After spending 16 years on death row, Kelly Renee Gishon Danner was executed by lethal injection in Georgia. But to understand how she ended up there, we have to go back to the winter of 1997 to a deadly plan that began with a phone call. Kelly was 28 at the time. She had three kids from three different men, a rocky marriage, and a new boyfriend on the side.

 Between 1989 and 1997, she and Douglas Morgan Gisson Danner had tried everything to make it work. They married, divorced, got back together, separated again, and then took one more shot. But by February 1997, things had shifted for good. Kelly had fallen for someone else, Gregory Bruce Owen. And according to co-workers, she wasn’t hiding her feelings.

 She told people she was done with Douglas, that she was in love with Greg and unhappy at home. While Douglas worked overtime trying to hold their family together, Kelly was already plotting a way out, one that didn’t involve lawyers or custody battles. It began as an idea, a late night thought Kelly shared with Greg when the world was quiet and nobody else could hear her.

 At first, it sounded like desperation, but she didn’t let it go. She brought it up again, then again, each time with more certainty. She didn’t want a divorce. She wanted Douglas gone permanently. Greg resisted at first. He told her it was crazy and that a divorce made more sense. But Kelly didn’t want sense. If she left Douglas, she would lose the house.

 She would lose the car, the money, maybe even the kids. But if he died, she would collect the life insurance and walk away with all of it, untouched. Eventually, Greg gave in. Whatever guilt or hesitation he felt got buried under her constant pressure, and together, they started planning. In the days leading up to the attack, they stayed in constant contact.

 She called him 47 times and paged him 18 more. And on D-Day, they were spotted together near a row of payoneses to finalize their plan before setting it in motion. On the night of February 7th, 1997, Kelly pulled up outside her family’s house and dropped Greg off. Before he got out, she handed him two things, a nightstick and a large knife.

Then she drove away. She wasn’t sticking around to watch. Instead, she headed to a friend’s place and later hit a nightclub, pretending it was just another Friday night. She was smiling, drinking, dancing, and every move was calculated, making sure every alibi box was checked. Meanwhile, Greg was crouched inside the house, waiting in the dark. And some

time after 10 p.m., Douglas walked through the door completely unaware. He didn’t even have time to process what was happening. As soon as the door closed behind him, Greg came out of the shadows, knife to his throat. No shouting, no warning, just an order. Get in the car and drive. The ride was quiet and cold, just miles of darkness, until Greg told him to pull over deep in the woods of Gwynette County, far from anyone who might hear what was coming next.

And then he made Douglas get out of the car, walk into the trees, and kneel. Greg hit him with the nightstick again and again. And after Douglas collapsed, he pulled a knife and stabbed him over and over in the back and neck until he stopped moving. Then when he was done, he bent over Douglas’s body and pulled off his watch and wedding ring.

 Kelly had told him to do this 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 didn’t call for help. Instead, she paged Greg with a coded message, then drove straight to meet him at the scene.

 When she got there, she didn’t panic. She didn’t cry. She asked just one thing. Is he dead? And Greg said yes. That’s all she needed. She grabbed a flashlight, walked into the woods, and stared down at her husband’s body like it was nothing. No regret, just confirmation. Then, as if tying up loose ends, they doused Douglas’s car in kerosene and set it on fire.

They didn’t run. They didn’t hide. They drove back to town like it was any other night. And Kelly dropped Greg off at his house. There, he tossed the knife, the nightstick, his jeans, and Douglas’s wedding band into the trash. But he missed one thing, which would come back to haunt him.

 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 the act. She reported Douglas missing, claimed he left around 700 p.m. to help a friend fix a car, but never came back. She said he must have gotten lost or something happened on the way home.

 At first, no one raised an eyebrow. It looked like a routine missing person’s case, and officers made their usual calls to hospitals, towyards, anyone who might have seen or heard something. They checked his credit card activity and searched the area, but nothing stood out. But as they dug deeper into his personal life, the picture began to change.

 What they found was a man who didn’t seem like someone who would just walk away. Douglas was a mechanic, someone who loved his job, his family, and the life he was trying to build. There were no signs of trouble. He had no debts, no enemies, and no reason to run. It just didn’t add up. And Kelly’s story, it started to fall apart quickly.

For 11 days, she kept up the lie. She told the police that she had no idea where Douglas had gone and hid the fact that the marriage was falling apart and she had a boyfriend. But Kelly wasn’t just improvising. She had a plan, one she had set in motion long before the cops ever showed up. So who was she and what path brought her here? Kelly had a rough start.

 She was born into poverty and raised in a poor cotton farming family in rural Georgia. Her childhood wasn’t just unstable, it was violent. People who knew her back then said the abuse started young, first by her stepfather, then by other men, and it followed her into her teens like a shadow that never left.

