JUST IN: Oklahoma Set to Execute Brenda Andrew — The Only Woman on Death Row and Her Final Plea

Well, the only woman on Oklahoma’s death row one step closer to execution. >> The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Brenda Andrews murder conviction and death sentence in 2004. You may remember the former Sunday school teacher was convicted of the first-degree murder of her husband, a local advertising executive.

 News4’s Ktor K has more on Brenda Andrews failed appeal. Brenda Andrew, the only woman on Oklahoma’s death row, denied in federal appeals court Tuesday. The 10th Circuit upholding her 2004 first-degree murder sentencing. The former Sunday school teacher was convicted of killing her aranged husband. >> It was just extra ugly.

>> Former Oklahoma County District Attorney Wes Lane says he’ll never forget overseeing the case back in 2001. Prosecutors say Andrew and her lover, James Pavat, fled to Mexico after gunning down her husband, Rob Andrew, in the garage as he was picking his kids up for the Thanksgiving holiday. Months later, Andrew and Pavat were arrested when they crossed back into Texas.

On the evening of November 20th, 2001, 2 days before Thanksgiving, a 39-year-old advertising executive was shot to death in the garage of his own home in northwest Oklahoma City after his wife asked him to come inside and relight the furnace. Rob Andrew had been sitting in his car in the driveway on the phone with a friend waiting to collect his son and his daughter for the holiday.

 They were going to his parents in Enid. The garage door went up. He ended the call and got out. He was shot twice with a shotgun on the floor beside the furnace holding a bag of empty aluminium cans. His wife was shot once in the arm. She said two men in masks had come in. He was 39. He was a deacon at his church.

 He was on the board of a charity that taught young people about money. and he worked with an organization that helped families with nowhere to live. At the office, he had decided that the 11th of July should be 711 day. And every year, he bought slushes for the whole building because the date matched the name.

 18 days before he died, he walked into a police station and told officers he believed his wife and another man were planning to kill him for his life insurance. That was his second report. Three weeks earlier, someone had cut the brake lines on his car. The next morning, two phone calls came in from two different payones 25 miles apart, both telling him his wife was in a hospital in Norman and he needed to come immediately.

 It was a highway drive. He found the damage before he got on the road. The day after that, his wife mentioned the brake lines to him. She said she had read about it in the newspaper. There had been no newspaper story. Four people knew. His mechanic, two police officers, and him. He told his divorce lawyer.

 He told his friends. He told a colleague that walking back to his apartment at night felt like having a gun at his back. He told his insurance agent supervisor that he thought the agent was involved with his wife and that the two of them wanted him dead. The policy was worth about $800,000. Rob Andrew was not a man anyone expected to end up dead on a garage floor.

 He came from a church-going family in a farming town 70 mi outside Oklahoma City. He married a girl from the same town, a quiet straight A student who taught Sunday school and had never been in trouble in her life. Both sets of parents approved. Everyone said it was exactly the marriage they had expected. This case is far more complex than you think.

 To understand how it ended in that garage, we have to go back to Enid. If you want the full story, not just the verdict, not just the sentence, but everything that happened before and after, subscribe to No Way Out. Enid, Oklahoma sat about 70 mi northwest of Oklahoma City, out where the land flattened into wheat fields, and the tallest things on the horizon were grain elevators and church steeples.

 It was a working town, farming and air base, oil business, and a lot of Sunday mornings. People knew each other. They knew each other’s families, and they knew which pew each family sat in. Brenda Evers was born there in 1963. Her family was religious, not casually religious, the kind of family that went to church more than once a week and built the rest of the week around it.

 Her parents were devout. The household ran on rules and Brenda followed them. People who knew her as a girl described her the same way over and over. Quiet, shy, polite. She did not say much. She was a good student who brought home straight A’s without much fuss about it. She served on the student council.

 In junior high, she took up baton twirling and got good at it. And she twirled at school events where the whole town turned out. She did not go to the parties her classmates went to. She did not smoke and she did not drink. When other students were figuring out how to get away with things, Brenda was at church.

 She joined the youth activities. She took part in an evangelism program, the kind where young people learned to talk to strangers about their faith and then go out and do it. Classmates said she always buttoned her clothes all the way up. She kept her grades up. She kept going to church. She kept twirling. By her final year of high school, Brenda Evers was known around Enid as one of the good ones.

Nobody who knew her then described her as difficult or wild or hard to handle. They described her as sweet and a little reserved. That year, she noticed a young man named Rob Andrew. He was from Enid, too, from a family as religious as hers, though Baptist rather than Lutheran. He was a year older.

 He had finished at Chisum High School and gone off to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. about 90 minutes away and he came home on breaks. Brenda liked him. She did not tell him herself. She told someone else and the message worked its way to Rob through his brother. There was a girl still in high school who had a crush on him. Rob was interested.

 They started dating. Both sets of parents approved. Nobody had to explain anything to anybody. When Rob drove back to Stillwater, Brenda finished out her senior year and graduated. Then she left Oklahoma. She enrolled at a Lutheran college in another state. It was a serious school with a serious religious identity and it was the natural next step for a girl raised the way she had been raised. She packed up and went.

 She did well there. But she was a long way from home and she was a long way from Rob Andrew. She stayed one year. Then she made her decision. She left the Lutheran College and came back to Oklahoma. She transferred to Oklahoma State to Stillwater to the same campus where Rob was finishing his degree. She wanted to be near him.

 She packed what she owned, registered for classes, and by the start of the term, she was walking the same ground he walked. She was 19. She had never lived anywhere but Enid in a college dormatory. She had never had a job that mattered, never been in trouble. Map never given anyone a reason to look at her twice. Robert Dale Andrew was born in Enid in 1962.

 His family was traditional and conservative and Baptist. His parents were church people. So were his brothers and sisters. The Andrews were known in town and known well. Rob went to Chisum High School and finished there in 1980. He was likable in a way that did not require effort. He was tall. He talked to people. He had energy.

 and he pointed it outward at his friends, at his family, at whatever project was in front of him. He was not the type who sat back and watched a room. At Oklahoma State, he studied advertising with a minor in marketing. Advertising suited him. It was a field built on persuasion and personality, on figuring out what a message needed to sound like and then making it sound that way.

 Rob had both halves of that. He could think about a problem and he could stand up in front of people and talk about it. He finished his degree in 1984 with an advertising diploma and a state full of agencies to try. That same year, on the 2nd of June, he married Brenda Evers. She was 20. It was exactly the wedding both towns worth of relatives had expected.

 Two young people from church married in church, starting out the way everyone around them had started out. They did not stay in Oklahoma. Rob took a job that moved them to Texas. They packed up and went the way young couples do when work calls. Brenda finished her degree and started working in banking. She was good at it. She liked it.

 Banking gave her something Enid never had. An office, colleagues, tasks that were hers, and a way of being measured that had nothing to do with church attendance or how she dressed. She earned an employee of the year award. Her family said she really, really enjoyed working at the bank for a few years. That was the marriage.

 Two careers, two paychecks, a rented life in another state. Then Rob decided they were going back to Oklahoma. He wanted to build his advertising career at home. That meant Oklahoma City where the agencies were and where both families were within driving distance. Brenda did not want to go. She said so.

 The move meant leaving the job she had built and starting over in a city where she knew nobody professionally. Rob wanted it. The decision was made his way and they went. It was a crack in the marriage and the people close to them knew it was there. Not a loud one. Nobody described a fight, but it was there. They settled in Oklahoma City.

 In 1988, Rob joined an advertising agency called Jordan Associates. It was an established firm with real clients, the kind of account that put an agency’s name on billboards and television spots across the state. He was good at the work. He rose inside the company. His salary climbed into six figures, which in Oklahoma City in that era put a household comfortably above most of its neighbors. He won awards.

 He was asked to speak publicly, and he did it well. He also gave time away. He served on the board of Junior Achievement, an organization that taught young people about business and money. He worked with a group called Positive Tomorrows, which served families who had no stable place to live.

 At the office, people liked him for reasons that had nothing to do with Billings. He decided that the 11th of July should be 71 day. And on that day, he brought slushes for everybody in the building because the date matched the name, and that struck him as reason enough. He and Brenda found a church on the north side of the metro area and joined it.

 It was called North Point Baptist. Rob became a deacon there. Brenda taught Sunday school. And at some point in those years, Brenda Andrews stopped going to work. The reason she stopped working was that the family was growing. In 1990, Rob and Brenda had a daughter. They named her Trristy. The name was Rob’s idea, and it was a joke he had been carrying around for a while.

 He had worked out that if she ever ran for public office, her campaign slogan could be electricity. That was the kind of thing he did. He built the joke first and then went looking for a place to put it. In 1994, they had a son. They named him Parker. Brenda left banking and stayed home. Her family said the choice was hers and that she meant it.

 Being a mother and being there was the priority and she set the career down to do it. So the household divided the way a lot of households in that place and time divided. Rob went to the agency in the morning and came back in the evening with the money. Brenda ran everything that happened between those two points.

 The money was good enough to change how they lived. They bought a house in Lansbrook, a neighborhood in northwest Oklahoma City where the lots were generous and the houses were newer and the streets were quiet. The address was on Shaffbury Drive. It had an attached garage which was where the family kept the van and where the furnace was.

