Missouri Executes Leonard Taylor For Killing His G/F And Her Three Kids— His Final Meal & Last Words 

On February 7th, 2023, at exactly 6:07 in the evening, inside the Potis Correctional Center in Bontra, Missouri, a 58-year-old man took his final breath. His name was Leonard Taylor. He had spent nearly 15 years on death row, convicted of one of the most disturbing crimes in Missouri history, the murder of a young woman and her three children.

But here is what makes this case unlike many others. Right up until the moment that lethal injection was administered, organizations, lawyers, and forensic experts on one side of the debate were raising serious questions about the evidence. And on the other side, the state of Missouri, the courts, and the victim’s family stood firm behind the conviction.

 Stay with me through this video because by the end, you will know everything. the crime, the evidence, the doubts, the execution itself, his final meal, and the very last words Leonard Taylor ever spoke. This is the full story. To understand this story, you first need to understand the man at the center of it.

 Leonard Taylor was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. By most accounts, his early life followed a familiar path for many young men from his community. He graduated high school and after graduation he joined the United States Army. He served. He moved through life. But Leonard Taylor also had another name, one that held deep personal meaning to him, Raheem.

 At some point in his adult life, Taylor converted to Islam and by all accounts he embraced it as a central part of his identity. He would later be known to those close to him simply as Raheem and his faith remained a defining part of who he was through the 15 years he spent on death row. Taylor had a daughter, Deja, who he had not seen or met until she was a teenager.

 The story of how he reconnected with her would actually become one of the most critical details in the entire legal case, but we will get to that. At the time of the events that led to his conviction, Taylor was in a relationship with a woman named Angela Row. Angela was 28 years old. She had three children, two daughters, and a son from a previous relationship.

 Their names were Alexis, Acraa, and Tyrese. Alexis was 10 years old. Acraa was six. Tyrese was five. a family, a mother and her three children living in their home in Jennings, a small city just north of St. Louis. And then on December 3rd, 2004, they were found dead. It was December 3rd, 2004 when someone entered the home on Harney Avenue in Jennings, Missouri, and found what investigators would later describe as a scene of devastating violence.

 Angela Row, 28 years old. Alexis Connley, 10 years old. AC Craya Connley, 6 years old. Tyrese Connley, 5 years old. All four had been shot. According to Missouri authorities, including Governor Mike Parson, the victims had suffered gunshot wounds to the head, described as execution style, along with additional wounds to the body.

 A mother and three young children gone. Police immediately launched a homicide investigation and very quickly their attention turned to one person, Leonard Taylor. Taylor was Angela Rose’s boyfriend and crucially he was no longer in Missouri. By the time the bodies were discovered, Taylor had already left the state and was in California.

 For investigators, that raised an immediate question. Did he flee or was he already gone before it happened? That question, that single seemingly simple question would end up being the most contested and consequential issue in the entire case. Here is what investigators pieced together in the weeks following the discovery.

 Leonard Taylor, they said, had a motive. Investigators believed that Taylor had shot Angela Row during an argument, a domestic dispute that turned fatal. And then their theory continued. He killed the three children because they were witnesses, because they had seen what he had done. It is the theory that a jury would ultimately accept.

 But here is what made the case complicated from the very beginning. Security cameras at St. Louis Lambert International Airport recorded Leonard Taylor clearly without question passing through security on the morning of Friday, November 26th, 2004. He was wearing dark pants, a pink shirt, and a cream colored hat. He carried two bags. He walked to gate 16 and boarded a Southwest Airlines flight at 8:10 in the morning headed for Ontario, California.

The purpose of his trip to meet his teenage daughter, Deja, for the very first time. Now, here is where the timeline becomes critical. The bodies were not discovered until December 3rd. That is one week after Taylor had left for California. If the victims were killed after Taylor boarded that plane, if they were still alive when he flew out, then he physically could not have committed the murders.

 The entire case rested on one question. When did they die? And that is where things get complicated. When the case went to trial in 2008, prosecutors built their argument around three key pieces of evidence. The first was a confession, or what was described as one. Taylor’s own brother, Perry Taylor, told police that Leonard had confessed to him, that Leonard had admitted to killing Angela and the children.

