The Death Row Inmate Who Wanted to Die | Scott Raymond Dozier | Crime, Final Hours & Last Words…

The Nevada deathrow inmate who had been awaiting his execution for over a decade has taken matters into his own hands. Scott Dozier was found dead this afternoon in an apparent suicide. Dozier, a convicted killer, had his execution delayed two times after it was caught in the middle of a legal battle between the makers of the lethal injection drug.

 Dolly Melendez explains what was holding back that execution leaving Dozier’s life caught in the middle. Darlene. >> Well, Sasha, [music] just last month our 8 News Now I-Team reported that the Department of Corrections placed two-time convicted killer Scott Dozier on suicide watch. It’s unclear how long he was placed on watch, but Dozier had been very clear himself.

 He would rather die than spend the rest of his life in prison. Today he was found alone in his cell in an apparent hanging. Dozier had given up his fight in court and insisted the state carry out his 2007 death sentence for separate killings of methamphetamine drug trade associates in 2002 in Phoenix and here in Las Vegas.

>> Scott Dozier had been waiting for this night. Inside Nevada’s Ely State Prison, the execution chamber was ready. The state had selected the drugs. Prison officials had chosen the time. And unlike most men facing death, Scott was not asking anyone to save him. He wanted the execution to happen.

 Years earlier, Scott had stopped fighting his death sentence. He gave up his remaining appeals and told the court to carry it out. Nevada agreed, but just hours before he was supposed to die, a pharmaceutical company went to court and stopped the state from using one of its drugs. It was the second time Scott had prepared for execution only to remain alive when the appointed hour passed.

There would never be a third attempt. Six months later, Scott Dozier was found dead inside his prison cell. Nevada had sentenced him to death, built an execution chamber for him, and scheduled his final moments twice. Yet, the state never managed to carry out the sentence. But, Scott’s story did not begin on death row.

 Long before the murder convictions, he was remembered as an intelligent and talented child. He became a soldier, a husband, and a father. He worked legitimate jobs and once performed in costume at a Las Vegas casino. Then, he entered the methamphetamine trade and somewhere along the way, the boy once described as a great kid became connected to the deaths of two men in two different states.

 One was found in the Arizona desert. The other disappeared after arriving in Las Vegas with thousands of dollars for a drug deal. So, how did Scott Dozier move from a seemingly ordinary life into drugs, murder, and death row? And why did the man who once had so much to live for eventually begin demanding that Nevada end his life? This is the story of Scott Dozier and the choices that turned a promising young man into one of the most unusual death row prisoners in American history.

 Scott Raymond Dozier was born on November 20th, 1970 in Great Falls, Montana to Larry and Martha Dozier. Larry worked on federal water projects, which meant the family moved often following his work between towns across the West. For most kids, that kind of instability creates problems.

 For Dozier, according to the people who knew him then, it didn’t seem to. He was a precocious child and an early talker. The only real difficulty in his infancy, by his mother’s account, was that he barely slept. She was advised at one point to put him on tranquilizers and refused, choosing instead to get up with him night after night.

 When his younger brother David was born, the two boys shared a room and [clears throat] Scott became, in David’s own words years later, basically the best older brother anyone could ask for. David remembered him helping with homework, working on projects together, and looking out for who his younger sibling spent time with. A younger sister came along after David.

 She grew up to become a scientist. The family was close. They took vacations together. His mother baked birthday cakes for all three kids. One shaped like an ice cream cone for his 12th birthday was displayed years later as evidence of just how ordinary his home life had looked. He loved soccer.

 He was placed in a gifted and talented program at school. Things shifted when the family relocated from a small town in South Dakota to Boulder City, Nevada. According to his mother, Boulder City was a harder place to land, full of wealthier kids, and a colder social environment than what the family had known before.

 By eighth grade, Dozier had spent time at Spring Mountain Youth Camp, a juvenile detention facility. The family eventually moved again, this time to Phoenix, Arizona, where Dozier worked at an Italian restaurant and graduated from high school in 1989. He was, by every account, a genuinely talented artist, skilled with charcoal and pastel from a young age.

 His parents paid for him to take oil painting lessons. Long after he was incarcerated, his parents kept his artwork displayed in their home. And family members maintained a page online for years just to share the pieces he continued to make in prison. Nothing about the boy from Great Falls suggested where his life was headed, but adulthood was about to introduce Scott Dozier to a world where loyalty, money, and survival meant something very different than they had in his parents’ living room.