 Their neighbors on one side were Dean Digstad and his wife. It was an ordinary neighborly relationship. When the Gigstads went out of town, Brenda watched their house. She had a key. At North Point Baptist, the Andrews were a known family. Rob was a deacon. Brenda taught Sunday school. Tricity and Parker grew up inside the congregation.

 From the street, from the pews, from the office, it looked like the plan had worked. Two people from Enid had gone out into the world, done well, and come back with a house and a family and a place in a church. Inside the marriage, it was not working. Rob’s co-workers noticed at first because Rob talked to them. Barbara Mercer Green worked with him and became one of the people he confided in.

What she heard over the years was not the story of a happy man. She said Brenda had told Rob on their wedding night that she hated him. Whether that was the exact beginning or not, the pattern people described did not change much across 17 years. Brenda’s contempt for her husband was not hidden from the people close to her.

 She said it out loud. Rob absorbed it. He did not want a divorce. He did not believe in divorce and he said so. He kept expecting the marriage to turn around. He sought counseling from a local pastor. He kept showing up. Brenda left a message on his answering machine calling him a half dad. At home, the shape of the marriage changed in ways that were visible to anyone paying attention.

 Rob traveled for work and put in long hours at the agency. Brenda ran the house and the calendar and the church commitments. Rob kept a journal. In it, he wrote about his wife. He wrote that she was a good mom and the spiritual leader of the home. He also wrote that he believed she had been unfaithful to him before they were ever married during their engagement.

Both of those things were in the same book, in the same handwriting. He did not confront the marriage and he did not end it. He wrote it down and he went to work. By the middle of the 1990s, Rob and Brenda Andrew had been together for more than a decade and married for most of it.

 They had two young dependents, a house they owned, a church that expected them every Sunday, and two sets of parents in Enid who had watched the whole thing from the beginning. They also had a marriage that one of them had described as hateful on the first night of it. Neither of them left. In 1997, Brenda began an affair. The man was named Rick Nunnley.

 The relationship ran for a period and then ended. It did not end completely. The two of them stayed in contact by telephone afterward, and Nunley remained a number she called. Years could pass, and the number still worked. In 1999, she began a second one. James Higgins worked at a store she shopped in.

 For a while, he was nothing more than a face behind a counter, and she was nothing more than a regular customer. Then that changed. Higgins said she started coming into the store dressed differently than she had before. Short skirts, low cut tops. She started flirting with him, and the flirting was not subtle enough for him to miss.

 One day she handed him a key to a motel room. He met her there that afternoon. That relationship ran for about 2 years into May of 2001. They met several times a week. Two years of afternoons arranged around Rob’s hours at the agency and the school schedule of a son and a daughter who had to be somewhere at the end of every day.

Higgins was hearing things from her that Rob’s co-workers were hearing from Rob, only from the other side of the marriage. She told him she hated her husband. She told him she wished she did not have to stay with him. She told him she wished Rob was dead. Higgins had two grown sons.

 They did some work at the Andrew house. Higgins said Brenda came on to them too while she was still seeing him. The talk was not confined to motel rooms. To a woman she knew, she went further than she had gone with Higgins. She said she wished Rob was dead so she could get on with her life and get his life insurance money. She said she would see him dead.

 She said she was going to kill Rob Andrew or have him killed. She said it in ordinary conversation in a kitchen to someone who had no reason to write anything down and did not. There was a piece of information buried inside that remark. She knew there was life insurance and she knew roughly what it was worth to her.

 In a household where one person earned and the other managed everything else, she knew where the paperwork was kept and what was written on it. She was good with paperwork. She had signed her husband’s name before on documents connected to his employment, and it was not a secret. She told people she could sign Rob’s name better than he could.

 At home, the affairs were not fully hidden. Tresidy and Parker were taught to be discreet about them. Rob knew or suspected or had decided not to look too closely. He was working long hours and traveling for the agency and he came home to a house where his wife had said what she said on their wedding night and had never taken it back.

 He did not leave. Other things about her drew comment from the people around them and none of those were secrets either. She asked a friend what color hair her husband liked. The answer was red. She dyed her hair red. A woman who knew her said Brenda did not dress the way she thought a person ought to dress to run errands.

 A babysitter watched her leave the house with her hair rolled and her clothes cut low. She and Rob went to dinner with another couple. The Andrews were late and the others were waiting at the bar. When Brenda came in wearing a dress that was very tight and very short, somebody in the group asked who the hoochie was. She kept a paperback among her things.

 a book about how to please a man in bed. None of this was a crime. A woman in a bad marriage had affairs. She dressed the way she wanted to dress. She said bitter things about her husband to men who would listen and to women who would not repeat them. Half the divorce files in Oklahoma County held less than that, and none of those women were arrested for it.

 By early 2001, Rob and Brenda Andrew had been married 16 years. She was 37. He was 38. She had said out loud more than once and to more than one person that she wanted her husband dead and that there was money in it. Nothing had come of any of it. They were words spoken by a woman with no criminal record of any kind. No arrests, no charges, not so much as a serious traffic matter to men who did nothing with them and to friends who let them pass.

 Words on their own do not kill anybody. For anything to come of them, she needed a second person. Not someone who would nod along in a motel room, someone who would act. That spring, the church assigned her a new partner to teach Sunday school with. His name was James Dwight Pavat, and he had been born on the 10th of November, 1953.

 He carried the surname bowling at birth. The name Pavat came later through his family, and by adulthood, it was the only name anybody used for him. He grew up in a working household with a stepfather named Wade Vatito, a plain-spoken man who stayed in his life for decades and who called James his son. As a young man, Pavat joined the United States Air Force.

 Military service in that era meant structure, a uniform, a chain of command, and a schedule set by somebody else. He served, and he carried the fact of that service with him afterward. It was the thing people mentioned first when they described him. He was a veteran. When he left the service, he needed civilian work. He went into life insurance.

 It was a particular kind of job. An agent did not sit behind a desk and wait for customers. He went out and found them. He sat at kitchen tables in the evening after the dishes were cleared and asked a question most people did not want to think about. What happens to your family if you die tomorrow? A good agent knew how to ask it without frightening anybody. He explained what a policy was.

Money the company agreed to pay out after a death in exchange for regular payments made while the person was alive. He explained who the money would go to. And that person was called the beneficiary. And he explained who owned the policy which was a separate thing altogether and which mattered more than most customers understood.

 The owner controlled it. The owner could change the beneficiary whenever he chose. Pavat learned all of it. The forms, the signatures, the company procedures, the codes an agent used to identify himself when he telephoned the home office. What could be done by phone and what required paper. He built a career out of it.

 He had a supervisor above him and a book of clients below him. And he made his living by being the kind of man families trusted with their private business. He married. He had a daughter, Jana, who grew up and moved into her own life and worked at a bank down in Norman. They stayed close. He borrowed her car sometimes. He called her.

 He settled in the Oklahoma City area and he joined North Point Baptist Church. He became a deacon there, which meant he was one of the men the congregation trusted to help run it and look after its members. He also taught Sunday school. So by 2001, two of the deacons at North Point Baptist were Rob Andrew and James Pavat.

 Their families crossed paths on Sundays the way families do in a congregation that size. That year, Pavat and Brenda Andrew were assigned to teach a class together. That meant preparing lessons, coordinating during the week, and standing in front of the same group every Sunday morning. He was 47, she was 37. They socialized. Pavat spent time with the Andrews and their family through the middle of that year. He was around the house.

 He was at church functions. He was a family friend, the sort of man who could turn up on a Saturday without anyone thinking about it. Around the same period he did business with Rob. Rob Andrew bought a life insurance policy through him. It was issued by Prudential and it was worth roughly $800,000. Brenda was the beneficiary.

There was nothing unusual in that. A deacon bought a policy from a fellow deacon who happened to be a licensed agent and did what a man with a mortgage and two young dependents is supposed to do. What was not ordinary was what had started outside the classroom. Pavat and Brenda Andrew began a sexual relationship.

 They were both married when it began. He divorced his wife that summer. They did not hide it well. A neighbor saw him hold his face within inches of hers. Ministers at the church called their behavior inappropriate and described the way she spoke to her husband, the language she used, the names she called him. The rumors moved through the congregation until the church acted.

Brenda Andrew and James Pavat were asked to stop teaching Sunday school. That was the answer to it. Two teachers were moved from a class in a church where Rob Andrew was still serving as a deacon. Everyone in that building now understood what was going on. Pavat’s own daughter had doubts about the woman her father was involved with.

 Brenda had told him she had only ever been with two men in her life, her husband and him. Jana Larson did not believe it and told her father so. He did not step back. He made Brenda Andrew the primary beneficiary on two life insurance policies of his own. His money going to another man’s wife if he died.

 Rob kept going to work and kept going to church and kept telling people he wanted the marriage to survive. Brenda came to the agency and there were scenes in front of his colleagues. She made a threat to Barbara Mercer Green. By late summer, something at the house on Shafsbury Drive had to give. In late September, Rob Andrew moved out.

 He took a few things and went to an apartment. He left behind the house, the routine, his son, and his daughter, and a 16-aged shotgun that had been in the bedroom closet while he was packing. A short time later, Brenda filed for divorce. Rob Andrew moved into an apartment and started over at 38.

 The separation did not stop him from being a father. He and Brenda worked out an arrangement for Tricity and Parker and Rob came to the house to collect them. There was a routine to it. He pulled into the driveway and waited in the car and Brenda brought them out to him. He did not come inside. That was the custom and it held.