 Perry’s statement to police was one of the most significant pieces of evidence in the entire trial. The second was physical evidence. When Taylor was eventually arrested, investigators found DNA from Angela Rose blood on his glasses. Additionally, a relative who had driven Taylor to the airport reported seeing him throw what appeared to be a gun into a sewer drain as they were leaving.

 No weapon was ever recovered from that drain. No weapon was found anywhere, but the claim that Taylor had disposed of a firearm before leaving the state was presented as further evidence of guilt. The third, and arguably the most important, was the time of death. This is where the time of death question became the central dispute in the case.

 The medical examiner assigned to the case was a doctor named Philip Burch. When he first examined the victims, Dr. Burch estimated that Angela, Alexis, Acraa,  and Tyrese had been dead for 2 to 3 days before their bodies were discovered on December 3rd. 2 to 3 days before December 3rd. That puts the time of death around November 30th or December 1st.

 Taylor had left for California on November 26th. Under Dr. Burch’s original estimate, the murders took place after Taylor was already out of the state. But by the time the case went to trial, Dr. Burch had revised his assessment. He now testified that the victims had been dead for up to three weeks before their bodies were discovered, which would place the time of death as far back as mid- November when Taylor was still in Missouri.

 His explanation for the revision. His first estimate had not accounted for the fact that the air conditioning in the home had been running, which would have slowed decomposition, making the bodies appear less decomposed than they actually were. The revised timeline placed Taylor in Missouri at the time of the deaths.

 The jury heard this evidence, and in 2008, they convicted Leonard Taylor on four counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death. From the moment of his conviction, Leonard Taylor maintained that he did not commit the murders. And over the years that followed, his legal team and supporters raised a number of specific challenges to the case against him.

 Challenge number one, the brother statement. Perry Taylor, whose statement to police was one of the central pieces of the prosecution’s case, recanted at trial. He walked back what he had told investigators. Taylor’s legal team alleged that Perry had only made the original claim because police had threatened him with prison time if he did not implicate his brother.

 Perry Taylor died in 2015. Challenge number two, phone calls from California. Taylor’s daughter, Deja, and her mother both stated that while Taylor was in California with them, they had spoken on the phone with Angela Row and one of her children. If those calls took place, it would mean the victims were alive after Taylor had already left Missouri, and the timeline the prosecution relied upon would not hold.

 Challenge number three, the medical examiner. An independent forensic pathologist, Dr. Dr. Jane Turner reviewed the case and submitted a signed affidavit expressing disagreement with Dr. Burch’s revised time of death estimate. Dr. Turner’s findings pointed toward the original time frame, suggesting the deaths occurred after Taylor had departed for California.

Challenge number four, no murder weapon and no eyewitnesses. No firearm was ever recovered, not from a sewer drain, not from anywhere, and no one witnessed the killings. There was no direct physical evidence placing Taylor at the scene at the time the murders occurred. Challenge number five, the innocent claim was never fully heard.

 According to Taylor’s legal team and the organizations that supported him, the totality of the evidence pointing toward his innocence was never comprehensively examined by any court. Every appeal, they argued, focused on procedural and legal grounds rather than a full review of the factual case. Those were the arguments put forward by Taylor’s side.

 The prosecution, the courts, and the state of Missouri reviewed those arguments at multiple levels, and at every level, the conviction was allowed to stand. By late 2022, it was clear that Missouri intended to carry out Leonard Taylor’s execution, and in the weeks that followed, a number of organizations mounted efforts to stop it.

 The Midwest Innocence Project, an organization that works to exonerate wrongly convicted individuals, formally requested that Missouri’s Governor, Mike Parson, intervene. In their letter to the governor, they wrote that they had grave concerns that Missouri is going to execute an innocent man. The National NAACP added their voice.

 Missouri civil rights organizations and religious groups called for a stay of execution. Governor Parson denied clemency. He declined to convene a board of inquiry. His office characterized Taylor’s innocence claims as self-serving. Taylor’s legal team then took the matter to the Missouri Supreme Court and requested a stay of execution.

 The Missouri Supreme Court denied that request. The case was escalated to the United States Supreme Court. In a brief unsigned order with no recorded dissents, the Supreme Court declined to intervene. There was one additional request that was denied. His legal team asked that a spiritual adviser, an imam, be permitted to be present with him in the execution chamber in his final moments.