 Angela Drake met Scott Dozier when she was 15 and living in Boulder City. She remembered him as a friend who always treated her with respect, the charming one in school, by her own description, while she wasn’t. She saw something admirable in him, too. He acted almost like a father figure to a young boy his own parents had taken into their home.

 Dozier enlisted in the army serving from November 16th, 1990 to August 10th, 1992 when he was honorably discharged. He and Angela married on New Year’s Day in 1991 not long after he’d enlisted. By Angela’s account at his later trial, he was thoughtful in ways that went beyond the ordinary. When she was pregnant, he trained as an EMT not for a job but simply so he’d be prepared if something went wrong.

 Their son, Ashton, was born in 1993. The marriage eventually ended. Angela pointed partly to her strict Catholic upbringing and a mother who didn’t approve of Dozier as contributing factors. She remarried, had three daughters, and moved to Hawaii with Ashton. But Dozier stayed involved. Every year he drew homemade birthday cards for his stepdaughters.

 Frogs, mermaids, bears done by hand. Ashton, 14 at the time of his father’s 2007 trial, testified that he loved his dad and that the two of them used to work on cars together, a hobby Dozier’s own father said the two of them had shared as well. After leaving the army, Dozier worked ordinary jobs and one unusual one.

 He performed at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in a costume dinner show called Winds of the Gods complete with gold brocade and a tiger striped skirt driving a chariot across the stage. By every visible measure, Scott Dozier had the basic pieces of a stable adult life. Military service, a marriage, a son, steady work.

 But behind all of it, something else had already taken hold. He had been arrested on a drug charge in Boulder City in 1989, the same year he graduated high school, and Las Vegas in the years that followed was exactly the wrong place for someone already drawn toward that world to try to stay out of it. Las Vegas in the mid to late 1990s was, in the words of one police detective who later testified at Dozier’s trial, a hotbed for methamphetamine production.

 This was before federal restrictions made the cold medicine ingredients used to cook the drug harder to obtain. Dozier’s father would later testify that his son had been a good one when he wasn’t involved with drugs. But avoiding that world in Las Vegas at that time took more discipline than Dozier had. In 1995, he was arrested in North Las Vegas in possession of Valium, methamphetamine, and Rohypnol, the drug commonly known by its street name as a date rape drug.

 In 1998, a house he was living in on Cinderella Lane exploded under circumstances that were never fully resolved, badly injuring a young woman named Kasey Kimball, who lost part of her right arm and right leg in the blast. Despite being wanted on warrants at the time, Dozier went to the hospital to see her.

 She would later write a letter, read at his murder trial years afterward, saying she didn’t see the monster the authorities described. She saw a boy who had loved her. That contradiction, genuine tenderness toward the people close to him, running alongside a life increasingly built on drugs, became the pattern of his 20s. He worked briefly as a stripper and took landscaping jobs, but his real income came from cooking and selling methamphetamine, and it kept him moving back and forth between Nevada and Arizona. He wasn’t shy about what drew

him to it. “I liked the idea of living outside the law,” he said later, describing that period of his life. It wasn’t a life he was pulled into against his will. It was one he found genuinely appealing. The danger, the independence, the sense of control it gave him. Even during this stretch, people who dealt with him described him as charming, almost without exception.

 An attorney who represented him on smaller charges before the murder cases described him as punctual and meticulous and considered him a personal friend. Scott Dozier didn’t become a different person once he entered the drug world. He brought the same charisma that had made him well-liked as a kid. He simply put it to use in a much more dangerous environment, surrounded by people whose loyalty was only ever as solid as their next arrest.

 By 2001, one person inside that world had become, in the eyes of prosecutors, a serious liability. His name was Jason Green. Jason Green, sometimes recorded as Jason Green and known to some by the nickname Griffin, was 26 years old and living with Dozier in a trailer off Arizona’s Carefree Highway north of Phoenix. The two men were connected through the same methamphetamine operation Dozier had been running between Nevada and Arizona.

According to prosecutors, Green had absconded from a furlough while in custody and Dozier came to see him as a security threat, someone who, if caught by police, might trade information about the meth operation to help himself. Prosecutors alleged that sometime between late July 2001 and the following March, Dozier shot Green in the back of the head while Green sat reading a magazine.