 Around the same time Brenda changed the locks on the house. She changed the security codes, too. Whatever access Rob had to the home he had paid for, he no longer had it. There were things of his still inside. One of them was the 16 gauge shotgun. A 16 gauge was not the common choice. Most people who owned a shotgun in Oklahoma owned a 12 gauge or a 20 gauge.

 Those were what stores stocked and what shells were sold for. The 16 gauge sat between the two and had fallen out of fashion, which meant fewer guns and fewer boxes of shells. Rob wanted it back. He told several friends that Brenda would not let him have it. One of his co-workers, James Higgins, had seen it in the bedroom closet in early September while Rob was packing. Rob left it there.

 He talked to his friends about the marriage. Not long after he moved out, he said something to a friend named Ron Stump. That Stump remembered afterward. He said Brenda had finally found someone who would kill him. He said it and he kept going to work. She hired her lawyer and Rob hired his, a man named Craig Box.

 A divorce turns a marriage into a list. Two people who have shared everything for 17 years sit down with attorneys and divide it into columns. The house, the bank accounts, the vehicles, the time with Tricity and Parker, and the insurance. The credential policy was the most contested item between them. Rob was still paying the premiums on it.

 It was his life being insured. and the woman who would collect on his death was living across town involved with the agent who had sold it to him. He began asking questions about it. Brenda had her own account of what was happening to her. She was living in the family home, no longer teaching Sunday school, going through a public divorce in a church community that knew exactly why.

 She was also afraid, or said she was. Two Oklahoma City police officers, Sergeant Larry Northcut and Officer Roger Frost, worked off duty hours patrolling the Lansburg neighborhood. Homeowners in that part of the city paid for extra security patrols, and the officers picked up the shifts on their own time, driving the streets after hours.

 Brenda asked Northcut for extra patrols around her house. She told him she was afraid of Rob Andrew. The patrols increased. Cars went past the house on Shaftsbury Drive more often than they had before. Rob, meanwhile, was talking to more people than anyone realized. At the office, he told Barbara Mercer Green things that had nothing to do with the divorce paperwork.

 He said that when he went back to his apartment at night, it felt like someone had a gun pointed at his back. He told her Brenda had been around the apartment when she had no reason to be there. One morning he got up early to take his garbage out to the bin and she was outside and the look on her face was one he could not shake.

 He said it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He was describing a woman he had been married to for 17 years. None of this reached the divorce court. His lawyer was working on the division of property and the arrangements for Tricity and Parker. The insurance question was moving through the insurance company. The rest of it was a man telling his friends he was frightened.

Rob kept the schedule anyway. He went to the agency. He came to the house and waited in the driveway. Brenda brought Tricity and Parker out. He took them. Near the end of that month, Brenda Andrew asked James Pavat a question. She asked him if he would kill her husband. She asked whether he would do it or whether he knew someone who could.

 Pavat did not keep it to himself. Some days later, he was with his daughter, Jana Larson, and he brought it up. He opened with a joke. He told her she was never going to believe what that woman had asked him to do. Then he told her. Brenda had asked him if he would kill her husband or if he knew someone that could.

 He said it as though it were an absurd thing, the sort of story a man tells to get a reaction. Jana Larson worked at a bank in Norman about 25 mi south of Oklahoma City. She was an adult with her own job and her own life and her father was a familiar presence in it. He called, he came by, he borrowed her car when he needed it. She heard what he said and she did not go to the police.

 Nothing about the conversation changed the surface of anyone’s life. Pavat went on selling insurance. Brenda went on running the house on Shafsbury Drive. Rob went on driving to Jordan Associates in the morning. Rob drove a Nissan. He used it every day. He drove it to the agency. He drove it to the house to collect Tresid and Parker.

 And he drove it back to his apartment at night. Like most people, he did not inspect it before he got in. He turned the key and went. A driver might not know anything was wrong until he needed to slow down. On the night of October 25th and into the early hours of October 26th, someone cut the brake lines on Rob Andrews car.

 A car has brake lines running to each wheel. They are thin metal and rubber tubes carrying fluid under pressure. When the driver presses the pedal, that fluid is what makes the brakes clamp down. If the lines are cut, the fluid escapes. The pedal goes soft. Then it goes to the floor and the car does not stop.

 That same day, October 26th, there were 82 telephone calls between Brenda Andrew and James Pavat. 82. in a single day between two people lived in the same metropolitan area and could see each other whenever they chose. The morning after the lines were cut, Pavat came to his daughter with a request. He wanted her to call Rob Andrew.

 He wanted her to use a phone that could not be traced back and he wanted her to tell Rob that Brenda was at a hospital in Norman and needed him immediately. Norman was a drive from Rob’s part of Oklahoma City. It meant getting on the highway and covering roughly 25 miles at speed. A man told his wife was in a hospital would not take his time about it.

 He would go fast and he would go on the interstate and he would be driving a car with no breaks. Jana Larson made the call. She used a pay phone near where she worked in Norman. She told Rob Andrew that Brenda was in the hospital and that he needed to come. That same morning, a second call reached Rob.

 a man’s voice telling him the same thing. That call came from a pay phone in South Oklahoma City. The man was never identified. Two calls from two payones 25 mi apart, both saying the same thing on the same morning. Rob Andrew did not get on the highway. Before he put himself in any danger, he discovered that something had been done to his car.

 The tampering was visible enough that he found it. He did not drive it. He called the police. Officers came. The car was examined. A report was made about the cutting of the brake lines on a vehicle belonging to a man in the middle of a divorce. Rob also told his mechanic. That was the whole list of people who knew.

 The mechanic, the police, and Rob himself. He had not told his family. He had not told his friends. It had not been in the newspaper because nothing had been in the newspaper. A cut break line in a city that size did not make the news. The next day, Brenda spoke to Rob about it. She told him she had read in the newspaper that someone had cut his brakes.

 There had been no newspaper coverage of it. None. There was no story for her to have read and no way for her to have picked it up in passing and no reason for her to have known about it at all. Rob understood exactly what that meant. He went back to the police and he told them who he thought was responsible. He told them he believed his wife and James Pavat had done it.

 He told them why he thought so, that she had known about the break lines before she could have learned about them any honest way. He also told them what he believed they were after. He believed they wanted the insurance money. Once Rob Andrew said that out loud, the $800,000 policy stopped being a line item in a divorce and became the thing he needed to fix.

 He set out to remove Brenda as the beneficiary. On paper, it should have been simple. Rob was the one insured. Rob was paying the premiums. Rob was the record owner of the policy. An owner could change the beneficiary whenever he wanted. And Rob wanted his brother named instead. He started by asking the man who had sold it to him.

Pavat told him he could not do it. Pavet said Rob had no control over the policy because Brenda was the owner. If that had been true, Rob would have had no say at all. The owner controls the policy. The insured person, if he does not own it, is just the name on the front. It was not true.

 Rob did not stop with his agent. He went over Pavat’s head and called Pavat’s supervisor at the insurance company. The supervisor checked and told him the truth. Rob Andrew was still the record owner. He had every right to change the beneficiary. Then Rob told the supervisor the rest of it. He said he suspected Pavat and Brenda were involved with each other.

 He said he suspected they were trying to kill him. He said that to his insurance agents boss. Word got back to Pavat and Pavat was furious. His client had gone to his supervisor and accused him of adultery and attempted murder. And Pavat’s job was now in question. He said he would harm Rob for putting his employment in jeopardy.

 Rob kept pushing on the policy. He made calls to the insurance company. He was recorded on some of those calls because insurance companies recorded their customer lines. He explained what he wanted and why he was worried. Brenda called the company, too. So did Pavat. They were recorded as well. Brenda gave her name, her address, and the policy number.

 She let Pavat speak to the home office on the same call, and she identified him as her insurance agent. Pavat gave the company his authentication code, the identifier and agent used to prove who he was. They were trying to persuade credential that the ownership of the policy had already changed.

 There was a document supporting that claim. It was a change of ownership form. Change of ownership forms transferred a policy from one person to another. This one transferred Rob Andrews policy to Brenda Andrew and it carried Rob Andrews signature and it was dated March of 2001, months before the separation. Months before the divorce, back when a husband signing something over to his wife would have raised no questions at all.

 Rob had not signed it. The signature was forged and the date was written in to make the transfer look old. Brenda had told people she could sign her husband’s name better than he could. She had signed his name before routinely on paperwork connected to his employment. It was a thing she did and a thing she said she was good at.

 The insurance company did not accept the change over the telephone. That refusal held the line. As long as credential did not recognize the transfer, Rob Andrew was still the owner and the owner could take Brenda’s name off the policy whenever he chose. It also meant that every day the paperwork sat unresolved was a day Brenda Andrew was still the beneficiary of an $800,000 policy on a man she was divorcing.

 Rob took his suspicions to Craig Box, his divorce lawyer. He told box about a series of calls from Brenda and Pavat and he told Box those calls had convinced him the two of them were behind the brake lines and behind an attempt on his life. He told Ron Stump. He told Barbara Mercer Green. He told the officers who took his report. He told the insurance supervisor.

 He told his mechanic. He put it in writing, too. He wrote a letter to Ron Stump. By the first days of November, the number of people who had heard Rob Andrew say that his wife was trying to kill him was not small. It included two police officers, a lawyer, an insurance executive, and several friends.

 On the 2nd of November, Rob went back to the police and filed another report. This time, he stated it plainly. He believed Brenda and Pavat were trying to kill him for the insurance money. That report was taken and written down. Rob went back to his apartment. He had done everything a person is told to do. He had noticed. He had reported it.

