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Kyla · #1 08-14-2004, 02:49 AM

By Brendan Riley
ASSOCIATED PRESS
10:16 p.m. August 12, 2004

CARSON CITY, Nev. – Death row inmate Terry Jess Dennis, resolute to the end about not wanting any appeals, was executed Thursday night at the Nevada State Prison for strangling a woman in a Reno motel room in 1999.

Dennis was pronounced dead at 9:08 p.m., state Corrections Director Jackie Crawford said. Dennis expressed no remorse and had no other last words, prison spokesman Fritz Schlottman added.

Dennis, shackled at the ankles and wrists and sedated with Valium, showed no emotion as he was led into the prison's old gas chamber just before 9 p.m. and was hoisted onto a gurney. Once strapped down, he looked upward and never turned toward witnesses. The condemned man closed his eyes before a lethal injection was administered.

Dennis had a final meal of two cheeseburgers and a Coke. Earlier in the day, he spent nearly three hours with his brother, Gary Dennis, but said he didn't want to talk with his estranged wife, who tried to contact him by telephone.

Gary Dennis told The Associated Press that his brother, who had attempted suicide numerous times over the years, didn't want to stop his execution because "he saw this as an easy way to go, relatively painless."

Earlier, the condemned man had told a Reno judge he'd rather die "than continue to live and be a doddering old man in prison."

Gary Dennis also said his brother told him "he wished he hadn't screwed up his life so bad" – but didn't say he was sorry for killing Ilona Strumanis, 51, a Russian immigrant. Shortly after meeting, Dennis and Strumanis spent several days in a motel room on a beer-and-vodka binge that ended in her murder.

"In my opinion, he was a good candidate for death, and a three-judge panel agreed," said Dan Greco, the deputy Washoe County prosecutor who tried the case and witnessed the execution.

Greco said Dennis stated he planned and fantasized about the murder for a long time, adding, "The facts of this crime were particularly horrific."

No members of the victim's family were among the seven official witnesses. Prison officials said they didn't hear from any family members.

Outside the prison, some 25 demonstrators led by the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty held a candlelight vigil with some carrying signs in protest.

"Execution by choice state assisted suicide," one sign read. "Killing is not the answer," said another.

Coalition leader Nancy Hart said the group is opposed to all executions, "particularly when this is the 10th volunteer out of 11 executions."

All but one of the condemned inmates executed in Nevada since 1979 cleared the way for their deaths by voluntarily surrendering their rights to appeal.

"That should give us some pause. They are choosing to be killed," she said.

Dennis was executed after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a stay request filed over his objections early Thursday.

The high court denied without comment both a stay request and an appeal filed by Michael Pescetta, an assistant federal defender, after Dennis withdrew an earlier appeal and said he was ready to die.

Washoe County District Attorney Dick Gammick on Thursday made available to the media copies of the videotaped confession Dennis gave to police after calling them following the March 1999 killing. Gammick said Dennis "in his own words describes the details of the murder in agonizing detail" on the videotape.

Dennis' estranged wife, Bonnie Dennis, said Wednesday that she saw the tape at Dennis' trial and believed he wasn't exaggerating.

"I had been on the end of that same kind of rage," she said in a telephone interview, adding that when Dennis drank or used drugs "he was like a demon."

Nevada prosecutors say Dennis was found mentally competent by the lower courts, despite his history of alcoholism, suicide attempts and a psychiatric report that concluded depression and self-hatred prompted Dennis to refuse any more appeals.

Dennis told police he strangled Strumanis with a belt after she ridiculed him for being unable to perform sexually and questioned his claim that he killed enemy soldiers while serving as an Air Force clerk in Saigon. His brother said Dennis had been stationed in Thailand, not Vietnam, and wasn't in combat.

The condemned man, who was raised in Washington state, had been described by former classmates and friends as a nice person who sang in his high school choir but who also got hooked on drugs and alcohol as a teenager.

Dennis claimed he had been drinking since he was a teenager, had been jailed at age 14 for marijuana use and had made his first suicide attempt in 1966.

The execution was the 53rd at the Nevada State Prison since 1903.

Executions are held in the prison's gas chamber, though lethal gas hasn't been used since convicted killer Jesse Bishop was executed in 1979. Lethal injections have been used for the 10 executions since then.