As the state prepares to execute Kenneth Fults next week, a warrant was signed Thursday setting up what could be the state's fifth execution this month.
Daniel Anthony Lucas is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. on April 27 for killing a Jones County father and his two children, one by one, on April 23, 1998.
Lucas’ co-defendant, Brandon Rhode was executed on Sept. 27, 2010.
Lucas, then 19, and Rhode were burglarizing the Moss family home the afternoon of April April 23, 1998, when the first of two children came home.
Bryan Moss was the first to be killed. The 11-yer-old saw Lucas and Rhode through the front window, ransacking the house, so he armed himself with a bat and came in through the back door. Lucas shot him.
His 15-year-old sister, Kristin, came home next. The two men put her in a chair and shot her too.
Rhode shot the father, Moss, when he got to the house on Griswoldville Road in middle Georgia. Then Lucas shot the children again to be sure they were dead.
On Tuesday, Fults is scheduled to die at 7 p.m. for murdering his 19-year-old neighbor, Cathy Bounds.
Fults had been on a week-long crime spree, breaking into houses in Spalding County so he could steal guns, planning to use them to kill his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend. He tried to shoot his rival from afar but the stolen gun jammed, so he wanted to get a more reliable gun to finish his plan, according to prosecutors.
The next morning, Fults broke into Bounds’ trailer just moments after her live in boyfriend left for work. Fults wrapped six-feet of electrical tape around her eyes, led her to the bedroom and placed her face down on the bed. As Bounds begged for her life, offering him the rings on her fingers, he placed a pillow over the back of her head and shot her five times.
Investigators canvassing the trailer park after the Jan. 30, 1996, murder found the stolen .22-caliber handgun used to kill Bounds, items taken in previous burglaries and a letter Fults had written in gang code describing how he murdered his neighbor.
The only other time Georgia has executed as many as five people in a year was last year and in 1987.
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