 He had named the people he suspected. He had told his lawyer. He had told his employer’s world. And he had gone to the police twice. Then he went on with his life because there was nothing else for him to do. He worked at the agency. He saw Tresidy and Parker on the schedule the two households had agreed on.

 Thanksgiving was coming and Rob had plans for it. He was going to take Trricity and Parker to his parents for the holiday. About a week into the month, James Pavat walked into a gun shop in Oklahoma City. He bought a 22 caliber handgun. A 22 is the smallest common handgun cartridge. It is what people learn to shoot with. It is quiet compared to larger calibers.

 The recoil is light and the ammunition is cheap and sold everywhere. It is not a weapon anyone would choose to stop a man with. At a distance, it often does very little. Fired from a few inches away into a limb, it makes a small wound. Pavat filled out the paperwork and took the gun. Around the same stretch of days, someone saw Brenda Andrew at a shooting area near her family’s land in Garfield County up in the country outside Enid where she had grown up.

 It was an informal range, a spot people used for target practice. She was there 8 days before the 20th of November. The person who saw her went back to the site afterward and found several 16 gauge shotgun shells on the ground. The 16 gauge was the uncommon one. It was the gauge of the shotgun that had been in the bedroom closet at the house on Shafsbury Drive when Rob moved out and that Rob had been asking to get back and that Brenda would not give him.

 Two doors down from that house lived Dean Gigstad and his wife. The Gigstads were the next door neighbors. They had a normal neighborly relationship with the family and it extended to the ordinary favor people do for each other on a quiet street. When the gigstads went out of town, Brenda watched their house.

 She had a key. The gigstads were planning to be away over the Thanksgiving holiday. Their house had a spare bedroom. And in that bedroom was a closet. And in the ceiling of that closet was an opening into the attic. That was standard construction in houses of that kind. Most homeowners went up there twice a year and forgot about it the rest of the time.

 Through November, the routine on Shaftsbury Drive held. Brenda was at the house with Tresidy and Parker. Rob was at the apartment and at the agency. The divorce was in progress. The insurance question was unresolved. Pavat was around. Pavat was also watching Rob. Through the month leading up to the end of November, Brenda had him tracking her husband.

 Where Rob went, when he went, what his days looked like. Rob kept talking. He gave Ron Stump a letter. He kept the recordings of his phone calls with the insurance company. The day before the 20th, he handed over tapes that supported what he had been telling people about Brenda and Pavat. On the night of the 19th, Brenda was with a friend. She talked about her husband.

What she said was three words repeated. She said she hated him. She said it again. She said it a third time. That was the night before the 20th of November. The 20th was a Tuesday, 2 days before Thanksgiving. Rob was collecting Tricity and Parker that evening. They were going to spend the holiday with him and with his parents.

 During that day, James Pavat borrowed his daughter’s car. He told Jana Larson he was going to have it serviced for her. She let him take it. Sometime that day at the house on Shsbury Drive, the pilot light on the furnace went out. A furnace pilot light is a small flame that burns continuously. It is what lights the main burner when the heat comes on.

 If it goes out, the furnace stops working and the house gets cold. Relighting one means getting down on the floor beside the unit, opening a panel, and holding a flame to the pilot while holding a knob in. In that house, the furnace was in the garage. The evening came. Rob left work and drove to the house.

 He pulled up outside and stayed in his car the way he always did, waiting for Brenda to bring Tricity and Parker out. He had a cell phone with him and he was talking to a friend while he waited. Then the garage door opened. Rob ended the call and got out of the car. Inside the house, Tricity and Parker were not packed and ready to go.

 They were in a bedroom far from the garage with the door closed and the television turned up loud. Brenda asked Rob to come into the garage. She told him the pilot light on the furnace had gone out and asked him to light it. It was not the arrangement. The arrangement was that he waited in the driveway and she brought Tricity and Parker out.

 This was a request to come inside into the garage and get down on the floor beside the furnace with his back to the room. Rob went in. It was around 7:00 in the evening. Rob Andrew went down beside the furnace to light the pilot. He was shot twice with a 16- gauge shotgun. He was also holding a bag of empty aluminum cans is and he still had hold of it when the emergency crews arrived.

 Brenda Andrew was struck once in the left arm. The wound went through and it was superficial. Neighbors on the street heard the sounds. One heard a loud noise. Another heard three shots and a scream. Brenda called 911 and reported that her husband had been shot. She made a second call as well. On that call, she told the operator that Rob was still breathing, that he was conscious, and that he was trying to talk.

 That call came about 5 minutes after the shooting. Officers reached the house quickly. Officer Ramsay and Officer Ronald Warren were among the first there. They went into the garage. Ramsay found Brenda kneeling over the top of her husband. She was on the phone beside him. He said she was very distraught and that she was trying to get help.

 She asked the officers to help Rob. It was clear to Ramsay when he arrived that Rob Andrew was already dead. The medical crews came in behind the police and worked on him. He had lost a great deal of blood. They could not revive him. An ambulance report from that night recorded that Brenda had asked about her husband’s condition.

 Tricity and Parker were still in the bedroom with the door closed and the television loud. They had not heard what happened in the garage. Officers found them there. They were taken out of the house to a friend’s home. Brenda was taken to the hospital. Her wound was treated. While she was there, the police collected evidence, including the clothes she had been wearing. That was routine in a shooting.

What a person had on their body when it happened could matter later, so it went into bags and out the door. Officer Roger Frost and Officer Terresa Bun were both at the hospital with her. Bun had experience with people who had just come through violence. Watching Brenda Andrew, she was not seeing what she expected to see.

 She described her as unusually calm. She said she was not sure whether Brenda was a victim because she was not seeing the usual signs. Frost thought the same thing. He had seen her at the scene as well. And to him, she had seemed strangely calm there, too. They were not the only ones. Several people who dealt with her that night.

 People whose jobs put them around families in the worst hours of their lives said afterward that her behavior did not match a woman whose husband had just been shot to death in front of her. After her arm was treated and the evidence had been collected, Frost told her a detective wanted to speak with her about the murder.

 His name was Roland Garrett and he was waiting at the police station. Brenda could not go home. The house was still an active scene with officers working through it. Her own clothing was gone into evidence, so she left the hospital wearing two hospital gowns, one covering each side of her. Frost drove her to the police department. She did not object.

 She signed waiverss allowing the police to search the house and the vehicle. Detective Garrett interviewed her and the interview was recorded on video. It ran about 2 and 1/2 hours. She told them her account. She said that as Rob was trying to light the furnace, two masked men came into the garage.

 She said they were armed and dressed in black. She said Rob turned to face them and was shot in the abdomen. She said he grabbed the bag of aluminum cans to defend himself and was shot again and that she was hit during that second shot as she ran from the garage into the house. She said the men then ran out.

 She could not give many other details. She could not remember what they had said. Garrett watched her through the interview. He came away thinking she did not seem to be grieving. Sergeant Frost noticed something else. He thought it was very strange that she could not remember any of the words her attackers had spoken. At the hospital, he had also noticed that she had not asked about her husband.

Brenda said she spoke to the police that night because she wanted to help them catch whoever had shot Rob. She said she was cooperating. When the interview was over, Frost drove her to the friend’s house where Tresidy and Parker were staying. Back at Shaftsbury Drive, officers worked through the garage.

 They found a spent shotgun shell sitting on top of the family van. It was a 16 gauge. The 16 gauge shell mattered because of what it was not. It was not a 12 gauge and it was not a 20 gauge. Those were the shells sold in every sporting goods store in Oklahoma. Fired by the guns most people owned. A 16 gauge was the odd one.

 Fewer guns took it. Fewer stores stopped it. Rob Andrew had owned a 16- gauge shotgun. He had told several friends that Brenda would not let him take it when they separated. James Hians had seen it in the bedroom closet in early September while Rob was moving out. Officers searched the house for it. It was not there.

 Investigators asked Brenda about it. She told them that if it was still in the house, it would be in the hall or the bedroom closet. And she said she had not seen it since January. They did not find it in the hall or in either closet. They did not find it anywhere. It was gone. The wound in Brenda Andrews arm did not come from a shotgun.

 It came from a 22 caliber bullet. And the bullet itself was recovered from the garage along with the casing it had been fired from. The problem with it was the distance. She had said she was shot as she ran from the garage into the house from some distance away, but the physical evidence showed the shot had been fired at close range.

When the experts examined the wound, they put the muzzle of the gun between 2 and 4 in from her arm when it went off. 2 to 4 in is not across a garage. It is contact range. While that work was going on, Dean Giggad and his wife came home. They had been out of town. They walked into their house next door and found things that did not sit right with them, and they called the police.

 Officers went through the Gigad home. There were no signs of forced entry. Nobody had broken a window or forced a door. Whoever had been inside had come in another way. Brenda Andrew had a key. She was watching the house while they were away. In the spare bedroom, officers found an opening in the closet ceiling leading up into the attic and evidence that someone had gone through it.

 On the floor of that bedroom was a spent shotgun shell. It was a 16 gauge, same brand as the one found on top of the van in the Andrew garage. The two shells were compared. Ballistics examiners look at the marks a gun leaves on a shell when it fires. Impressions from the firing pin, scratches from the chamber and the extractor. Those marks are specific to the weapon.