 What followed, according to testimony from people inside Dozier’s circle, involved a chain of people helping move and eventually bury Green’s body. First hidden in a closet, then wrapped in plastic sheeting, driven around for months in a container in the back of a truck, and ultimately buried in a shallow grave under a large wooden spool once the people involved grew afraid that eviction proceedings on the property would expose it.

 The case broke open because of a man named Doug Powell, an associate who had known Dozier for roughly a decade and was already in custody himself. Powell told police he could help them find another victim connected to Dozier and lead investigators to the site outside Phoenix where Green’s badly decomposed remains were recovered on September 23rd, 2002.

 Dozier’s account of what happened was different. He said he came home one day and simply found Green already dead and that rather than call police, which he believed would expose his meth operation, he disposed of the body himself. He has consistently maintained that he did not kill Green. The case against him rested heavily on witnesses who had their own criminal exposure and their own reasons to cooperate with prosecutors.

 Still, after a 12-day trial, an Arizona jury convicted Dozier of second-degree murder in 2005 and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison. By then though, Arizona investigators weren’t the only ones interested in Scott Dozier. Nevada authorities were already looking into the disappearance of another young man, one who had flown to Las Vegas with $12,000 in cash and never made it home.

Jeremiah Miller was 22 years old and by every account of the people who loved him, he was nothing like the caricature that true crime stories can turn victims into. He came from a stable family in a small town, stayed close with extended relatives and loved the outdoors. Basketball, football, woodworking, landscaping, driving heavy equipment.

His father would later describe lifting weights and playing pool with him and remembered him as someone who loved children and loved older people equally. He’d graduated high school in 1997 and was working toward becoming an elementary and special education teacher. First at community college and later at Arizona State University.

 He was fluent in Spanish, had volunteered building houses with Habitat for Humanity and told his family he wanted to help kids who might otherwise, in his words, end up in the kind of trouble he’d need to keep them out of. He’d married a young woman named Martha Hernandez in January 2001 and the couple had moved to Peoria, Arizona.

 But in the year before his death, something had shifted. Miller wasn’t working or attending school. He’d started selling drugs, introduced by a friend named Jason Shaw, to a man Shaw knew as reliable in that world, Scott Dozier. Miller was, by the accounts of people around him, in over his head. He was losing weight from his own growing meth use, carrying a gun more often, and taking risks that made even the people already inside that world nervous.

 He’d also started seeing a woman named Brandy Douglas. Hoping to change his fortunes, Miller borrowed $12,000 from an older drug dealer nicknamed Grandpa, and flew to Las Vegas with Dozier and Douglas, planning to buy ephedrine, a key chemical used to produce methamphetamine. Dozier had access to rooms at the La Concha, a motel on the strip, in exchange for odd jobs he did around the property.

 But the deal fell through on that first trip, and Douglas and Miller flew back to Phoenix. Dozier called Miller back to Las Vegas a second time. Miller flew out alone. Douglas stayed behind, still airsick from the first flight. Whether the drug deal went through on this second trip is something witnesses never fully agreed on.

 What is clear is that Douglas spoke to Miller by phone late on the night of April 18th, 2002. He told her the deal had gone through, and that he’d be home to her the next day. She never heard from him again. Days later, several miles from the strip, a maintenance worker at the Copper Sands apartment complex noticed something in the dumpster, a large suitcase. And inside it, flesh and hair.

What investigators eventually recovered was the dismembered torso of Jeremiah Miller. His limbs had been carefully removed at the joints. His head was never found. Identifying him came down to two tattoos on what remained of his body, one of a dragon, the other reading, “Always remember.” When Brandy Douglas couldn’t reach Miller the day after his call, she contacted his family.

 His mother, Kemari, and father, David, immediately knew something was wrong. It wasn’t like their son to simply vanish. When David called police, he says the detective initially sounded skeptical, telling him that young men sometimes came to Las Vegas and disappeared on their own. The family didn’t accept that. They printed flyers and distributed them from Kingman to Las Vegas, at casinos and along the Hoover Dam.

 At one point during the search, Dozier called David Miller directly. He told him he hoped they’d find Jeremiah, that he had a son himself and couldn’t imagine what he’d do if something happened to him. The break came when police asked the Millers if their son had any distinguishing marks. He did, the two tattoos, plus a scar between his eyebrows from a childhood fall and a bite mark from a family dog.

