As Georgia prepares to execute a murderer next week, it announced Wednesday that another man, Kenneth Fults, will die by lethal injection on April 12.
If Fults is put to death, he will be the fourth person Georgia has executed this year. Joshua Bishop is scheduled to die by lethal injection next Thursday for a 1994 murder in Baldwin County.
Fults pleaded guilty to murdering his next door neighbor, Cathy Bounds, on Jan. 30, 1996, and only went on trial in so his punishment could be decided.
A Spalding County jury decided Fults should die for his crime.
Years later in an interview one of those jurors said he planned to vote for the death penalty even before the trial began and he used a racial slur when he referenced Fults. His appeals failed even though his lawyers argued that there may have been a racial element to his sentencing.
Fults, now 48, told police he committed several burglaries during a week-long crime spree because he planned to use a stolen gun to kill his former girlfriend’s new boyfriend.
Fults took one of those stolen guns, when he broke into his neighbor’s house.
Bounds was home.
She offered Fults her rings and begged for her life. Fults responded by taping Bound’s eyes closed by wrapping more than six feet of electrical tape around her head. He placed her face-down on her bed, put a pillow over her head and shot her five times.
Fults described that murder, with a few details altered, in a letter written in gang code that police found at his trailer. Fults tried to convince detectives that he accidentally shot Bounds while in a dream-like state.
Detectives found the stolen .22-caliber handgun he used to kill her hidden under his trailer.
Confronted with the evidence against him, Fults pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping and other felonies.
On Thursday next week, Bishop is scheduled to die by lethal injection for murdering 43-year-old Leverette Lewis Morrison in Milledgeville. Bishop and co-defendant Mark Braxley murdered Morrison after spending the day drinking and smoking crack at Braxley's Milledgeville. Bishop and Braxley planned to steal Morrison's car while he was asleep. But Morrison woke when Bishop reached into his pants pocket for the key and they struggled.
The two men used a car battery and a curtain rod to beat him to death, and they left his body near two dumpsters because he was too heavy to hoist him into the trash bin. They drove his car to a nearby pond and burned it.
Bishop and Braxley also admitted they killed another man two weeks earlier. Braxley pleaded guilty and is serving life with the possibility of parole.
At least one other Death Row inmate could see his execution date set in the next few weeks, Daniel Anthony Lucas who was sentenced to die for 1998 murder in Jones County.
