Oklahoma executed a man Thursday after fatally shooting a woman during a home break-in and robbery 20 years ago.
Wendell Grissom, 56, was declared deadly in McClester’s Oklahoma State Prison at 10:13am, prison authorities told The Associated Press. It was Oklahoma’s first run of 2025.
Grissom and co-defendant Jesse Floyd Johns were found guilty of the murder of 23-year-old Amber Matthews and injured his friend Doll Kopp at a Blaine County home in KOPF. Johns was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Three other executions were scheduled for this week around the US. Louisiana first used nitrogen gas to kill the man as he resumed his executions after a 15-year break on Tuesday. The man who lured and murdered his girlfriend’s ex-husband was executed in Arizona on Wednesday by a fatal injection. Another fatal injection is scheduled for Thursday in Florida.
Prosecutors said Grissom, who had a long criminal history, picked up hitchhiking Johns and the two men were driving west on Interstate 40 when they decided to commit a robbery. They randomly chose KOPF’s home near Watonga where Matthews had visited KOPF and her two young children.
Matthews was shot twice in the head and seriously injured by KOPF, which allowed him to live on the floor and continue running, getting help on Grissom’s truck, prosecutors said. Grissom and Johns also escape on a stolen 4-wheeler, but soon ran out of gas and were captured after getting on a cafe in a nearby county.
Authorities have found that the KOPF children were still inside the house and physically unharmed. Matthews died after flying by helicopter to Oklahoma City Hospital.
Grissom’s lawyers did not dispute his guilt, but in a generous hearing he was suffering from brain damage that he was never presented to the ju judge. The state’s Commission on Pardonment and Parole rejected Grissom’s request.
Grissom’s lawyer told the board that he always accepted responsibility and wrote an apology to Matthews’ family in his first interview with police.
“He can’t change the past, but he is now and always deeply embarrassing and regretting,” said Christie Christopher, a lawyer at the Federal Public Defence Counsel.
KOPF told the board that she still carries deep mental and physical scars from the attack, including fragments of bullets remaining on her body. She said that for years after the attack, she was called 911 when the doorbell rings unexpectedly or when a stranger appears in her neighborhood.
“I’ve always lived in a terrible state,” she said with tears.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond calls the murder of Matthews a “textbook” death penalty case.
“The crimes Grissom committed — a random and brutal attack on innocent strangers in the holiness of their own home — is a very species that awakens people at night,” Drummond said at a hearing last month.
Kevin Ray Underwood’s deadly injection in December was the 127th execution by Oklahoma since the US reinstated the death penalty in 1976, state prison records show.