 When investigators confirmed the match, they told David Miller they had recovered his son’s body, but not his head or his arms. Dozier was arrested in Phoenix roughly two months later, after police staked out his parents’ home and pursued him in a car chase that ended in a crash. The case against him leaned heavily on people from inside his own circle.

 Doug Powell, the same associate whose testimony had unravelled the Arizona case, told police that as soon as news of the suitcase discovery broke, Dozier’s reaction was simple, “I messed up.” Powell said Dozier later showed him news clips about the case and seemed to brag about it, and that he’d handed Powell cash from what he called a fat roll of money not long after Miller disappeared.

 Powell also said Dozier had in the past drawn pictures of dismembered bodies. A man named Joe Wolschleger, a fellow military veteran, who said he sometimes used drugs with Dozier for days at a stretch, testified that Dozier called him one night, breathless, saying he had a guy in a suitcase and was heading to a lake. According to Woolslager, Dozier described shooting Miller inside the motel room after telling him they were about to make money, then hanging the body in the shower.

 Another witness, Jerry Wimberly, a neighbor and fellow drug user, testified that Dozier had asked him to look into the bathroom at the La Concha and that what he saw was a man’s body in the tub, the head resting on the chest, the shower still running. Wimberly said he immediately left the room and never heard Dozier admit to killing Miller directly.

 A hotel employee, Joe Munarson, testified that he’d loaned Dozier cement, a dolly, and a bucket and never saw any of it again. Investigators later excavated part of the property with a bulldozer looking for Miller’s head. They never found it. The financial trail mattered, too. Witnesses said Dozier, who’d appeared broke in the days leading up to Miller’s disappearance, at one point asking a hotel employee to loan him $20, suddenly had cash afterward, buying a camcorder and gifts for the women he was seeing.

He reportedly told people he’d won the money gambling. Dozier’s defense argued the case had real problems. Investigators tested for blood at the motel using a chemical reagent and found none. A striking gap, his lawyers argued, for a crime scene where a man was allegedly shot, bled out, and dismembered.

 They raised questions about a bloody jersey and a lug wrench found near the dumpster that were never fully explained, and about Grandpa, the dealer who had loaned Miller the $12,000 and was, they pointed out, never seriously investigated. And they argued that virtually every witness against Dozier was a self-interested criminal testifying under the influence of drugs at the time of the events they claimed to remember in circumstances that benefited their own cases.

 It was, in the end, entirely a circumstantial case, no single definitive piece of evidence, but a convergence of testimony, timing, and money that a jury would ultimately find convincing. Arizona moved first. In 2005, after a 12-day trial built substantially on Doug Powell’s cooperation, Dozier was convicted of second-degree murder in Jason Green’s death and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

 He has never accepted that verdict. His account remains that he found Green already dead and disposed of the body to protect his drug operation, not that he killed him. Nevada’s case followed. Dozier stood trial in Clark County in 2007 for Jeremiah Miller’s murder. Prosecutors leaned on the same network of witnesses, Powell, Wolschleger, Wimberly, and others, along with the financial evidence and Miller’s family’s testimony about the search for their son.

 The defense pressed hard on the absence of blood evidence and the unreliable nature of witnesses with their own legal troubles. The jury wasn’t persuaded by the defense. Dozier was convicted of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon and robbery with the use of a deadly weapon. During the penalty phase, prosecutors used the Arizona conviction as an aggravating factor.

 This was not, they argued, an isolated act, but a pattern. The defense presented mitigating evidence, his military service, his relationship with his son, his artistic ability, the letters from family and friends describing a man capable of real warmth. His attorney, Alzora Jackson, argued to the jury that sentencing him to death would only add to the destruction the drug world had already caused.

 More killing layered onto killing. The district attorney’s office rejected an earlier plea deal that would have had Dozier plead guilty, accept a life sentence, wave his appeals, and tell the Miller family what had actually happened to their son. The office’s position was that a review committee had already approved seeking execution and nothing had changed.

 The jury sentenced Dozier to death in October 2007. He appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court, which affirmed both the murder conviction and the death sentence in 2012. Though it found insufficient evidence to support the deadly weapon sentencing enhancements attached to the original verdict. The core conviction and the sentence stood.

