On December 19th, 2024, after spending 18 years on death row, Kevin Ray Underwood was finally executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, one of the most infamous correctional facilities in the entire United States. At exactly 10:14 in the morning, Kevin Ray Underwood, age 45, was pronounced dead on his birthday.
Stay till the end of this video because today I’m going to walk you through everything. The terrible crime that put him on death row in the first place, the trial, the evidence, the confession, the 18 years of legal battles and appeals that followed, how his execution was carried out, what his last meal was, and his final words, the very last thing he said before the needle went in.
This is the full story of Kevin Ray Underwood. I recognize that I do not want to die. I recognize that I deserve to for what I did. And I would like to apologize to the victim’s family, to my own family, and to everyone in that room today who had to hear the horrible details of what I did. Before we get into the crime itself, let’s establish who Kevin Ray Underwood was because understanding the person matters when you’re trying to understand a case like this.
Kevin Ray Underwood was born on December 19th, 1979, which, as you’ll notice, is the exact same date as his execution 25 years later. That detail is not lost on anyone who followed this case closely. He grew up in Oklahoma and, by all outward appearances was unremarkable. Not in a charming, quiet neighbor kind way, just ordinary.
He was in his mid-20s at the time of the crime. He worked at a Walmart. He kept largely to himself. He had a blog. This was 2006, the early days of personal internet culture, where he posted mundane observations about his day-to-day life. Random musings, pop culture, complaints about work. If you had scrolled through it before April 2006, nothing would have alarmed you.
But there was something else going on inside Kevin Ray Underwood that nobody around him fully understood. He had been diagnosed, both before and after the crime, with a range of mental health conditions. At trial, the diagnosis was schizotypal personality disorder. Years later, during the appeals process, a second diagnosis emerged, Asperger syndrome.
His legal team would lean heavily into both of these, arguing that his mental state diminished his culpability. That executing someone with serious mental illness constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. The courts disagreed, every single time. But we’ll get to that. For now, what you need to understand is this.
Kevin Underwood was a 26-year-old man living alone in an apartment complex in Purcell, Oklahoma. And one of his neighbors was a 10-year-old girl named Jamie Rose Bolin. Jamie Rose Bolin was born on August 7th, 1995. She was 10 years old. She had a father, Curtis Bolin, who worked late hours to provide for her.
They lived in the same apartment complex as Kevin Ray Underwood. Same building, different units. One of those modest residential complexes in a small Oklahoma town where everyone more or less knows everyone else’s face. Jamie was, by every account, a bright and energetic child. The kind of kid who walked home from school and still had energy to spare.
On April 12th, 2006, she did exactly that. Walked home after a school event. Her father wasn’t home yet. He was still working his shift. She was alone. And Kevin Ray Underwood knew it. Somewhere between the school and their apartment door, Kevin Ray Underwood intercepted her. The pretext was simple. Come inside. See my pet rat.
It’s the kind of thing a child says yes to without thinking twice. Because why wouldn’t she? He was a neighbor, a familiar face. Someone she had no reason to fear. She went in. He turned on SpongeBob SquarePants for her to watch on TV. And then he killed her. Her body was later found concealed in his apartment, hidden inside a large plastic storage tub in his bedroom closet, sealed shut with duct tape.
But here is what made this case different from almost every other case I’ve covered on this channel. When FBI agents later interviewed Underwood, when they sat across from him and he started talking, what came out wasn’t just a confession to a killing. What came out was the full picture of what he had intended to do. He told investigators he had developed a fantasy, a desire to abduct someone and then consume them.
He wanted to commit an act of cannibalism. In his own words, on video, he said, “I wanted to know what it tasted like, and just the thought of it was appealing to me. When police searched his apartment, they found items that made it very clear that this had been planned in advance. This was not a snap decision. Not a moment of rage.
He had been building toward this. The only reason he didn’t go further was that he got caught first. Jamie’s father came home from work and his daughter wasn’t there. She didn’t come home that night. The next morning, she still wasn’t there. Eventually, authorities issued an Amber Alert. >> [music] >> They began canvassing the complex, knocking on doors, talking to residents, trying to piece together the last known sightings of a missing 10-year-old girl.
Kevin Ray Underwood came up quickly. He was her neighbor. He was one of the last people known to have seen her. Investigators knocked on his door. He let them in. No warrant required. He gave consent to search his apartment. He was calm, cooperative even, answered their questions without visible agitation.
Then, one of the officers noticed it. A large plastic storage tub in the bedroom closet, sealed completely, wrapped in duct tape. They asked about it. Underwood said he kept it sealed to protect his comic book collection from moisture damage. Nobody bought it. And when the officers moved toward that closet, something broke inside Kevin Ray Underwood.
“Go ahead and arrest me,” he said. “She’s in there. Then, I’m going to burn in hell.” He began hyperventilating. The calm was gone. 18 seconds of cooperation unraveling in real time. Jamie Rose Bolin was inside that tub. What followed was one of the most straightforward investigations in modern Oklahoma criminal history, not because the case was simple, but because the suspect kept talking.
Kevin Ray Underwood gave investigators a detailed videotaped confession. He walked them through what he had done. He didn’t construct an alibi. He didn’t try to shift blame. He didn’t claim a blackout or a breakdown of memory. He just told them. The confession was voluntary. >> [music] >> It was clear. And it was comprehensive.
