Kelly Renee Gissendaner feigned concern for her supposedly missing husband in 1997, going as far as making pleas to the public via the media to help find him.
Gregory Owen, her lover, tried not to be noticed.
That’s exactly as Gissendaner had planned it.
What didn’t go as planned was police learning she had a extra-marital romance with Owen.
Investigators tracked him down and got him to admit to murdering Douglas Gissendaner in a conspiracy with Kelly. Owen pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years.
Gissendaner refused a similar offer from the prosecutor. Instead, she chose to go on trial before a Gwinnett County jury and was sentenced to die. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole is her last hope.
Her lethal injection is scheduled for Wednesday. If carried out, she will die while the person who stabbed her husband to death stands a chance to walk free.
“I deserve to be here, but I don’t deserve to die,” Gissendaner said in a 2004 interview. “How can you justify me being here and [Owen] could be walking the streets one day?”
Gwinnett District Attorney Danny Porter, who prosecuted Gissendaner, said she is not only as guilty as Owen but perhaps more so for crafting the plot.
“She didn’t actually strike the blow with the night stick, and she didn’t actually stab him four or five times,” Porter said. “(But) she was the instigator.”
Cases like Gissendaner’s are rare. Out of 1,402 murderers executed since the 1970s, only five were co-conspirators like her.
Victor Streib, a retired Ohio Northern University law school dean and death penalty authority, said it’s not unconstitutional to hand down disparate punishments for the same murder. But there is an appearance it may not be just.
“There is a fairness (issue) as to why she should get the death penalty and he doesn’t,” Streib said. “In all the thousands of murders we have every year, only a very small percentage gets sentenced to death, and there’s no rational way to describe those. They aren’t the worst 5 percent.”
Who gets a death sentence seems random, making it hard to justify from one case to another, Streib said.
All Gissendaner’s appeals failed, including one that raised the constitutionality of her death sentence for murder in light of the life sentence given to Owen.
Now, the 46-year-old woman’s last chance to live is with the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. The five members will hear Tuesday morning from those who want her spared. In the afternoon, people who want her sentence carried out will have their chance to speak privately with the board.
The board, which typically does not explain its reasoning, has commuted death sentences nine times. In four of those cases, the defendants’ lawyers told board members the sentences in their crimes were not proportional. Those four got the death penalty while more culpable co-defendants were sentenced to life in prison. Unlike Gissendaner, all four men were there when the murders were committed.
The crime
The Gissendaners had a difficult relationship from 1989 to 1997, including marriage, divorce, another marriage, separation and a final reunion in 1996. Kelly met Owen during those years and convinced him in 1997 that killing her husband was the way for her to be free.
She planned to spend the evening of Feb. 7, 1997, at a bar with friends while Owen waited for Douglas at the Gissendaner house. She gave Owen a night stick and a hunting knife.
Owen kidnapped Douglas Gissendaner at knife-point and drove to a desolate area of Gwinnett County. Once out of the car, Owen struck him with the nightstick, knocking him to his knees, then stabbed the unconscious man repeatedly in the neck.
Kelly Gissendaner arrived just as Owen stabbed her husband for the final time. She confirmed her husband was dead before they burned his car and went to their homes.
Their plot unraveled, and Owen implicated Gissendaner as the originator of the plan. Owen could be eligible for parole around 2022.
“Plea bargains are a question of who can cut a deal first, which is not a very principled way to decide who could get the death penalty,” said Stephen Bright, who teaches at Yale Law School and is president and senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human rights.
“And it’s troubling.”
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