Lethal Legacies: The Chilling and Tragic Stories of the Only Three Women Executed in Oklahoma History
The ultimate penalty of death by lethal injection is a rare and somber event in the United States, but it becomes even more historically significant when examining the demographics of those who face the executioner. Female offenders make up a microscopic fraction of the death row population nationwide. Yet, in the state of Oklahoma, a dark and unprecedented chapter of criminal justice unfolded at the dawn of the new millennium. Over the course of a single year, the state carried out the executions of three women. Their crimes were incredibly diverse in motive and execution, ranging from crimes of desperate, toxic passion to cold, calculated financial assassination, and finally, to a mother’s fiercely twisted, murderous obsession.
These are the harrowing, meticulously detailed stories of Wanda Jean Allen, Marilyn K. Plants, and Lois Nadine Smith. To truly understand how these three individuals found themselves strapped to a gurney in the stark, sterile witness chamber of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, we must peel back the layers of their lives, examining the tragic upbringings, the brutal betrayals, and the fatal choices that ultimately sealed their doom.
The Broken Mind and the Fatal Shot: The Tragedy of Wanda Jean Allen
To comprehend the sheer tragedy of Wanda Jean Allen’s final destination, one must rewind the clock to a bitterly cold winter afternoon in 1988. It was on this day that a highly volatile relationship reached a catastrophic and violent breaking point directly on the front steps of a small-town police department. But the roots of this tragedy stretch much further back into a life characterized by profound disadvantage, untreated trauma, and systemic neglect.
Wanda Jean Allen and her victim, Gloria Gene Leathers, were once fiercely inseparable. Their romance was forged in the bleak, unforgiving environment behind prison walls. Upon their release, the two women made a desperate attempt to build a functional life together. However, what initially began as genuine companionship and mutual reliance quickly mutated into a profoundly toxic and dangerously explosive domestic situation. By the time the pair were sharing a roof, their household was plagued by screaming matches, physical altercations, and repeated police interventions.
On a Thursday afternoon in 1988, Gloria decided she had endured enough. She wanted out of the relationship permanently. The final unraveling began in the mundane aisles of a local grocery store. The two women had walked into the establishment together, but the air was thick with tension. Gloria had just received her welfare check, and Wanda Jean immediately demanded the money. The dispute quickly escalated from tense whispers to a public shouting match. The commotion grew so intense that bystanders contacted the authorities.
When local police arrived on the scene, Gloria dropped all pretenses. She approached an officer and explicitly requested a police escort back to the residence she shared with Wanda. Her intention was clear: she needed to pack her belongings safely and move back into her mother’s home. She was exhausted by the relentless fighting and terrified of Wanda’s escalating temper.
Back at their shared house, an eerie calm settled over the scene, though it was merely a facade. A police officer stood by, watching carefully as Gloria hurriedly gathered her personal items. During this time, she made a brief phone call to her mother, requesting a ride to her new, safe haven. Across the room, Wanda Jean stood eerily still, her eyes locked onto Gloria with a chilling intensity. She watched her former lover pack away their shared life, muttering a dark promise under her breath: “If I can’t have you, no one will.”
Gloria, determined to escape, ignored the ominous threat. Minutes later, her mother’s vehicle pulled into the driveway. Together, they loaded the last of Gloria’s bags into the trunk. To any outside observer, it appeared that Gloria had successfully navigated her way out of a dangerous domestic trap. She was finally free.
However, before heading to the safety of her mother’s home, Gloria made one final, fateful decision. She realized that simply leaving was not enough; she needed to formally document the abuse and threats. She asked her mother to turn the car around and drive directly to the local police station to file a comprehensive report against Wanda Jean.
What Gloria and her mother failed to realize was that they were being hunted. Wanda Jean had slipped into her own vehicle and trailed them through the city streets. She was quiet, calculated, and dangerously patient, ensuring she never got too close to raise alarm, but never letting their vehicle out of her sight.
When they arrived at the police station parking lot, Gloria confidently opened the passenger door and stepped onto the pavement, walking briskly toward the front entrance of the precinct. She was mere steps away from the safety of armed officers. But before she could reach the heavy glass doors, Wanda Jean’s car violently pulled in behind them. Wanda stepped out of her vehicle, raising a .38 caliber revolver.
There was no hesitation, no final argument, and no opportunity for Gloria to plead for her life. Wanda pulled the trigger. The gunshot echoed deafeningly across the concrete parking lot. A single bullet tore directly into Gloria’s abdomen, causing her to collapse instantly onto the pavement.
Inside the precinct, two officers heard the distinct crack of gunfire and sprinted through the front doors. They were met with a scene of absolute chaos. Gloria was bleeding profusely on the cold ground, her mother was screaming hysterically for medical assistance, and Wanda Jean was already speeding away from the scene, the smoking revolver still clutched tightly in her hands. Despite the devastating internal damage, Gloria remained conscious just long enough to identify the woman who had pulled the trigger. Her mother provided the horrifying context to the officers. The brazen attack had occurred in broad daylight, right on the doorstep of law enforcement.
For four agonizing days, Gloria hovered in the terrifying limbo between life and death. Surgeons and medical staff worked tirelessly to repair the catastrophic damage to her internal organs, but the bullet had caused irreversible trauma. While Gloria fought for her life, Wanda Jean became a ghost. Law enforcement scoured the area, but she had successfully vanished.
The manhunt concluded when an anonymous tip led police to a hiding spot approximately 70 miles outside of Oklahoma City. