On Saturday, April 28, 1979, Terry Chasteen, a young mother, was driving her three children to their babysitter's house before reporting to work in the produce department at a Marsh grocery store. While driving on Interstate 465 early that morning, Chasteen noticed the driver of a construction truck motioning toward her car. She pulled over. Steven Judy, too, pulled to the side of the road. He told her it looked as if a rear tire on the car were loose. He offered to tighten it, and she got a lug wrench out of the trunk. They returned to their vehicles. But Chasteen got back out and approached Judy, saying something was wrong with the emergency brake. He walked to the front of the car and opened the hood. But instead of fixing anything, he removed a coil wire from the engine so the car would not start. He offered Chasteen, 23, and her kids a ride. So 5-year-old Misty, 4-year-old Mark and nearly 3-year-old Steven crawled into the truck. Their mom sat by the door. Within an hour, Chasteen was raped and dead, and her children were drowned. All four were killed that morning by 24-year-old Steven Judy. "I have no use for anyone who kills children," said Robert Williams, retired officer of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department. He and then-Sheriff Dick Allen were the first on the scene at White Lick Creek that morning after mushroom hunters stumbled upon a body along the fast-flowing creek bank. Williams's daughters were 2 and 6 at the time. "I could have pulled the switch myself," he said, referring to Judy's electrocution. Terry had been bound and gagged with cloth strips torn from her Marsh uniform. Tom Gray was in his first term as Morgan County prosecutor when Steven Judy came along. He was among the first at the murder scene. "I'll not ever forget that morning, the eerie mist of that morning," Gray said. A moment stands out, after the mother's body was found and her daughter was found snagged on tree limbs under water nearby. "We found two more," echoed a shout from downstream. Steve Oliver was working as an intern in the Morgan County prosecutor's office in April 1979. When his boss called him to White Lick Creek the morning of April 28, he saw a dead body for the first time. Oliver, 28 at the time, spent the day on the creek bank and at the morgue instead of at the party in his honor for passing the bar exam. He spent the next several months collecting information about Judy's past crimes and compiling evidence to prove Judy was sane when he killed Chasteen and her children. "He was a true sociopath, with absolutely no conscience or remorse or guilt," Oliver said. "It made me really want to see that this man was killed." Defense attorney Steve Harris was 34 when the case landed in his lap. Having already defended four murder defendants in his career, Harris was the most likely choice to be appointed public defender in the death penalty case. For months, he and Judy spent time together on a daily basis, preparing for trial and then going through the process. He remembers his client as personable, polite, considerate, cooperative - and also as a calculated killer. "It was a strange situation for me, to be there with this guy who seemed so normal, so sociable on the surface, who was capable of such horrible things." Even Harris said Judy had to die. "He would have killed again had he not been executed," his lawyer said. Jury foreman John Sappington, a retired postal clerk, will never forget the day he voted to sentence Judy to death. "He looked at me, and he said, 'I know where you live, and I know you have a daughter.' He threatened all of us, and the judge too, if we didn't give him the death penalty." The 12 jurors didn't hesitate. When the nine men and three women got into the jury room to deliberate a sentence, Sappington asked whether they wanted to discuss the options or take an immediate vote. They wanted to vote. They all wanted Judy to die for his crimes. "I said, 'Let's sit here for a while, so it doesn't look so bad.' We had some coffee, and then called for the bailiff." On the surface, Steven Judy seemed harmless enough. He could be personable and charming. He liked children, and they liked him. His foster parents supported him. And yet he was capable of evil. "The thing that influenced me the most was the realization that there are many people in society who appear to be as normal and friendly as he was, and yet they are as dangerous as he was," said defense lawyer Harris. "It's scary for me to think how many people like him are out there." When Judy was 13, he posed as a Boy Scout and forced his way into a woman's home in Indianapolis. He raped her then stabbed her with a pocket knife until the blade broke. He used a hatchet to fracture her skull and cut off a finger on her left hand as she tried to block his blows. For that brutal attack, he spent 6 months at a center for delinquent juveniles. From there, he was admitted to Central State Hospital and diagnosed as a sexual psychopath. He stayed there from October 1970 until January 1973, when he was released to the custody of foster parents Bob and Mary Carr. The Carrs, who had several young children at the time, said they didn't know the violent details of Judy's past. They bailed him out of jail after an armed robbery arrest a week before he killed Chasteen and her children. Judy admitted the killings. Harris argued that his client was not guilty because he was insane. The state had to prove he was not. Prosecutors Gray and Oliver worried. "A guy kills three little kids and a mother? You worry the jury will think, 'Only a crazy person could do that,' " Gray said. "That was our fear." And if the jury had found Judy not guilty by reason of insanity, he would have been sent to a