What emerged from it and from a broader FBI investigation was a picture of a young man who had been mentally deteriorating in the weeks leading up to April 12th. A man who had been feeding something dark inside himself until it consumed him entirely. Kevin Ray Underwood went to trial in February 2008. The prosecution had everything they needed. The physical evidence.
The forensic analysis. The FBI investigation. And most critically the videotaped confession. Underwood on camera, in his own words, describing what he had done and why. You cannot overstate the impact of a confession like that on a jury. On February 29th, 2008, a leap day, the jury returned their verdict.
Guilty of first-degree murder. Deliberation time 23 minutes. In capital murder cases, juries often deliberate for days. Sometimes weeks. This jury needed less than half an hour. When you watch a man confess to a crime of this nature in his own words on video, there is genuinely not much left to deliberate over. One week later on March 7th, 2008, the jury recommended the death penalty.
On April 3rd, 2008, McClain County District Judge Candace Blaylock made it official. Kevin Ray Underwood was sentenced to death. He was 28 years old. Here’s the part of these cases that people sometimes overlook. Between a death sentence and an execution, there are years, sometimes decades, of waiting, of appeals, of legal filings and court hearings and motions and counter motions, of living in a cell, knowing what is coming, but never quite knowing when.
For Kevin Ray Underwood, that stretch lasted 18 years. 18 years from sentencing to execution. His legal team pursued every available avenue. The argument they kept returning to, in federal court, in appellate court, was mental illness. That his diagnosed conditions, schizotypal personality disorder and later Asperger syndrome, meant his culpability was diminished.
That the Eighth Amendment protected him from execution. It’s worth acknowledging that debates around mental illness and capital punishment are genuine, ongoing, and serious in legal and ethical circles. These are not simple questions. Courts across the country grapple with them regularly. But in Underwood’s case, every court that heard the argument rejected it.
An Oklahoma City federal judge rejected it. Appeals courts rejected it. Every door closed. In Oklahoma, before an execution is carried out, there is one final official opportunity to stop it. The clemency hearing before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. Underwood appeared before that board, and he spoke. In a tearful 2-minute statement, he addressed what he had done.
He said, “I recognize that although I do not want to die, I deserve to for what I did. And if my death could change what I did, I would gladly die.” He said he had blocked out most of his memories of that day, that when those memories surfaced, they caused him great pain, that he could not believe he had done those things, that the person he was in the weeks leading up to the crime was not who he had been before it, and not who he was afterward.
The board’s judgment was clear, three to zero, no clemency. Kevin Ray Underwood would be executed as scheduled. In the hours before his execution, Kevin Ray Underwood made his last meal request. He ordered chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy, pinto beans, hot rolls, a cheeseburger with french fries and ketchup, and a cola from the prison canteen, a heavy, comfort food kind of meal, the kind of food that feels like Oklahoma on a cold December morning.
He ate it. And then the clock kept moving. December 19th, 2024. Kevin Ray Underwood woke up, if he slept at all, on his 45th birthday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. The execution protocol was set into motion. Witnesses were brought in. The process moved forward the way it always does, quietly, procedurally, with a kind of clinical routine that is almost unsettling in how ordinary it feels.
Before they administered the injection, Underwood was given the opportunity to make a final statement. He used it. He addressed the timing, the fact that his execution had been scheduled on his birthday, six days before Christmas. He said it was, in his words, “a needlessly cruel thing to do to my family.” Then he said, “But I’m very sorry for what I did, and I wish I could take it back.
” Those were the last words Kevin Ray Underwood ever spoke. At 10:14 in the morning, he was pronounced dead on his birthday. When it was over, Jamie’s family spoke. Lori Pate, Jamie’s aunt, made a statement that many people who followed this case found quietly powerful in how restrained it was. She said, “This doesn’t bring our Jamie back, but it does allow the space in our hearts to focus on her and allow the healing process to begin.
” Not triumphant, not angry, not dramatic, just a family that had been waiting 18 years for something to finally be over. Jamie Rose Bolin was 10 years old when she died. She had walked home from school on an ordinary spring afternoon in a small Oklahoma town, and she never made it back to her father.
She would have been 29 years old in 2024. Cases like this one sit with you in a specific way. There are true crime stories where you can trace a line from trauma to poverty to desperation to crime. Stories where you don’t excuse what happened, but you can construct some kind of human narrative around it. You can follow the thread.
And then there are cases like Kevin Ray Underwood, where you keep reaching for an explanation that satisfies and never quite find one. A 26-year-old man, a familiar face in an apartment hallway, a child who trusted him. His defense said mental illness. His defense said diminished culpability. And those are real conversations worth having in courtrooms, in society, in policy.
But the courts, every single one, looked at the evidence, looked at the premeditation, looked at the confession, and arrived at the same conclusion year after year, appeal after appeal. What I’ll leave you with is this. Jamie Rose Bolin was somebody’s daughter. She was 10 years old. She trusted neighbor. And her aunt, 18 years later, stood in front of cameras and said that now, finally, there was space in their hearts to begin healing. That’s not a legal argument.
That’s not an Eighth Amendment debate. That’s just a family still carrying a little girl with them everywhere they go, finally being allowed to breathe. That was the full story of Kevin Ray Underwood. If you made it to the end, thank you. These cases are heavy, and I don’t take lightly the time you spend here with me watching them.
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