L. Garner was born on September 26, 1972, and had a twin brother. According to his sister Lisa Ross's later trial testimony, their childhood home was physically and sexually abusive, which she described as "evil." Garner began getting into trouble with the law at age 10, failed the second, fourth, and sixth grades, and had a juvenile record including theft, criminal trespass, breaking and entering, assault, and disorderly conduct charges throughout his youth.

Psychologists who evaluated him ahead of his 2010 clemency hearing found his IQ measured around 76, just above the legal threshold for intellectual disability and that he functioned at a mental age comparable to a 13- or 14-year-old, with documented brain impairment from childhood lead poisoning.

Murder Story

On January 26, 1992, Addie Mack fell on an icy sidewalk in Cincinnati, Ohio, and went to the emergency room at University Hospital to be examined. While she was being treated, Garner, then 19, stole her purse from near a pay telephone in the emergency room, finding her keys, food stamps, and home address inside. He called a cab and had the driver take him to her apartment, intending to steal what he could.

Once inside, Garner moved through each room of the apartment and discovered six children asleep Mack's own children and their cousin and a neighbor boy who was spending the night, ranging in age from 8 to 13, with no adults present. One of the girls woke and asked him for a glass of water, Garner gave it to her, let her watch television for a few minutes, and told her he had run into her mother at the hospital, who had sent him to check on the children, before sending her back to bed.

Garner removed several items from the apartment, including a television, a VCR, a cordless phone, and a Sony boom box, loading them into the waiting cab and telling the driver he was moving out his belongings after a fight with his girlfriend. Realizing the child who had woken up could identify him, Garner went back inside and set three separate fires: two, in the unoccupied bedrooms, smoldered and went out on their own, but the third, set on the living room couch, quickly consumed the living room and filled the apartment with heavy smoke.

Addie Mack's oldest child, 13-year-old Rodriczus "Rod" Mack, woke to the smoke, heard his sisters screaming, and saw fire in the hallway outside his bedroom. He escaped through his bedroom window, sliding onto a dormer above the front door and climbing down to safety. The other five children in the home his three sisters, a cousin, and the neighbor boy did not follow and died of smoke inhalation inside the apartment.

Garner was arrested two days later after the stolen items were found in his home, and admitted to entering the apartment and setting the fire, but maintained he believed the children would be able to escape. He pleaded no contest to arson and theft charges but pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder.

At trial, prosecutors argued the children's deaths were the "obvious result" of his actions, stating, "The five children never had a chance to live their lives and a sixth had his life destroyed... His nightmare will have no end." A Hamilton County jury found Garner guilty on all five counts of murder following emotional testimony from the victims' mothers, firefighters, and detectives. He was convicted of five counts of aggravated murder, aggravated burglary, two counts of aggravated arson, theft, and two counts of receiving stolen property, and was sentenced to death on November 5, 1992.

Garner's conviction and sentence were affirmed on direct appeal by the Ohio Court of Appeals in 1994, and his subsequent postconviction relief petition was denied in 1997. His federal habeas corpus appeal was rejected by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2009 (Garner v. Mitchell, 557 F.3d 257). 

Ahead of his execution, his attorneys sought clemency citing his intellectual limitations, documented childhood abuse, and lead-poisoning-related brain damage. In June 2010, the Ohio Parole Board unanimously rejected the request, acknowledging in its report that "Mr. Garner suffered developmentally and was raised in an exceptionally and horrendously abusive environment," but concluding this did not outweigh "the aggravating circumstances of an offense resulting in the death of five innocent children."

William L. Garner was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio, on July 13, 2010, at age 37, using Ohio's newly adopted single-drug lethal injection protocol; multiple accounts describe the execution as not proceeding entirely smoothly. So many people wished to witness the execution, including Rod Mack, by then an adult, along with several of the victims' parents that the prison opened a second viewing room with closed-circuit television to accommodate everyone. 

Garner held a clipping of a friend's dreadlock as he died and read a lengthy final statement thanking the state of Ohio, his spiritual advisers, and his friend Stacy Evans. In a strange coincidence, Garner's twin brother was arrested on an outstanding warrant for failing to register as a sex offender, while standing outside the prison waiting to witness the execution. He was the 6th person executed in Ohio in 2010 and the 39th since the state resumed capital punishment, and the 31st person executed in the United States that year.