Despite the horrific depictions of John Wayne Conner’s years growing up, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles voted against stopping his execution scheduled for Thursday evening, which would be 34 years to the day after he was convicted in Telfair County.
The board’s decision came a couple of hours Wednesday after the five members got another version of Conner, a man who killed three people, not just the one murder for which he has received a death sentence.
Conner’s lawyers, sisters and friends met in private with the board for 3½ hours Wednesday morning, pleading for mercy because of the violence that Conner learned at the hand of his father.
Then South Georgia prosecutor Timothy Vaughn, the district attorney for Telfair, and the relatives of two of the three people Conner killed had their time before the board.
Unless the courts step in, Conner will die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. Thursday for murdering his drinking buddy, J.T. White, in 1982 in Milan.
The 60-year-old man's execution would be the sixth lethal injection Georgia has carried out this year, a record for the more than four decades that the state's current death penalty law has been in place.
He still has last-minute appeals pending, but the courts have already ruled on some of those issues raised years ago. Conner’s lawyers are again claiming that he is intellectually disabled and ineligible for the death penalty. His attorneys also said Conner’s inexperienced trial lawyer and the attorney who filed his initial appeals failed him by not bringing up his violent family history.
Two new issues his lawyers have raised concern the length of time that Conner has spent on death row. He suffered "cruel and unusual punishment," they wrote, because his execution was set for 34 years after a crime committed when he was in his 20s. The lawyers argued that Conner has been serving a "de facto life sentence" since his trial, and carrying out his execution would now be more punishment.
“I laughed at their assertions,” said Vaughn, who is also the lead prosecutor in five other South Georgia counties.
According to the clemency petition, Conner's abusive father taught him to be violent. But that information, the lawyers wrote, was not presented at trial, nor was it included in the appeals that immediately followed.
“Imagine a man who evokes fear and repugnance from an entire community,” the petition said regarding Conner’s father.
Conner, then 25, and White, 29, had spent the evening of Jan. 9, 1982, at a party but wanted to keep drinking once they returned to Conner’s house in Milan.
They walked to a neighbor’s house in search of a ride to the liquor store, but the neighbor refused.
Walking back to Conner’s house, the two got into a fight because White said he wanted to have sex with Conner’s girlfriend, Beverly Bates. Conner beat White with a quart bottle and an oak tree branch.
Conner went home to get Bates so they could leave town, but on the way Conner stopped at the ditch where he had left White.
To make sure White was dead, Conner beat him with a tree limb and then stabbed him with a stick.
Conner and Bates were arrested the next day in Butts County, on their way to Gainesville.
Conner, called “Shorty” by his relatives, learned from a “pattern modeled by those in his family,” his lawyers wrote.
The petition said Conner’s father slit a man’s throat after the man brushed against the arm of Conner’s pregnant wife. They also said the elder Conner, while serving overseas during World War II, beheaded a man in a movie theater for sitting in the seat between him and his brother. The petition said Conner’s father stabbed his brother and father-in-law, sexually assaulted his daughters and cut up his wife “like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Vaughn said Conner was just as violent.
Conner was 15 when he was convicted of manslaughter in 1971 for fatally shooting another teenager, Randy Smith. Conner spent 15 months in a juvenile facility for killing Smith.
On May 3, 1981, he cut Jesse Wayne Smyth’s throat, put the body in the trunk of Smyth’s car and drove the car into a river. For nine months, no one knew where Smyth was until one of Conner’s brothers told police what had happened. By then Conner was in jail, awaiting trial for White’s murder.
After he was convicted on July 14, 1982, of murdering White, Conner pleaded guilty to Smyth’s murder and was sentenced to life for that crime. Vaughn said records don’t explain his motives for killing Smith and Smyth.
“He killed three people in 10 years,” Vaughn said.
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