Parole board denies clemency to condemned killer

The state parole board on Friday denied clemency to Melbert Ray Ford Jr., who is scheduled to be executed next week for the 1986 killings of a his former girlfriend and her 11-year-old niece.

Ford is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Georgia Diagnostic Classification Prison in Jackson. He was sentenced to death for the murders of his former companion, Martha Matich, and her niece, Lisa Chapman, during a grocery store robbery in Newton County.

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Man sentenced to life in slayings of Cherokee firefighter, wife

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