 By high school, things got even worse. In her senior year, she reported being on a date, and 9 months later, she gave birth to her first son, Brandon. At 19, she married a man named Jeff Banks. But that marriage barely lasted 6 months. And then came Douglas, who she met on a blind date two years later, and they clicked straight away.

 They married that fall, had a daughter named Kayla, and tried to build a future. But life got messy. They both lost their jobs and had to move in with Kelly’s mother. Douglas eventually joined the army and the two relocated to Germany. That’s where it unraveled. While Douglas served overseas, Kelly got pregnant by someone else.

 And that betrayal cracked the foundation and they divorced in 1993. But Douglas didn’t disappear from her life. He stayed close, close enough to try again. And 2 years later, in May 1995, they remarried. By the end of 96, they had bought a home in Auburn, Georgia, and were trying to start over. A fresh start, they told themselves. To Douglas, it didn’t matter who the biological father of the children was, and he raised all three of Kelly’s kids as his own. He was always there for us.

Their youngest son, Dakota, would later say, “He was our dad.” And 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. And just 36 hours after Douglas vanished, everything collapsed. Deep in the woods, a park ranger spotted the carcass of a car charred black burned clean through.

 No plates, no glass, nothing but a metal shell sitting in the middle of nowhere. It had been torched so badly that investigators couldn’t even tell what make or model it was. The only way to ID it was through the vehicle identification number stamped onto the frame. And 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 their attention to the people 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 really what it seemed. They dug through bank records, cell tower hits, anything that might speak louder than the people they interviewed.

And 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. The two had met while she was still technically married, but living apart from Douglas.

 And when police asked why she never mentioned Greg, she first said she was embarrassed. But that explanation didn’t 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. And 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 for the night Douglas went missing, and a man named Ricky Lee Barrett backed him up. For now, there wasn’t enough to arrest him. But 2 weeks later, the case broke wide open. Roughly 3/4 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, and so was the cash and a driver’s license. It was Douglas. Nothing had been stolen. His wallet hadn’t even been touched, which meant this wasn’t random. It wasn’t a robbery gone wrong.

 Someone had killed him on purpose and not for the cash in his back pocket. 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. And that detail turned everything. Suddenly, money was back on the table, but not in the way anyone had expected.

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, non-stop. Their timelines were now tangled, and Greg’s alibi started to fall apart. When detectives brought his friend Ricky Barrett back in for more questioning, the story changed.

 Ricky admitted Greg had left his house around 900 p.m. that night and didn’t come back until early the next morning. And even worse, Greg had asked him to lie about it. That was all they needed. And the next time Greg sat down with detectives, they slid the phone records across the table. Ricky’s new statement followed.

 There was nowhere left to run, and Greg folded. He told them everything that he and Kelly were never broken up. That the whole thing, the planning, 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 all in a messy divorce. Kelly had pitched it, timed it, pushed it forward.

 And Greg just followed orders. Kelly was arrested and locked up. And her first call from jail went straight to her best friend. On that call, she confessed, said she had helped plan it, 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 that she never had a choice.

But instead of backing down after her arrest, Kelly turned it up a notch. While in jail awaiting trial, Kelly wrote a letter. In it, she tried 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 it, but Kelly didn’t. 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 3 months, that she only got back together with Douglas so she could keep the house and cash in on his life insurance after he was dead. He said she had talked about it months before the killing, calling it the only way to get rid of him for good.

 And this, 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, then later moved to Arendelle. And behind bars, something shifted. She turned inward toward faith. Through a program tied to Emory University, she enrolled in theology classes and began reading the works of Christian thinkers like Dietrich Bonhaofer.

 Eventually, she started writing letters to theologian Jurgen Moltman, and the two kept in touch for years. Inmates around her noticed the change. They said Kelly encouraged others that she talked some women out of ending their own lives. A group of them later called themselves the struggle sisters. And they said Kelly helped them find something they didn’t have before, a reason to keep going, a reason to live.

 But faith and good deeds weren’t 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. And what followed were waves of clemency pleas from her kids, religious leaders, former judges, and even the Vatican.

 Supporters said her sentence didn’t match the crime. Greg, the man who actually killed Doug, had gotten life. And Kelly, who only planned it, was going to die. But Georgia law allows a death sentence, even for those who didn’t carry out the killing themselves. And so a new date was set, September 30th, 2015. Just after midnight, Kelly was led to the death chamber at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.

 On her last night, she asked for a feast. For her last meal, she requested 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 gurnie, Kelly got very emotional.

 She started crying and sobbing. Then, between tears, she began to sing Amazing Grace. When she wasn’t 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 Gizen Donner 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. She was pronounced dead at 12:21 a.m. Kelly Renee Gisender was 47 years old. At the time, she was the only woman on George’s death row. Her execution marked a historic moment. It was the first time the state had executed a woman in 70 years since 1945. Her codefendant, Greg Owen, who testified against her, was released in early 2023.