 The markings on both shells were similar. They could have been fired from the same gun. Nobody could confirm which gun because the gun was never found. Up in the attic itself, officers found several 22 caliber rounds unfired. Three of them. The bullet taken out of the Andrew garage, the one that had gone through Brenda’s arm, was consistent with those unfired rounds in several respects.

 Same kind of ammunition. Those rounds were capable of being fired from the handgun James Pavat had bought at the gun shop about a week before the 20th of November. That could not be tested because that gun was never found either. The morning after the murder, James Pavat returned his daughter’s car. He had told Jana Larson he was taking it to be serviced. It had not been serviced.

Larson found something on the floorboard. It was a single 22 caliber rimfire round. It was the same brand as the three rounds in the gigad’s attic. Later that day, her father spoke to her about it. He told her to throw away the round she had found in her car. He also told her something else. He told her never to repeat that Brenda Andrew had asked him to kill Rob Andrew.

 Then he told her that if she did repeat it, he would kill her. That morning, someone saw Brenda Andrew and James Pavat together at the hospital. The two of them were giggling. Rob Andrews family began arranging his funeral. His parents were in Enid. His brothers and sisters were there. They had been expecting him and the two grandchildren for Thanksgiving.

 And now they were choosing a casket. Brenda went to the funeral home to take part in the arrangements. The funeral director had been doing that work for 25 years. Sitting a widow down and asking her about her husband was the core of the job. He asked her what she loved about Rob and what she would miss about him. She said nothing.

 That was the answer. Not a pause, not a struggle to speak the word itself. The director had sat across from grieving spouses for a quarter of a century. He said afterward that her response was the most bizarre he had ever received. Another man at the funeral home, William Burlson, watched her that day and described her manner as flat, cold, and unemotional, the strangest he had seen from someone who had just lost a husband.

 Meanwhile, Pavat was making arrangements of his own. He put his daughter’s name on his checking account. A checking account is the ordinary account a person lives out of, wages in, bills out. Adding a second name to it means the bank will accept that person’s signature as well as your own.

 She could now take money out of it without asking him. He also asked her to clear his belongings out of his apartment. A man who expects to come home does not give away access to his money and empty his apartment. He went online and read about Argentina. He had heard that Argentina had no extradition agreement with the United States. An extradition agreement is a deal between two countries to hand over people wanted for crimes.

 Without one, a country is not obliged to send anybody back. He was looking at where a person could go and not be returned. Brenda and Pavat then came to Jana Larson with a request. Rob Andrew was dead. He could not sign anything and he would not have signed this. They wanted Larsson to help them make the document anyway. What her part in making it was supposed to be, she never said.

 Brenda also asked Larsson to move money. She wanted funds transferred out of her own bank account and into Larsson’s so that Larsson could wire it to them after they left town. Rob Andrews funeral was held in Oklahoma City. The church was packed. Brenda was not there. The funeral director had spoken to her by telephone half an hour before the service.

 She had told him she and the two of them were on their way. They were not on their way. They were gone. Within days of the shooting, before the funeral, Brenda, Andrew, and James Pavat left the state with Tricity and Parker. They crossed the border into Mexico. They took a car and they drove south.

 Brenda packed her own luggage for the trip. behind them. Rob Andrew was buried by his parents and his brothers and sisters. His widow did not attend. His son and daughter were not there either because they were in another country with the man their mother was involved with. The Oklahoma City police now had a shooting, two suspects, and no suspects in custody.

 Everything that had happened before the 20th of November came back into focus. Two police reports filed by a man who said his wife and her boyfriend were trying to kill him for insurance money. Cut brake lines. Two calls from two payones telling him to drive to Norman. A forged transfer of an $800,000 policy.

 A gun bought a week before the shooting. Shells at a target range in Garfield County. Shells in a neighbor’s spare bedroom. A missing shotgun. A close-range wound that did not match the story that came with it. And now flight. The FBI came into it because the pair had crossed an international border. Jana Larson made a decision.

 Her father had already threatened to kill her over what she knew. He had told her to throw away the bullet from her car. He had asked her to make the call to rob Andrew from an untraceable phone, and she had made it. She contacted a lawyer. Then she agreed to cooperate with the authorities. She worked closely with an FBI agent named Curt Stoner.

 She cooperated with the Oklahoma City police as well. Then her father started calling from Mexico. He called several times and each time he asked her to send money. That was the weak point in the plan. Two adults in a foreign country with a family and no income needed money and every attempt to get it created a signal.

 Jana Larson kept taking the calls. The authorities knew about every one of them and were using them to try to locate the pair. Brenda and Pavat kept moving through Mexico. They had the two of them along in hotel rooms, in a car, in towns where nobody spoke their language. Back in Oklahoma, the case was being built without them.

 Police went to Pavat’s apartment and searched it. Inside, they found a document about changing his name. They found a black book containing a list of weapons and ammunition. And they found two22 caliber bullets that were not the type used to shoot Brenda Andrew. They collected the recorded calls to credential.

 Rob asking about the policy and voicing what he suspected. Brenda giving her name and address and policy number. Pavat speaking to the home office using his agents code. both of them pressing the argument that the ownership had already changed. They had the forged change of ownership form dated March of 2001. They had Rob Andrews own voice on tape telling police he thought a plot was underway.

 They had the phone records. Two calls to Rob on the morning of the 26th, one from a pay phone in Norman near Larson’s workplace, one from a pay phone in South Oklahoma City, and 82 calls between Brenda and Pavat on that same day. What they did not have was the two people. Weeks went by, then months.

 December passed, January passed. In Mexico, the money ran out. Whatever they had taken with them was gone, and Jana Larson’s wire transfers were not going to keep two adults and two young dependents moving indefinitely in a country where they could not work. In late February of 2002, 3 months after the shooting, they made the only move left to them.

 They drove north and re-entered the United States. They crossed at the Texas border, coming into McAllen. Federal officers were waiting. Brenda Andrew and James Pavat were arrested as they crossed. They went into the custody of the US Customs Service. The FBI announced it. Tricity and Parker were taken into protective custody.

 They were unharmed. at the advertising agency in Oklahoma City. The news went through the building. A spokeswoman for Jordan Associates said the staff were thrilled beyond belief. They had spent 3 months not knowing where the two of them were. Brenda made a phone call from jail while she was being returned to Oklahoma.

 She called Rick Nunley, the man she had the affair with back in 1997. Tricity and Parker were brought back to Oklahoma County. Both were charged with the firstdegree murder of Rob Andrew and with conspiracy to commit that murder. The case number was CF 2001-6189. The state also filed what is called a bill of particulars.

 That is the document a prosecutor files when the death penalty is on the table. It lists the specific reasons the law allows a jury to consider a death sentence. Those reasons are called aggravating circumstances. The state alleged three of them against Brenda Andrew, that the murder was committed for money or the promise of money, that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, and that she was likely to commit acts of violence in the future that would make her a continuing threat.

Brenda was held at the Oklahoma County Jail. She was placed in a segregated unit, meaning she was kept apart from the general population. When she was led out into the common area of her pod, she was out there alone. The jail held federal prisoners as well as county ones under an arrangement where the federal government paid to house inmates there.

One of those federal inmates was a woman named Terresa Sullivan. She was serving a sentence in a federal drug case. Around this time, Oklahoma City police detectives went to the places where women who had been jailed alongside Brenda Andrew were being held. They were asking whether anyone had heard her say anything about the case.

 They contacted Teresa Sullivan at her place of federal confinement. Sullivan told them she had something. Sullivan said Brenda Andrew had confessed to her. She said Brenda had told her that she and Pavat killed her husband for the money, the kids, and each other. She said Brenda had also told her that Pavat shot her in the arm to make it look as if she was a victim.

Sullivan gave that account to the detectives before she spoke to William P. Early, the federal public defender handling her own case. The prosecution had a witness who said the defendant had admitted it. The two defendants were charged together, but their cases were separated so that each would face a jury alone.

 Both trials went to Judge Susan Bragg in Oklahoma County District Court. Before either trial, the defense asked for a change of venue. That is a request to move a trial to another county because the local jury pool has heard too much about the case. The judge held a hearing in January of 2003. The defense brought evidence of the media coverage, which had been heavy from the first day, and polling showing that a large share of Oklahoma County residents were familiar with the case and had formed opinions about it.

 Judge Bragg denied the motion. She said there was no way to know whether unbiased jurors could be seated until a large panel was brought in and questioned face tof face. James Pavette went to trial first. His trial began on August 25th, 2003 and ran 3 weeks. The state put on its case. Jana Larson testified against her father.

 She told the jury about the conversation in late October when he had said Brenda asked him to kill her husband. She told them about the phone call she made to Rob from the pay phone in Norman. She told them about the 22 round on the floorboard of her car and about her father telling her to throw it away and never to repeat what he had said and about the threat that followed.

She was not happy to be there. She was testifying against her own father. You see, she had cooperated partly out of fear that she might be implicated in the murder if she did not. The state also had the physical evidence, the shells, the bullets, the forged documents, the phone records, and it had a letter. The letter had been written by Pavat after his arrest, and it was addressed to one of Rob Andrews children.

 In it, Pavat said he had brought in another man to help him kill Rob Andrew, and he said Brenda Andrew had nothing to do with the plan. An expert compared the handwriting to known samples of Pavat’s writing and testified that it matched in a number of respects. Neither side accepted the letter as true.

