The state of Georgia executed Kelly Renee Gissendaner early Wednesday morning, ending the life of the only woman on the state’s death row and closing a case that began with a conspiracy hatched in secret and ended with a husband murdered in the woods for insurance money.
Gissendaner, 47, was pronounced dead at 12:21 a. m. at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Georgia, after receiving a lethal injection.
She spent her final moments singing “Amazing Grace” through tears, praying, and delivering a message of love to her children and remorse to the family of the man she helped kill.
The execution marked a historic and somber milestone. No woman had been executed by the state of Georgia in 70 years, not since 1945. But for the family of Douglas Gissendaner, the agony of that night in February 1997 was never about history.
It was about a father taken away from his children, a husband murdered in cold blood by someone he trusted.
To understand how Kelly Gissendaner arrived at that death chamber, one must go back to the winter of 1997, when she was 28 years old, a mother of three children from three different fathers, trapped in a rocky marriage and deeply infatuated with another man.
Her relationship with Douglas Gissendaner had been a turbulent cycle of reconciliation and collapse. Between 1989 and 1997, they married, divorced, reunited, separated, and tried once more to make things work. But by February 1997, Kelly had fallen for Gregory Bruce Owen, and she made no secret of it around her coworkers.
She told people she was done with Douglas, that she was in love with Greg and deeply unhappy at home. While Douglas worked overtime trying to hold their family together, Kelly was quietly constructing a way out, one that did not involve lawyers, custody battles, or the messy complications of divorce.
It began as an idea shared in the dark of night, a whispered thought Kelly presented to Greg when the world was quiet. At first, it sounded like desperation, but she did not let it go. She brought it up again and again, each time with more certainty.
She did not want a divorce. She wanted Douglas dead.
Greg resisted at first, telling her it was insane and that a divorce made far more sense. But Kelly was not interested in sense. If she left Douglas, she would lose the house, the car, the money, and possibly even her children.
But if he died, she stood to collect his life insurance and walk away with everything untouched.
Eventually, Greg gave in, his hesitation buried under her relentless pressure. Together they began planning. In the days leading up to the attack, they remained in constant contact, exchanging 47 phone calls and 18 pages.
On the day of the murder, they were seen together near a row of payphones finalizing the plan.
On the night of February 7, 1997, Kelly pulled up outside her family’s home and dropped Greg off. Before he got out, she handed him two items: a nightstick and a large knife. Then she drove away.
She had no intention of witnessing what came next. Instead, she went to a friend’s house and later hit a nightclub, pretending it was just another Friday night.
She smiled, drank, and danced, every move calculated to build an alibi. Meanwhile, Greg crouched inside the house, waiting in the darkness. Sometime after 10 p.
m. , Douglas walked through the door, completely unaware. He had no time to process what was happening.
As the door closed behind him, Greg emerged from the shadows with a knife to his throat.
part2
There was no shouting, no warning. Just a cold order: Get in the car and drive. The ride was quiet and cold through miles of darkness until Greg told him to pull over deep in the woods of Gwinnett County, far from anyone who might hear what came next.
Greg ordered Douglas out of the car, walked him into the trees, and told him to kneel. Then Greg struck him with the nightstick again and again. When Douglas collapsed, Greg pulled out the knife and stabbed him repeatedly in the back and neck until he stopped moving.
Then he bent over the body and removed Douglas’s watch and wedding ring.
Kelly had instructed him to do that to make it look like a robbery. Around that same time, Kelly walked out of the nightclub and headed home. By then, Douglas was already bleeding out in the dirt, his lungs collapsing, his body shutting down.
But Kelly did not call for help. She paged Greg with a coded message and drove to meet him at the scene.
When she arrived, she did not panic. She did not cry. She asked only one question: Is he dead?
Greg said yes. That was all she needed. She grabbed a flashlight, walked into the woods, and stared down at her husband’s body with no visible regret, only confirmation.
Then, as if tying up loose ends, they doused Douglas’s car in kerosene and set it on fire.
They did not run or hide. They drove back to town like it was any other night. Kelly dropped Greg off at his house, where he tossed the knife, the nightstick, his jeans, and Douglas’s wedding band into the trash.
But he missed one thing that would come back to haunt them both: investigators later found the sweatpants he had worn that night, and the blood on the fabric matched both Douglas and Greg.
The next day, Kelly picked up the phone and called the police, putting on a performance. She reported Douglas missing, claiming he left around 7 p. m.
to help a friend fix a car but never returned. She said he must have gotten lost or something happened on the way home. At first, it looked like a routine missing person’s case.
Officers made their usual calls to hospitals, tow yards, and anyone who might have seen something. They checked credit card activity and searched the area, but nothing stood out. As they dug deeper into his personal life, the picture began to change.
Douglas was a mechanic who loved his job, his family, and the life he was building. There were no signs of trouble, no debts, no enemies, and no reason to run.