 Dozier had spent years trying to avoid this outcome. But something in him had already started to shift by the time the appeals process dragged into its second decade behind bars. He no longer wanted lawyers fighting to keep him alive. Life at Ely State Prison, Nevada’s maximum security facility and home to its death row, gave Dozier more structure and more comfort than most condemned prisoners get.

 He had access to an exercise yard, art supplies, a television, and an MP3 player loaded with everything from Saint Vincent to punk and metal. He worked with pastels. He lifted weights heavily enough that a judge once joked in a hearing about whether there was a fitter death row inmate anywhere on the planet. He cut his own hair.

 A 2005 psychological evaluation, conducted amid the murder accusations, described him as having elements of antisocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits. Manipulative, hypersexual, prone to using his looks and charm for attention, and requiring admiration from the people around him. The evaluation found an above-average IQ paired with a lack of empathy, a sense of invincibility, and what the psychologist called a superficial or glib charm that made him unusually persuasive.

 Dozier continued to deny killing either Green or Miller, but he’d also, by his own account, made peace with something else entirely. He didn’t believe life on death row was worth continuing. In an interview years later, he put it plainly. “He didn’t want to die,” he said. He’d simply rather be dead than keep doing what he was doing.

 In October 2016, after an Arizona court rejected his latest appeal in the Green case, Dozier wrote by hand to Clark County District Judge Jennifer Togliatti. He asked her to have his death sentence carried out. He’d already arranged for a university lab to accept his brain for research. The rest of his remains, he decided, his family would cremate.

 In the language used around capital punishment, a prisoner who does this is called a volunteer. Someone who abandons the appeals most condemned people spend decades pursuing and asks, instead, for execution. Courts still have to confirm the person is legally competent to make that decision.

 Nevada’s courts found that Dozier was. He wasn’t unclear about his reasoning, either. Life in prison, he told a reporter, wasn’t really living. It was just surviving. It was boring, repetitive, the same faces every day, stretching out with no end date attached to it. Death to him, an avowed atheist who didn’t believe in an afterlife, represented something closer to relief than punishment.

 What Dozier hadn’t accounted for was that Nevada, a state that hadn’t executed anyone in over a decade, wasn’t actually prepared to grant his request. Nevada’s last execution had taken place in 2006. In the years since, the state, like most of the country, had run into a wall that had nothing to do with the courts and everything to do with pharmaceutical companies.

 Drug manufacturers, uncomfortable with their products being used to kill people, had increasingly refused to sell the drugs states needed for lethal injection. When Nevada’s corrections director reached out to nearly 250 different suppliers asking for execution drugs, not one agreed to help. Dozier’s request forced the issue. The state built a new execution chamber at Ely State Prison, completed in late 2016, and eventually settled on a drug combination no state had ever used before.

 The sedative diazepam, the powerful opioid fentanyl, and a paralytic drug called cisatracurium. If it went forward, Dozier would become the first person in the United States ever executed using fentanyl. A death warrant was signed and his first execution date was set for November 14th, 2017. Dozier’s own defense attorneys raised concerns about the untested combination, specifically that if the fentanyl failed to render him fully unconscious, the paralytic could leave him aware and unable to signal that something had gone wrong. Days before the scheduled

execution, a judge agreed and removed the paralytic from the protocol. The state appealed and the execution was stayed while the case moved through Nevada’s court system. Dozier was frustrated by the delay in ways that had nothing to do with fear of death. He’d already said goodbye to his family. He’d prepared himself mentally for an ending and then watch that ending get pulled away by a legal fight he hadn’t asked for and didn’t particularly want litigated on his behalf.

 The Nevada Supreme Court eventually sided with the state on procedural grounds and a new death warrant followed in June 2018. A second execution date was set, July 11th, 2018 at 8:00 p.m. with the original three-drug combination restored. Diazepam swapped for a different sedative, midazolam, alongside the fentanyl and cisatracurium.

 Once again, it would have been a first of its kind execution in American history. And once again, the drama that unfolded in the final hours had almost nothing to do with Scott Dozier himself. By the morning of July 11th, 2018, everything was in place. The chamber was ready. Dozier had said his goodbyes to his family for what he believed, for the second time, would be the last time.