 The state did not believe Rob had been killed by Pavat and an unnamed accomplice. Pavat’s own lawyer argued that Pavat had not written it at all and that Pavat had no involvement in the death whatsoever. Pavat did not testify. Then after the trial had already started, a second letter appeared. It came to Pavat’s defense lawyer in the mail.

 A nearly identical one went to Judge Bragg. The letters were handwritten and they confessed to the murder of Rob Andrew. They gave details about how it was done. They were signed by a man named Xion Wood. Wood was an inmate at the Oklahoma County Jail awaiting his own trial on an unrelated murder charge. He was housed in the same section of the jail as James Pavat.

 The defense moved to bring him into court. They also moved to call two jailers who said they had heard Wood make similar statements out loud and one of whom said Wood had handed him one of the letters. Judge Bragg held a hearing on it closed to the press and the public. Wood appeared through his own lawyer who objected strongly to him being made to testify.

anything he said on the stand about those letters could be used against him in his own murder case. The judge found the letters could not be trusted, and she refused to make Wood take the stand. She had reasons. The two letters were almost word for word the same, as though one had been copied from the other. They were extremely detailed.

So detailed that they repeated the main features of the state’s own case, which had already been laid out in open court by the time the letters were mailed. They said the 16 gauge shotgun had been left at the scene, and no weapon of any kind, had been found there. They said Wood had acted alone, which fit neither Brenda’s account of two masked men, nor Pavat’s letter about himself and an unnamed second man.

 The judge was also given information that Brenda Andrew had threatened a woman who was due to testify in one of the cases against Wood and that Wood had tried to confess to other killings around the city. The letters stayed out of the trial. So did Wood. On September 16th, 2003, the jury convicted James Pavat of firstdegree murder and of conspiracy to commit murder.

 The trial moved into its second stage. In a capital case, the jury decides guilt first. If it convicts, the same jury comes back to decide the sentence. That second stage is where the state presents its aggravating circumstances and the defense presents its mitigation. The reasons a jury might choose life instead of death. Rob Andrews father, er, Andrew, gave a victim impact statement.

 Under Oklahoma law, the family could speak, but there were limits on what they could ask for. He told the jury that the whole family would do everything in their power to help secure convictions and punishment for all of those involved in the murder of his son and that those people would never walk free again.

 The defense called Pavat stepfather Wade Vet to ask the jury to spare him. Petito broke the tension in the courtroom at one point with a remark that made the jurors laugh. Then at the end of his testimony, he told the jury that if there was any mercy in their hearts, he asked them to show it to his son. As the defense lawyer was finishing, Vet added that if there was not, he hoped God would show mercy on them.

 The prosecutor argued for death. She said it was a proper case for it. She said there were no circumstances that lessened what had been done to rob Andrew. She also asked the jury to picture the garage. She asked them what they believed Rob Andrews last words were as he lay on that floor looking up at Brenda Andrews face.

 She said he was probably trying to say he loved her because that was the kind of man he was. The jury found two aggravating circumstances that the murder was committed for money or the promise of money and that it was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel. It rejected the third. It did not find that Pavat was a continuing threat.

 The jury recommended death for the murder and 10 years and a $5,000 fine for the conspiracy. On October 21st, 2003, Judge Bragg imposed that sentence. James Pavet was sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at Malleister to the unit that held men under sentence of death. 9 months later, Brenda Andrew went to trial in the same courthouse in front of the same judge.

 Her trial began in June of 2004 and ran into July. Her lead lawyer was Greg McCracken. He had been her divorce attorney. He was joined by George Mskovsky III and Andrea Miller. The prosecution was handled by two assistant district attorneys from Oklahoma County, Fern Smith and Galand Deer. The state’s theory was that Brenda Andrew and James Pavat had planned the killing together, that she had drawn her husband into the garage on a pretext, and that the wound in her arm had been staged to make her look like a second victim. Her defense was that she did not

know who killed her husband. She had told police two masked men came into the garage. Her lawyers argued that if anyone had planned Rob Andrews death, it was Pavat acting on his own to stop the couple from getting back together. In its opening statement, the prosecution told the jury that this case was about a controlling wife.

It also promised the jury evidence about Brenda Andrews extracurricular activities. The state then began building two cases at once. One was about the murder. That case ran through the physical evidence and the sequence of events and it was heavy. The break lines, the 82 phone calls, the payones, the forged transfer of the policy, the recordings of the calls to Credential, the gun bought a week ahead, the target range in Garfield County, the 16 gauge shells in the garage and in the neighbor’s spare bedroom matched to each

other by their markings. The 22 rounds in the attic, matched by Bran to the round in Jana Larson’s car and consistent with the bullet taken out of the garage. The missing shotgun, the close-range wound. The two reconstruction experts, one hired by the state and one hired by the defense, who both told the jury that the shot to her arm was evidence of a staged scene, the flight to Mexico.

 The other case the state built was about the kind of woman Brenda Andrew was. Witness after witness was asked about her affairs, her clothes, and her behavior. James Higgins took the stand and described the affair that ran from 1999 into 2001. He told the jury how it started, that she had been shopping in his store regularly and began flirting with him and coming in dressed a certain way.

 The prosecutor asked him to describe the clothing. He said, “Short skirts and low cut tops.” Rick Nunnley testified about the earlier affair. Rob Andrews journal was brought in and read to the jury, including the entries in which he wrote about believing she had been unfaithful during their engagement years before the marriage began.

 Years before the marriage began, there was testimony that Rob had been frustrated by the lack of a sex life in the marriage. Three ministers from the church testified. They described the relationship between Brenda and Pavat and called their behavior inappropriate. They also told the jury about the language she used when she spoke to her husband and about her calling him names.

 A neighbor testified about seeing Pavitt hold his face within inches of hers. Another witness, David Ostro, testified about a dinner the two couples had gone to 6 to 8 weeks before the 20th of November. He described what she wore, a dress he called very tight and very short, showing a lot of cleavage and her hair. He told the jury that as they waited at the bar for the Andrews to arrive, somebody made a comment asking who the hoochie was, a woman named Jennifer Jones testified that Brenda had not been wearing a tire she would consider

appropriate for running errands. A babysitter testified about seeing her leave the house with her hair rolled and revealing clothes on. Ron Stump testified that a woman had once asked what hair color her husband liked. The answer was red. Brendan dyed her hair red. Higgins testified that she had made advances toward his two grown sons while they were doing work at the Andrew House.

Jana Larson testified that she had told her father she did not believe Brenda when Brenda claimed she had only ever been with two men. There was testimony that Pava had said that the two of them were well-trained and would not tell anyone about the affair. A neighbor was asked about the family’s hot tub and whether Brenda might have used it to swim without clothes.

 The state introduced a book found among her things. The title was 203 ways to drive a man wild in bed. And the state introduced the contents of the luggage she had packed for Mexico, including her underwear. There was a limit on all of this set by the judge. She allowed evidence of that kind in only as it related to Brenda Andrews ability to manipulate men.

 Some of it came in without any objection from the defense at all. Brenda’s lawyers did not contest the affairs. They stipulated to them, meaning they agreed the affairs had happened and did not fight the point. There were also things the defense wanted the jury to hear that the jury never heard. Sergeant Larry Northcut was going to testify that Brenda had asked him for extra patrols around her house a few weeks before the shooting because she was afraid of Rob Andrew.

 Under Oklahoma’s discovery rules, each side has to tell the other in advance what a witness is expected to say. The defense had not provided a summary of Northcut’s testimony until the day he was called. The judge could have done several things. She could have ordered the summary produced. She could have granted a short pause in the trial so the state could prepare.

 She could have made any other order she thought fair. She chose the strictest option. Northcut was barred from telling the jury who had requested the patrols. Officer Roger Frost was allowed to say that off-duty officers were patrolling the neighborhood and that a request for extra security had come from someone who lived there.

 He was not allowed to say who. So, the jury heard that there had been extra patrols on that street. It never heard that Brenda Andrew was the one who asked for them or why she said she wanted them. Officer Ronald Warren was one of the first officers into the garage. He would have told the jury that he found Brenda kneeling at her husband’s side, that she asked him to help Rob, and that Rob was obviously already dead when he got there.

 He was excluded, too, for lack of pre-trial notice, even though he had written a report that spelled out what he would say, and that report was already in the state’s own files. His partner, Officer Ramsay, did testify. He told the jury he saw her kneeling over the top of Rob. When the defense asked Ramsay about her manner, the prosecutor objected.

 Before the objection was finished, Ramsay answered. He said she was very distraught. Later asked what she was trying to do while she was on the phone beside her husband. Ramsay said she was trying to get help. Both objections were sustained, but the judge never told the jury to put those answers out of their minds.

 So, both answers stayed in the room. Two neighbors, Lisa Gizler and Carol Shadid, were also kept off the stand for the same discovery reason. Gizler had reported hearing a loud noise. Shadid had reported hearing three shotgun blasts and a scream. That mattered to the defense because Brenda had always said she heard three shots. Then the state called Teresa Sullivan.

Sullivan told the jury that Brenda Andrew had confessed to her in the county jail. She repeated what she had told the detectives that Brenda said she and Pavat killed her husband for the money, the kids, and each other. That Brenda said Pavat shot her in the arm so she would look like a victim. The prosecutor asked her a direct question.