Kelly’s story started to fall apart quickly. For 11 days, she kept up the lie, telling police she had no idea where Douglas had gone and hiding the fact that her marriage was falling apart and she had a boyfriend. But Kelly was not improvising.
She had a plan set in motion long before the police ever showed up.
Kelly’s background painted a picture of a woman shaped by hardship. She was born into poverty in rural Georgia and raised in a poor cotton farming family. Her childhood was not just unstable; it was violent.
People who knew her said the abuse started young, first by her stepfather, then by other men, following her into her teens.
By high school, things got worse. In her senior year, she reported being on a date, and nine months later she gave birth to her first son, Brandon. At 19, she married a man named Jeff Banks, but that marriage barely lasted six months.
Then came Douglas, whom she met on a blind date two years later, and they clicked immediately.
They married that fall, had a daughter named Kayla, and tried to build a future. But life got messy. They lost their jobs and moved in with Kelly’s mother.
Douglas eventually joined the army, and the couple relocated to Germany, where everything unraveled. While Douglas served overseas, Kelly got pregnant by someone else. The betrayal cracked their foundation and they divorced in 1993.
But Douglas did not disappear from her life. He stayed close enough to try again, and in May 1995, they remarried. By the end of 1996, they had bought a home in Auburn, Georgia, and were trying to start over.
Douglas raised all three of Kelly’s children as his own. Their youngest son, Dakota, would later say, “He was our dad.”
For a little while, it looked like they might make it. The bills got paid. The house felt steady.
But behind closed doors, something darker was already unfolding. Just 36 hours after Douglas vanished, everything collapsed. Deep in the woods, a park ranger spotted the carcass of a charred car burned clean through, with no plates, no glass, nothing but a metal shell.
It had been torched so badly that investigators could not tell what make or model it was. The only way to identify it was through the vehicle identification number stamped onto the frame. When the results came back, jaws dropped.
It was Douglas’s car, but Douglas was nowhere to be found. With no body and barely a lead, detectives turned to those closest to him.
They started asking hard questions about his home life, his relationship with Kelly, and whether the picture-perfect image of their marriage was real. They dug through bank records and cell tower hits. Then, buried under layers of silence, they found something no one had brought up before, and it changed everything.
During one of Kelly’s separations from Douglas, she had been seeing another man, Greg Owen. When police asked why she never mentioned him, she said she was embarrassed. But that explanation did not hold for long.
Her story changed. Kelly told investigators that when she informed Greg she planned to reconcile with Douglas, he flew into a rage and threatened to kill him.
With that information, they made Greg the new prime suspect. Police tracked him down and confronted him, but Greg denied everything. He claimed he had an alibi, and a man named Ricky Lee Barrett backed him up.
For now, there was not enough to arrest him. But two weeks later, the case broke wide open.
Roughly three-quarters of a mile from where Douglas’s car had been found, a search team stumbled across a body lying face down in the woods. A crime scene tech reached into the back pocket, pulled out a wallet, and opened it. The credit cards were still there, along with cash and a driver’s license.
It was Douglas. Nothing had been stolen.
The wallet had not even been touched, which meant this was not random. It was not a robbery gone wrong. Someone had killed him on purpose.
The police started asking why, but Douglas’s family already had a theory. They told investigators that Kelly, his wife, had just taken out a $15,000 life insurance policy on him. That detail turned everything.
Detectives moved fast. They secured Kelly’s phone records, and what they saw put her at the center of everything. The night Douglas vanished, Kelly had exchanged more than 40 calls with Greg, back and forth, nonstop.
Their timelines were now tangled, and Greg’s alibi started to fall apart. When detectives brought Ricky Barrett back for more questioning, the story changed.
Ricky admitted Greg had left his house around 9 p. m. that night and did not come back until early the next morning.
Even worse, Greg had asked him to lie about it. That was all they needed. The next time Greg sat down with detectives, they slid the phone records across the table.
There was nowhere left to run, and Greg folded.
He told them everything: that he and Kelly were never broken up, that the whole plan, the timing, the motive was all hers. Kelly wanted Douglas dead so she could cash in the insurance money, get the house, and not risk losing it in a messy divorce. Kelly had pitched it, timed it, and pushed it forward.
Greg said he just followed orders.
Kelly was arrested and locked up. Her first call from jail went straight to her best friend, and on that call she confessed, saying she had helped plan it and that she wanted Douglas gone. But just a few hours later, she called again, trying to rewrite the story.
Now she claimed Greg had forced her, that she had been coerced and never had a choice.
While in jail awaiting trial, Kelly wrote a letter attempting to hire someone to lie under oath. She also wanted witnesses robbed and beaten, anything to shut them up before they reached the stand. But by then, the truth was already moving faster than she could.
Before the trial even started, both Kelly and Greg were handed the same deal: life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, but only if they testified.
Greg took the deal. Kelly did not. She thought she could beat the odds, thought a jury might see her side.
But it was a bet that would cost her her life. In exchange for the deal, Greg testified against Kelly. He told the jury she had planned the murder for three months and that she only got back together with Douglas to keep the house and cash in on his life insurance.