mental hospital until he was deemed cured, then released. At the time, Indiana did not give jurors the option of guilty but mentally ill. But jurors agreed that Judy knew what he was doing and knew it was wrong. He was not crazy. He was guilty. And unlike most killers, he wanted to die. In many ways, Judy's refusal to allow appeals on his behalf to stop the death penalty made it easier to support and carry out - just as his threats to jurors and others in the case had made the penalty of death inevitable. He let Judge Jeffrey Boles know he wanted to die. "I honestly want you to give me the death penalty because one day I may get out," he said to Boles. "If you don't want another death hanging over your head, I think that's the only thing you can do." Harris said his client wanted to take some kind of action at the sentencing hearing to make sure he was sentenced to death. "He said he was going to jump over the table and choke Tom Gray, and I told him that no, he shouldn't do that, that someone might shoot him, and that it might be me." Then Judy asked whether he could address the jurors. Harris said yes, but asked him to keep it clean. In a chilling moment, Judy threatened them, one by one, saying he would come after them and their families if he ever got out. "I never go across that bridge without thinking of those people he killed," said Sappington, the jury foreman, who lives just a few miles away. "And I never lost one night's sleep over our decision. We had no choice." Sappington is a Catholic. His faith opposes capital punishment. "I've had to cope with that," he said. "I'm a man of conscience, and I thought it might bother me." But it has not. "If anyone against the death penalty had seen and heard what I did, they might reconsider," he said. "The world is better off." Death came quickly for Steven Judy once he halted the appeals process. There was no delay, no stay of execution. No years on death row. Harris, his court-appointed attorney, was there 'til the end. "One of the last things he said to me was, 'You know, this is the best thing,' ," Harris said. "And even though I knew it was probably the right thing to do, it's hard to go through an execution with someone." He felt an obligation to be there for his client. And a series of phone lines had been established in case Judy asked for a last-minute stay from the governor. "About a half-hour before the execution, he wavered," Harris said. A nervous, chain-smoking Judy offered some advice. "He said, 'If you ever have another client who wants the death penalty, tell them not to do it.' Then he was making jokes again. He said he was going to quit smoking." Judy was offered a 10-milligram injection of valium. His lawyer urged him to refuse it so he could think clearly. Judy wanted the shot and quickly relaxed. They said goodbye in a small, barred cell furnished with a toilet and sink that didn't work. "We shook hands, he said, 'Thanks, this is the right thing, don't feel bad about it,' and that was it." Harris took a seat in the viewing room. The next time he saw Judy, he was being led to the electric chair. A black cloth covered his face. He was about 15 feet away, beyond a glass panel. Four guards stood on each side. They strapped him in and attached a metal saucer to his head and electrodes to one leg. A few minutes after 1 a.m., the warden spoke the words: "Commence the execution." After it began, Judy's body stiffened, smoke came out of his head, and he shook violently, Harris said. Witnesses sat in silence, waiting 4 1/2 minutes to make sure Judy's heart had stopped beating so a physician could declare him dead. One of Judy's last acts was handing over a letter to his lawyer. He asked Harris to wait until after the execution to read it. Judy had said he would admit to other crimes, other murders, he had committed. Harris figured this was the written admission. Inside were several pages of stenographer's notebook paper. Written on the first page was this: "I'm sorry, Steve, but I've decided to handle it this way because I care too much for my foster mom and family. I hope you can understand. Thank you for all you've done for me." Judy signed his name. The remaining pages were blank. "That little son of a bitch," Harris said. Judy's was the first, and last, capital punishment case for Harris. "It's by choice," he said. "I'll never do another one."  

John Eldon Smith and his wife were charged in two counts with the murder of Joseph Ronald Akins and his wife Juanita Knight Akins. At separate trials both were convicted and sentenced to death on each count. Ronald Akins and his wife of twenty days, Juanita Knight Akins, were killed in a secluded area of a new housing development in Bibb County, Georgia, on August 31, 1974, by shotgun blasts fired at close range. According to the state's evidence, Ronald Akins' former wife, Rebecca Akins Smith Machetti, together with her husband, John Eldon Smith, (a/k/a Anthony Isalldo Machetti, a/k/a Tony Machetti), and John Maree plotted the death of Ronald Akins with the intent of redeeming the proceeds of Ronald's insurance policies, and other benefits, the beneficiaries of which were Mrs. Machetti and her three daughters by her marriage to Ronald. They were living in North Miami Beach, Florida at the time. According to the testimony of accomplice John Maree, he was to be paid $ 1,000 for his participation. He testified that he and Tony Machetti (Smith) drove to Macon, Georgia, where they contacted Ronald Akins and lured him into the area of the crime, ostensibly to install a television antenna, and that when he and his wife arrived at the appointed time Tony Machetti (Smith) killed both of them with a shotgun, after which he and Maree returned to North Miami Beach, Florida.