She asked whether Sullivan had been offered anything by the state of Oklahoma to testify against Brenda Andrew. Sullivan said no. Sullivan was serving a federal sentence and had 22 months left on it. Brenda’s lawyer cross-examined her hard. He put it to her that she had not come forward voluntarily, that the police had found her because she was a snitch at the county jail, and that everyone knew she would tell any story they wanted to hear.

 He put it to her that it was a known fact, both at the jail and at the federal prison where she was housed, that she would do anything and say anything for law enforcement to get her sentence reduced. Sullivan answered no to both. In his closing argument, the defense lawyer told the jury that all it would take was a single phone call to the federal prosecutor for Terresa Sullivan’s sentence to be cut.

 The defense also called a woman named Angela Burke, who had been an inmate at the same jail. Burke told the jury that Sullivan was a known jailhouse snitch throughout the jail, someone with a reputation for testifying against other people. She told them how inmates communicated with each other. They passed letters or they hollered underneath the cell doors.

 She said she had never once seen Brenda Andrew talk to anybody. She told the jury that Brenda was in a segregated unit and that when Brenda came out into the pod, she was out there by herself. Later in her testimony, she said that inmates were sometimes out in the pod together. Burke also told them that newspapers were available to inmates on the pod and that Sullivan had access to the news.

 Everything that had been printed about the case was there for anyone to read. And she told them that Sullivan had said to her that she was testifying so she could get some benefit. There was another jail witness the defense wanted and did not get. Donna Tyra was a detention officer at the county jail. She would have told the jury that Sullivan was known there as the mouth of the South.

 That Brenda and Sullivan could not have communicated at all, not by voice, not by notes, and that newspapers on the pod could have given Sullivan everything she needed to know about the case. Discovery of Tyra’s testimony had not been given to the state, and she was kept off the stand. The evidence about the blood on Brenda Andrews jeans came in through the defense’s own expert.

 His name was Ross Gardner. He examined the stains on the jeans she had been wearing, which had been taken into evidence at the hospital. One stain was labeled pattern 5. Gardner told the jury it was high velocity spatter, the fine mist thrown out when a bullet or shot strikes a body. He said he believed it came from the second shotgun blast that struck Rob Andrew, not from her own arm wound.

 He could not say which direction it had traveled. Blood thrown forward away from the shooter is called forward spatter. Blood thrown backward toward the shooter is called back spatter. If pattern five was back spatter, then whoever wore those jeans was standing where the shooter stood.

 Gardner acknowledged that on the stand. If it was back spatter, he said it would be reasonable to conclude that Brenda Andrew was the shooter. Nobody had ever tested the stain to find out whose blood it was. The prosecution took that piece of evidence and built its closing argument around it. The lawyers made their final speeches in July of 2004.

The state told the jury that pattern 5 was back spatter and that it proved Brenda Andrew had fired the gun. The prosecutor described the moment. He said that when Rob Andrew turned to look at her one last time, the blood spatter showed the jury what he saw. He said, “Rob Andrew saw her face over the barrel of a shotgun.

” Then the prosecution made clear it did not matter. Under Oklahoma law, a person is guilty of murder if she aids, abetss, advises, or encourages the killing. The state told the jury it did not have to decide whose finger was on the trigger. If Pavat fired and Brenda helped him, she was guilty of murder all the same.

 So, the jury was told both things in the same argument, that she was the shooter and that it made no difference if she was not. The prosecution walked the jury through the rest of the case. The flight to Mexico, the evidence that she hated her husband and did not want to reconcile with him, her manner after the killing, the forensic evidence, the efforts to get the insurance money, the phone calls between her and Pavat on the day the brake lines were cut and the day after, the shotgun shell found in the neighbor’s house in a home she had a key

1. It also went back through the video interview from the night of the murder and pointed out where she had lied to detective Garrett. She had denied the affairs. She had brushed off the significance of the fight over the life insurance policy. She had suggested Rob was in possession of his 16 gauge shotgun.

Then the prosecutor turned to the other case. He talked about her sex life and her manner. He called her an attractive woman who had been cheating with Pavat for months and who had failed to express sorrow when the police questioned her after the shooting. He turned to the luggage she had packed from Mexico and to the underwear inside it and he put it in front of the jury.

 He said the grieving widow packed this to run off with her boyfriend. He said the grieving widow packed this to go and sleep in a hotel room with her boyfriend. He said the grieving widow packed this in her appropriate act of grief. He returned to her affairs with Higgins and Nunley. At one point he used a phrase [ __ ] puppy telling the jury she must have been one because she had been sleeping with a married man.

 The defense answered with the case it had. Brenda Andrew did not know who killed her husband. If anyone had planned it, it was James Pat acting alone to keep Rob and Brenda from getting back together. The jailhouse witness was a snitch chasing a sentence reduction. The evidence was circumstantial. The jury retired. It came back with a verdict of guilty on both counts.

 First-degree murder and conspiracy to commit firstdegree murder. Then the same jury came back to decide whether Brenda Andrew would live. The state called Rob Andrews family. His father spoke. He told the jury that the whole family would do everything in its power to help secure convictions and punishment for everyone responsible for the murder of his son and that they would never walk free again.

The defense presented its mitigation, the reasons to choose life. It listed 11 of them for the jury. That she had no history of prior criminal activity. That she had never committed acts of violence in the past. That she was a good mother who loved her family very much. That a death sentence would take from Tresidy and Parker their only living parent.

That she had a family who loved her and valued her life. That she had many relatives who would visit her in prison if given the opportunity. that she had been a kind and giving neighbor and friend, that she had an education and might be able to help other inmates, that she had been a dedicated employee who worked hard, that she had been a model inmate since being jailed, that she had always been active in school and church activities.

The judge also told the jury they could find other reasons of their own and consider those, too. The defense called Brenda Andrews daughter to the stand. Tricity was going to read several letters she had written to her mother. Her lawyer had told the court he intended to ask her whether she wanted her mother to get the death penalty.

She never got that far. When she took the stand, she was overcome, sobbing, and she could not read the letters. The question about punishment was never asked. The defense also called Brenda’s niece, Jennifer Bolan. She read a prepared statement in tears, asking the jury to spare her aunt’s life. Then the prosecutor stood up to make the state’s final argument.

 She told the jury that she was sure they had noticed something from the witness stand. She said Tresidy had not begged for her mother’s life. There was no objection from the defense. She turned to the niece and asked the jury a question. She asked whether they would put their own 15-year-old niece on the stand to do that.

 Then she answered it herself. She said she would not. There was no objection. She addressed the defense’s list of reasons to spare Brenda’s life. One of them was that she had relatives who would visit her in prison. The prosecutor said that Rob Andrews parents would like to visit him in prison. She said they would like to visit him anywhere, but they could not.

She said they had been deprived of that. She said the only place they got to visit was his grave. There was no objection. The defense had argued that nobody from the Andrew family had asked for the death penalty and had asked the jury whether they thought Rob Andrew himself would have asked for it. The prosecutor answered that the family was prohibited by law from asking for a specific punishment.

Then she asked the jury whether the family had needed to say it. She asked whether the message had been conveyed anyway and whether the jury understood what punishment the family wanted. There was no objection. She addressed the claim that Brenda was a good mother. She asked the jury whether a good mother invited her boyfriends over to the house with her family in the home while she was still married to their father.

 She talked about Brenda Andrews character and her manner. She told the jury Brenda was different. She said Brenda had people under her spell. She said Brenda was not like you and me. She said Brenda had shown no emotion, no remorse, and no grief. And she said Brenda deserved that different kind of punishment reserved for people exactly like her.

 She came back to the blood on the jeans. She reminded the jury that the stain was on the front of Brenda’s jeans and that Rob Andrew had been down on the garage floor when he was shot. Someone might ask why the stain had never been tested, she said. She told them there was no need to test it. She said they knew whose blood it was. She said it was Rob Andrews blood and that the defense’s own witness was the one who had said so.

 The jury weighed the aggravating circumstances against the mitigating ones. It found two aggravating circumstances proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That the murder was committed for money or the promise of money and that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. For that second finding, the jury had the 911 calls.

 On her second call, about 5 minutes after the shooting, Brenda told the operator her husband was breathing, was conscious, and was trying to talk. The medical examiner testified that Rob had been shot twice and that his death would not have been instant. The circumstantial evidence showed the shotgun was a singleshot weapon which had to be reloaded by hand between shots.

 And when the emergency crews reached him, he was still holding the bag of empty cans which suggested he had tried to shield himself or fend off the person shooting at him. The jury rejected the third aggravating circumstance. It did not find that Brenda Andrew was a continuing threat to society. Then it sent out a note with a question.

 The jurors wanted to know whether life without parole meant she would stay in prison until her natural death. Judge Bragg answered that life without parole was self-explanatory. The defense did not object to that answer. The jury returned its recommendation. Death for the murder of Rob Andrew, 10 years, and a $5,000 fine for the conspiracy.

 On September 22nd, 2004, Judge Susan Bragg formally sentenced Brenda Evers Andrew in accordance with the jury’s verdict. She was 40 years old. She was taken to Mabel Basset Correctional Center at Mloud, east of Oklahoma City. It was the state prison for women and it held the only cell in Oklahoma occupied by a woman under sentence of death. She was the only one.

Her appeal was automatic. In Oklahoma, a death sentence goes to the Court of Criminal Appeals, whether the prisoner asks for it or not. Her case was assigned the number D204-10. The state’s indigent defense system took over her representation, and three lawyers from its capital direct appeals division began building the appeal.

