Background and First Murder
Jimmy Lee Gray was born in 1949 in Whittier, California.
At the age of 18, Jimmy murdered his girlfriend, Elda Louise Prince.
Sixteen-year-old Elda was a sophomore at Parker High School in Parker, Arizona, where Jimmy was also a student and a school friend of Elda’s brother, 18-year-old Ervin.
The Prince family had made Jimmy welcome in their house and even helped out by buying him clothes. They also took him to ball games and on fishing trips.
On the day of the murder, January 5th, 1968, Elda was to leave school early for a doctor’s appointment and her mother, Opal, was going to the doctor’s office to pick her up at 4:30 p.m.
The receptionist told her that Elda had not shown up, so Opal went home presuming that her daughter had caught the school bus as usual.
When the bus arrived without her, Opal called the police and reported her daughter missing.
Jimmy went with the Princes to the sheriff’s office and later that evening helped in the search for Elda.
The sheriff was suspicious of Jimmy, having noticed his shoes, and under questioning the following day, he led deputies to a culvert near the Colorado River and showed them where he had dumped her body.
The shoes’ tread pattern exactly matched the footprints found at the crime scene.
Examination showed that Elda had been strangled and had her throat cut before being thrown into the culvert.
It appeared that Jimmy had met Elda after school, that walking home they had quarreled, and that he had killed her. Elda was buried in the Cottonwood Cemetery on January 11th.
Jimmy was convicted of second-degree murder and received a sentence of 20 years to life.
Sadly, he was released on parole after just six years, despite the protest of the trial judge who regarded him as a dangerous individual.
How right he would be proved to be.
The Second Murder
Nothing much was heard of Jimmy until June 25th, 1976.
After release from prison, he had moved first to California and later to Mississippi.
On that day, three-year-old Derissa Jean Scales disappeared from her parents’ apartment in Pascagoula, Mississippi. They reported her disappearance to the police around 5:00 p.m. that afternoon.
Jimmy lived in the same apartment complex as the Scales family and was questioned by police after neighbors mentioned that they had seen Derissa with a man with a red Volkswagen car, whom they identified as living in the apartments.
When Jimmy showed up in the car, police noted that the lower legs of his jeans were wet, which he explained by his having been swimming in the complex’s pool.
Under questioning, he admitted to them that he had taken Derissa for a ride in the country and that on a back road he had touched the little girl.
He claimed that she had wandered off and fallen into a shallow ditch.
He rescued her from the ditch and put her, still breathing, into the trunk of his car.
He then began the homeward journey, stopping on a bridge over Black Creek, where he removed Derissa from the trunk and threw her into the water below.
Once again, he led police to the crime scene at 3:30 a.m. the following morning.
The Medical Examiner found that Derissa had been gagged, sodomized, had her underpants forced down her throat, and was finally suffocated by being held face down in the mud in the ditch.
Mud was found to have been inhaled into her lungs.
The Trial
Jimmy came to trial in Pascagoula on December 13th, 1976, before Judge Merle, charged with first-degree murder and sodomy.
Once again, shoe prints would help convict the killer, and chemical analysis would show the presence of semen in the little girl’s body, although at that time DNA testing was not sufficiently advanced to enable it to be definitively linked to Jimmy.
It took jurors just an hour to convict Jimmy, and he was then sentenced to death in the gas chamber.
Jimmy’s mandatory appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the original verdict and granted him a new trial in 1978, where Jimmy was allowed to address the jury on his own behalf.
However, they were not impressed and reached the same guilty verdict.
Both juries recommended the death penalty at the conclusion of the sentencing phase, as the victim’s age and sodomization were severe aggravating factors.
In 1979, the same court upheld the verdict and sentence from the second trial.
Further appeals followed, including one based upon the cruelty of execution by lethal gas in which the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in New Orleans, granted a stay of execution in July 1983 just hours before he was scheduled to die.
Parchman Prison’s chaplain, Rev. Ronald Padgett, told reporters that Jimmy:
“was relieved and pleased with the decision.”
Mississippi Governor William Winter refused executive clemency.
On September 1st, 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Jimmy’s final appeals in a 6-to-3 decision, clearing the way for his execution the following day, Friday, September 2nd, 1983, at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger stated:
“This case illustrates the recent pattern of calculated efforts to frustrate valid judgments after painstaking judicial review over a number of years. At some point there must be finality.”
Mississippi State Penitentiary is generally known as Parchman, after its first warden, J. M. Parchman.
One of Jimmy’s spiritual advisors, Rev. Joseph Ingle, stated at the time that Jimmy should not be executed because he was a:
“devout Christian who committed crimes. He’s a sensitive, caring and humorous person. I want us to focus on Jimmy’s humanity because I am sick and tired of hearing about the crime.”
Execution
At about 8:30 p.m. on the Thursday evening, Jimmy received holy communion from several ministers.