He said she had talked about it months before the killing, calling it the only way to get rid of him for good. This testimony, together with the letter in which Kelly threatened witnesses, was enough for the jury. In 1998, she was sentenced to death.
Kelly was first sent to Metro State Prison and later moved to Arrendale State Prison.
Behind bars, something shifted. She turned inward toward faith. Through a program tied to Emory University, she enrolled in theology classes and began reading Christian thinkers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Eventually, she started writing letters to theologian Jurgen Moltmann, and the two kept in touch for years. Inmates noticed the change and said Kelly encouraged others, talking some women out of ending their own lives.
A group of inmates later called themselves the struggle sisters and said Kelly helped them find a reason to keep going. But faith and good deeds were not enough to change her fate. Her execution was originally scheduled for February 2015, but weather delays and concerns over lethal injection drugs pushed it back.
What followed were waves of clemency pleas from her children, religious leaders, former judges, and even the Vatican.
Supporters argued her sentence did not match the crime. Greg, the man who actually killed Douglas, had received life in prison. Kelly, who planned it, was going to die.
But Georgia law allows a death sentence even for those who did not carry out the killing themselves. A new date was set for September 30, 2015.
Just after midnight, Kelly was led to the death chamber. On her last night, she asked for a feast: two Whoppers, two large orders of french fries, lemonade, cherry vanilla ice cream, popcorn, cornbread, and a salad made with boiled eggs, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, carrots, cheese, and buttermilk dressing. When they strapped her to the gurney, she became emotional.
She started crying and sobbing. Then, between tears, she began to sing “Amazing Grace.” When she was not singing, she was praying.
When asked for her final words, she stopped crying long enough to speak clearly. “I just want to tell my kids that I love them and I’m proud of them. And no matter what happens tonight, love does beat out hate,” she said in a clear voice.
“And I love you, Sally. And I love you, Susan. You let my kids know I went out singing ‘Amazing Grace’ and tell the Gissendaner family I am so sorry.
That amazing man lost his life because of me. And if I could take it back, if this would change it, I would have done it a long time ago. But it’s not.
And I just hope they can find peace. And I hope they find some happiness. God bless you.”
Her final words delivered, Kelly Renee Gissendaner was pronounced dead at 12:21 a. m. She was 47 years old.
At the time of her execution, she was the only woman on Georgia’s death row. Her codefendant, Greg Owen, who testified against her and served time for the murder, was released from prison in early 2023.
The case leaves behind a complicated legacy: a grieving family still mourning a man described by his children as devoted and kind, a state debating the morality of capital punishment, and a woman who found redemption in faith but could not escape the consequences of her choices. Douglas Gissendaner’s family has said they will carry the pain of his loss forever. Kelly’s children have spoken of their love for both their mother and the man who raised them.
The execution was the first of a woman in Georgia in seven decades, a statistic that underscores how rare it is for women to reach death row in the United States. Just before the lethal drugs began flowing, there was a brief delay while the legal system ran its final course. The Georgia Supreme Court and the U.
S. Supreme Court both declined to intervene, clearing the way for the procedure to proceed.
Witnesses described the scene as somber and quiet. Kelly’s spiritual advisor was present, as were members of Douglas’s family, who had waited nearly two decades for this moment. They watched in silence as the woman once married to their loved one took her final breaths.
When the time of death was announced, there were no outbursts, just the heavy weight of closure settling over the room.
Attorneys for Gissendaner had argued in final appeals that her sentence was disproportionate because the actual killer received life in prison. They pointed to her transformation behind bars, her theological studies, and her positive influence on other inmates. But prosecutors maintained that she was the architect of the murder, the mastermind who manipulated a vulnerable man into carrying out her plan.
The evidence supported that narrative. Phone records showed her relentless pressure leading up to the killing. Her call from jail contained a confession.
Her letter seeking to harm witnesses revealed a willingness to go to extreme lengths to avoid responsibility. Even after her arrest, she continued to try to control the narrative, shifting blame and crafting alibis.
For Douglas’s family, the execution brought a measure of justice they feared might never come. They had watched Kelly fight her sentence for years, winning multiple stays and delays. Each postponement reopened old wounds.
But on this night, they finally saw the conclusion of a legal saga that began with a body found in the woods of Gwinnett County.
The death of Kelly Gissendaner does not bring Douglas back. It does not erase the terror he experienced in his final moments, kneeling in the dark woods as a man he barely knew beat him and stabbed him at the direction of his own wife. But it closes a chapter in a case that captured national attention and raised difficult questions about crime, punishment, and redemption.
Kelly Gissendaner’s story is one of transformation and tragedy, of a woman who endured abuse and poverty, who found faith and purpose behind bars, but who also orchestrated the murder of the man who loved her and raised her children as his own. In the end, the state of Georgia decided that the crime outweighed the redemption. At 12:21 a.m. , that judgment was carried out.