While they worked, something happened in Terresa Sullivan’s case. Terresa Sullivan was the woman from the county jail, the federal inmate who had taken the stand at Brenda Andrews trial and told the jury that Brenda confessed to her that she and Pavat had killed her husband for the money, the kids, and each other.

 Sullivan was serving a federal drug sentence when she testified. She had 22 months left to run. There is a thing that happens in cases like this and it is not a secret. When a person already in prison gives evidence against someone else, the government can go back to the judge who sentenced them and ask for time to be taken off.

 It is called a reduction for substantial assistance. It is legal. It is written into the rules and it happens often. Prisoners know about it. That is part of why some of them come forward. The jury is supposed to know about it, too, because it tells them what the witness stands to gain. At trial, the prosecutor asked Sullivan directly whether the state of Oklahoma had offered her anything to testify against Brenda Andrew. She said no.

 That was true as far as the question went. Nobody from the district attorney’s office had promised her anything. But before the trial, her own federal lawyer had told her she might receive a benefit for testifying. He had told the assistant district attorney he would be asking for a letter afterward.

 And he had already contacted the federal prosecutor who put Sullivan away to say a request to cut her sentence was coming. Nobody asked Sullivan whether she was hoping for any of that. The defense never put the question to her. Two weeks after the conviction, the assistant district attorney wrote the letter. In it, she called Sullivan’s testimony an important link in the state’s case.

 The next month, the federal prosecutor moved to cut her sentence. The court granted it. Sullivan had testified with 22 months left. She was released 5 months later. Brenda Andrews appellet lawyers found the paperwork in 2005 and filed for a new trial. The direct appeal ran alongside it, raising 15 errors. The hearsay from Rob Andrew, the evidence about her affairs, the excluded defense witnesses, the police interview, the prosecutor’s remarks at sentencing.

 On June 21st, 2007, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed her conviction and her death sentence. The opinion did not read like a clean win. The court agreed she was right about several things. Some of what Rob Andrew said should never have been repeated in court. The judge had been wrong to bar the two neighbors when a short pause would have solved it.

 Wrong to bar Officer Warren, whose report was already in the state’s own files. And the jury should have been told how it was allowed to use the evidence about her private life and never was. Each finding ended the same way, harmless, because the evidence of guilt was overwhelming. Then the court reached the evidence about her affairs, her clothing, her behavior.

 It wrote that it was struggling to find any relevance in it other than to show her character. The state agreed. It conceded most of it had been irrelevant to any issue in the case. The court held its admission harmless anyway. Three judges signed the outcome. Two did not agree with all of it.

 Presiding judge Gary Lumpkin thought the majority had conceded too much. He called it an unusually strong case planned methodically that left little doubt of her guilt. Judge Charles Chapel disagreed entirely. He would have reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. Judge Arlene Johnson went further than either of them. She wrote that the first stage of the trial was rife with error and that the worst of it was a pattern of putting in evidence with no purpose but to hammer home that Brenda Andrew was a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad woman. The jury

weighed all of it with no instruction limiting its use. That broke a basic rule. A defendant must be convicted of the crime charged, not of being a bad woman. Then she listed it. The affairs, the neighborhood boys, the dinner where someone called her a hoochie, the red hair, the argument with a plumber.

 Only a partial list, she said. And whatever its purpose, its effect was to make Brenda Andrews life seem worthless to the jurors deciding whether to end it. She turned to the prosecutor’s closing. The comment that Tricity had not begged for her mother’s life when the girl was never asked a single question about punishment.

 The comment about the niece and the comment about the grave, an argument the court had condemned in case after case, many of them prosecuted by this same office, including by the lead prosecutor in this trial. The reprimands had been ignored. She agreed the evidence of guilt was overwhelming, but she could not say the jury had been unaffected when it decided whether this woman should live or die.

 She would have reversed the death sentence. three judges to affirm, one to reverse the conviction, one to reverse the sentence. The court also refused a new trial over Sullivan. It called her early release, an act of grace, by the federal courts, and held that the jury knowing about it would not have changed the verdict.

 Her direct appeal was over. Her lawyers filed for postconviction relief in the same court and asked the United States Supreme Court to hear her case. In April of 2008, the Supreme Court rejected her appeal without comment. That June, the Oklahoma court denied her postconviction application.

 Every court in Oklahoma had now closed her case. That opened the next door. A prisoner who has run out of state options can ask a federal judge to examine whether the state trial met the standards of the United States Constitution. The request is called a petition for a rid of habius corpus. She filed hers in the Western District of Oklahoma.

 What she was walking into was a law Congress passed in 1996. Before it, a federal judge could look at a claim fresh and decide whether the state court got it right. After it, that is no longer the question. A federal court cannot grant relief simply because it thinks the state court was wrong. The state court has to have been unreasonably wrong.

 so wrong that no fair-minded judge anywhere could have agreed with it. It is a very high wall and it was built on purpose. Her petition sat for 7 years. She stayed at Mabel Basset. She went from her 40s into her 50s. Her son and daughter grew up outside those walls. On September 9th, 2015, the district court denied every claim without holding a hearing.

 Her case went up to the 10th Circuit in Denver, which agreed to hear 10 issues. The evidence about her sex life, the six excluded defense witnesses, what Sullivan stood to gain, the interview nobody had read her rights before, the repeating of a dead man’s words she could not question, the four remarks at sentencing, the blood on her jeans that was never tested, and a treaty with Mexico.

 That last one had never been mentioned in any Oklahoma courtroom. Attached to the extradition treaty between the two countries is an addition called a protocol. It gives Mexico the right to demand a promise that a person handed over will not be executed. If Mexico asks, the United States must give that promise or Mexico can refuse to send the person back.

 Brenda Andrew had been in Mexico for 3 months. Had she been found there, that protection would have been available. She did not stay. She and Pavat ran out of money and walked back across the border at Macallen. Her lawyer never told her the protocol existed. Argument was heard in July of 2017. Then the case went quiet for nearly 6 years.

 The 10th Circuit ruled on March 21st, 2023. Judge Gregory Phillips wrote for the majority joined by Judge Harris Hartz. They affirmed on all 10 issues. On the central claim, the majority never reached the question of whether her trial had actually been unfair. It stopped one step earlier. Under the 1996 law, a federal court has to point to a decision of the United States Supreme Court that covers the claim, not a general principle, a specific holding on point.

 Her lawyers pointed to a 1991 case called Payne v. Tennessee, where the Supreme Court had written that when evidence is so unduly prejuditial that it renders a trial fundamentally unfair. The due process clause provides a way to get relief. That sentence said exactly what she needed it to say. But the 10th Circuit had already decided it was not a holding.

 Payne had been about victim impact statements, and the court read the sentence as belonging to that subject alone. So the majority held she had failed to identify clearly established federal law. The door closed and nothing behind it was examined. It rejected the other nine issues, returning again and again to the same phrase.

 The evidence of her guilt was overwhelming. Then it listed that evidence. 24 items. The threats, the break lines, the forged transfer, the three words she said the night before, the giggling at the hospital. Both experts agreeing the arm wound was staged, the gun bought a week ahead, the shotgun she would not return, the matching shelves, the rounds in a neighbor’s attic.

 She had a key to the word she gave the funeral director, Mexico. In a footnote, the majority added something else. It said it was not difficult to imagine Brenda Andrew firing the first two shots and Pavat then entering the garage to shoot her in the arm before retreating through the house and into the neighbor’s attic. In another footnote, it made a concession.

The judges shared the state court’s concerns about the evidence and the use the government made of it. Then they said she still had to get over the wall the 1996 law built and she had not. Judge Robert Bakarak dissented. He wrote that the state had focused from start to finish on Brenda Andrews sex life.

 That it portrayed her as a scarlet woman and a modern Jezebel, sparking distrust based on her loose morals. That the drum beat continued into closing argument, plucking away any realistic chance the jury would seriously consider her account. He found three kinds of error that together prevented a fair trial. the evidence about her private life, the excluded defense witnesses, and the police interview.

 A woman taken from a hospital in two openbacked gowns, told she was not free to go to her son and daughter, questioned for more than 2 hours, curled up in the chair. She had been convicted, he wrote, only after a slew of errors, many of them recognized by Oklahoma’s own appellet court. He would have reversed. The vote was 2 to1.

 Brenda Andrew asked the full 10th Circuit to rehear the case. On August 25th, 2023, it declined. Nearly every court that looked at this case said something was wrong with the trial. The Oklahoma court said it struggled to find any relevance in the evidence about her private life. The state conceded most of it did not belong there. One Oklahoma judge would have thrown out the conviction.

 Another would have thrown out the death sentence. A federal judge in Denver wrote that she was convicted only after a slew of errors. Not one of them overturned it. Every finding of error ended the same way, harmless, because the evidence of guilt was overwhelming. After two juries, five Oklahoma judges, a federal district court, and a federal court of appeals, Brenda Andrew is still in the same cell at Mabel Basset.

 She is the only woman on Oklahoma’s death row. Her conviction has never been reversed. Her sentence has never been reduced. No execution date has been set. Still condemned. Still waiting. James Pavat is held at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in Malleuster. He has never stopped denying that he killed Rob Andrew.

 Rob Andrew was 39 years old. He told the police twice that he believed his wife wanted him dead. He told his divorce lawyer. He told his friends. He told the man who supervised his insurance agent. He named the two people he suspected 18 days before he died.