According to prison officials, he had earlier eaten a final meal of Mexican food, strawberries, and milk.
Three hours before the execution, members of the Mississippi Coalition Against the Death Penalty held a peaceful candlelight protest outside the gates of the prison and outside the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson.
At 12:01 a.m. Central Daylight Time, Warden Eddie Lucas gave the order to staff to commence the execution procedure.
At 12:08 a.m., Jimmy was brought into the 20-foot by 12-foot white-painted execution room wearing a red death row jumpsuit, and strapped into the gas chamber’s perforated steel chair with the head of a Bowles stethoscope taped to his chest.
The heavy door was closed and sealed, and at 12:12 a.m., the gas was released when Mississippi’s executioner, T. Berry Bruce, operated the lever to lower the sodium cyanide pellets into the vat of sulfuric acid below the seat of the death chair.
At this time, the head restraint was not fitted to the chair, but the vertical metal pole behind the chair was present.
Fifteen official witnesses, including four journalists, watched the execution and noted eleven gasps, followed by moans and a single loud groan.
Jimmy appeared to gulp down the gas, as he had no doubt been instructed to do to hasten his death.
He strained violently against the restraining straps and his head slumped forward, then snapped violently backward, hitting the metal pole with such force as to rattle the whole apparatus repeatedly.
The exact time of death is disputed.
Prison officials claimed that Jimmy suffered cardiac arrest at 12:15 a.m., but the witnesses saw that he was still gasping for breath and convulsing eight minutes later when officials abruptly closed the curtains and asked them to leave the witness area.
According to the official execution log, all movement had apparently ceased by 12:21 a.m., nine minutes after the execution began.
His attorney, Dennis Balske, told reporters that Jimmy had suffered:
“a painful death”.
A gold-colored hearse took Jimmy’s body to a funeral home in Indianola, about 40 miles away.
The body had been claimed by a Natchez church group that had befriended him, and he was buried in an undisclosed plot after a brief private service.
This was the second execution in the United States in 1983 and the eighth since the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976.
Mississippi’s previous execution had been that of Tim Jackson by lethal gas on May 1st, 1964, for a rape-murder.
Three more men would die in Parchman Prison’s gas chamber, the last being Leo Edwards on June 21st, 1989. After that, Mississippi moved execution methods to lethal injection.
Reactions to the Execution
Jimmy’s mother, Verna Smith, who was living in California, urged the State of Mississippi to execute her son.
Ministers, social workers, and lawyers who got to know him on death row described Jimmy as a born-again Christian and spoke of him as:
“sensitive,” “shy,” “gentle,” “bright” and “troubled.”
Richard A. Scales Jr., Derissa’s father, told reporters:
“I’m glad it’s happening, it should have happened years ago.
Even in prison he had been able to talk, to breathe and to laugh and he had taken all these things from my little girl.
He didn’t have the right to continue living.”
Opal Prince, Elda’s mother, hailed his execution as:
“our big day.
I’ve put better dogs to sleep than that man,”
said Mrs. Prince, who was then director of rabies and animal control in Mohave County. She told reporters that the execution:
“is overdue.
It should have been done in 1968 in Arizona. I know I come on hard, but this is a hard thing. With all the jail overcrowding, let’s get rid of people like him and make room for the people who can be rehabilitated.”
UPI reporter Dan Lohwasser, who had witnessed the gassing, said afterwards:
“I thought I had some pretty hard bark on me from being in Vietnam, but I was pretty shook up.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Jimmy Lee Gray?
Jimmy Lee Gray was an American murderer executed in Mississippi’s gas chamber in 1983. He had previously served six years of a twenty-year sentence in Arizona for the 1968 murder of his teenage girlfriend Elda Prince before being paroled and subsequently murdering three-year-old Derissa Scales in Mississippi.
What crimes did Jimmy Lee Gray commit?
In 1968, Gray strangled and slit the throat of 16-year-old Elda Prince in Parker, Arizona. Paroled in 1974, he abducted, sexually assaulted, and suffocated three-year-old Derissa Jean Scales in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in 1976.
Why was Jimmy Lee Gray’s execution controversial?
His execution in the Mississippi gas chamber on September 2nd, 1983, was visibly agonizing. Lacking a headrest, Gray repeatedly smashed his head against a steel pole behind the chair while suffocating on cyanide gas, prompting prison officials to clear the viewing room after eight minutes while he was still gasping.
What prison executed Jimmy Lee Gray?
He was executed at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, commonly known as Parchman Farm, in Sunflower County, Mississippi.
When did Mississippi stop using the gas chamber?
Mississippi used the gas chamber for thirty-five executions between 1955 and 1989. The final prisoner gassed was Leo Edwards Jr. on June 21st, 1989, after which the state adopted lethal injection.
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