That morning, the drug manufacturer Allergan filed an emergency lawsuit. The company had learned that its midazolam, a drug it sold strictly for medical use, was about to be used in Dozier’s execution, and it argued that Nevada had obtained the product deceptively, aware the company prohibited this exact use.

Allergan wasn’t trying to save Dozier’s life. It was trying to protect its own reputation as a manufacturer of medicine meant to help people, not kill them. Las Vegas District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez issued an emergency order that morning, just hours before Dozier was scheduled to die, blocking Nevada from using the company’s midazolam.

 Without it, the state had no legal way to carry out the execution as planned. For the second time, Scott Dozier had prepared himself to die, and for the second time, he remained alive when the appointed hour came and went. It marked the first time in the modern era of the death penalty that a pharmaceutical company had successfully stopped an execution through the courts.

 Other manufacturers soon voiced similar objections. Pfizer over its fentanyl, Sandoz over the cisatracurium. A Las Vegas court later found that Nevada had obtained Allergan’s product through what it called bad faith subterfuge, and barred the state from using its remaining supply at all. Dozier’s frustration afterward wasn’t really about the drug companies.

 It was about the position he was left in, alive, again, with no execution date, no resolution, and no real say in any of it. In the months after the second cancellation, Dozier’s situation inside Ely State Prison changed. His family and lawyers said he was placed under increasingly restrictive conditions, deprived of most of his belongings, cut off from the exercise yard, phone calls, and visitors, and placed under close mental health observation.

 Prison officials described the measures as precautionary, citing concerns raised by a mental health provider. Dozier’s lawyers argued his mental state was deteriorating specifically because of the isolation itself. His sister, in written comments to a reporter around that time, compared the experience to having a terminally ill family member, never knowing which visit, which phone call might be the last, and now not even sure why those things had been taken away in the first place.

 Friends who corresponded with him described him sounding more defeated than they’d ever heard him. Court filings later revealed that in the months before his death, Dozier had made several attempts to end his own life, including reportedly trying to obtain a lethal substance through the mail. The state maintained its restrictions were a direct response to that risk.

 His family argued there was little evidence he posed an active danger, and that the isolation itself was the greater threat to his well-being. None of it was resolved by the time law enforcement found him unresponsive in his cell at Ely State Prison on January 5th, 2019. He was pronounced dead that afternoon. He was 48 years old.

 Authorities said he was not on active suicide watch at the time and had been alone in his cell. The county coroner found no evidence of foul play. Nevada had spent years building a legal and physical apparatus specifically to grant Scott Dozier’s request. In the end, the state never carried out his sentence. He died in custody in the middle of an unresolved legal fight before anyone, the courts, the pharmaceutical companies, or Dozier himself, had settled question of how or when it would end.

 Scott Dozier’s case gets remembered, when it’s remembered at all, as a strange footnote in the history of the American death penalty. The condemned man who wanted to die faster than the state could figure out how to kill him. It’s an unusual enough story that it’s easy to let it swallow everything else. But start at the beginning again.

 A boy from Great Falls, Montana, remembered by his own teachers as a great kid who talked too much, a soldier, a husband, a father who trained as an EMT just in case his pregnant wife needed him, and who spent years afterward drawing homemade birthday cards for children who weren’t even his own. Then, a slow slide into a world of methamphetamine, money, and people who would turn on each other the moment it benefited them.

 Two men died in that world. Jason Green, 26, whose family could not be reached for this account, and whose life outside Dozier’s orbit remains, in the public record, almost entirely unknown. And Jeremiah Miller, 22, who wanted to become a teacher, who spoke fluent Spanish, who built houses for families who needed them, and whose parents spent the rest of their lives haunted by a question his father asked out loud in court, “Where is the rest of my boy?” Scott Dozier’s fight to be executed became, for a while, a national story about lethal injection drugs,

pharmaceutical liability, and the mechanics of capital punishment in a country that isn’t always sure it wants to use the punishment it hands down. That’s a real and important story, but it was never the only one, and it shouldn’t be allowed to be the last word. Nevada sentenced Scott Dozier to death in 2007.

 12 years later, he was still waiting, not for mercy, but for an ending he had asked for himself. He never got it from the state. He gave it to himself instead, in a cell in a remote prison town, with the question of his guilt still exactly where it had always been, settled by a jury, denied by him, and unresolved, in the deepest sense, for the families of the two men who never got a say in how their own stories ended.

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