 The state attorney general denied that request as well. every avenue for appeal had been exhausted. Leonard Taylor would be executed on February 7th, 2023. In the days leading up to his execution, those who spoke with Leonard Taylor, or Raheem, as he preferred to be called, described a man who appeared calm and at peace. his advocate, one of the people who worked closely with him during his final period, described him as positive up to the last time they spoke.

 She said that Taylor had told her that whatever was Allah’s will was Allah’s will. He shared with her that his favorite song was Family Reunion by the OJ’s, a sole classic about the bonds of family and coming together. On the subject of his last meal, Missouri’s Department of Corrections did not publicly release specific details of Taylor’s final meal request, and no verified account of it has been confirmed in the public record.

February 7th, 2023 at 6:07 in the evening, the state of Missouri administered a lethal dose of Pentoarbatl to Leonard Taylor. Witnesses present, including journalists and representatives of both Taylor’s family and the victim’s family, reported that as the five grams of pentobatital were delivered, Taylor moved his feet.

 He then took five or six deep breaths and then all movement stopped. At 6:16 p.m., 9 minutes after the injection was administered, Leonard Taylor was pronounced dead. He was 58 years old. He was the third Missouri inmate to be executed since the previous November. Leonard Taylor did not speak aloud in the execution chamber.

 He had chosen to leave his final message in written form, a statement prepared in advance and released publicly. This is what Leonard Taylor, Raheem Taylor, chose to say as his final words to the world. He began with a passage from the Holy Quran. Surahu verses 153 and 154 verses about patience, perseverance and the belief that those who give their lives in the path of what is righteous are not truly gone that they live on and then in his own words he wrote Muslims don’t die we live eternally in the hearts of our family and friends from Allah we come

and to Allah we all shall return everybody will get their turn to die. Death is not your enemy. It is your destiny. Look forward to meeting it.” And he closed with one word, “Peace.” Those were the last words Leonard Taylor chose to leave behind. After the execution, a reporter spoke with Gjun Row, Angela Row’s sister, one of the family members of the victims who had waited nearly two  decades for this moment.

 She said, “Justice is served.” And then she added, “Not really.” Those were her words reflecting whatever she felt in that moment. Only she knows what she meant by them. Angela Row was 28. Alexis was 10. AC Craya was 6. Tyrese was five. Their lives were taken in an act of violence that left a family and a community shattered.

 The Midwest Innocence Project released a statement after the execution expressing their position that Taylor had been unjustly executed, writing that his life had been quote stolen by unreliable testimony and unscientific conclusions and a system that refused to correct its mistakes.

 They also pointed to broader statistics, noting that since 1973, more than 190 people have been exonerated from death row across the United States, for of them from Missouri, and that a National Academy of Sciences study estimated that more than 4% of those on death row in America may be factually innocent.

 The state of Missouri and the victim’s family, for their part, maintained that the conviction was just and that the sentence had been rightfully carried out. The case of Leonard Taylor, Raheem Taylor, is not a simple one. On one side, a jury that heard the evidence, weighed it, and reached verdict. Courts at every level that reviewed the case, and allowed the sentence to stand.

 a victim’s family that considered justice to have been done. On the other side, defense experts, innocence advocates, and legal observers who raised questions about the time of death, the reliability of the key witness, and whether all the evidence had been fully examined. And at the center of it all, four people who lost their lives on Harney Avenue in Jennings, Missouri, Angela Row, Alexis Connley, AC Craya Connley, Tyrese Connley. Their names deserve to be said.

A mother and three children. The courts, the jury, the governor, and the state of Missouri concluded that the person responsible for their deaths was Leonard Taylor. That conclusion was reached through the legal process and it was the conclusion that stood. Taylor maintained until his death that it was the wrong one.

 Both of those things are part of this story. And this channel’s job is simply to lay out the facts and let you decide what you think. What I can tell you is that this case was real. These people were real. And the questions it raises about evidence, about testimony, and about how the justice system works are questions that will continue to be discussed long after this video ends.

 If you’re new here, subscribe. There are more stories like this one told carefully, told fully. I’ll see you in the next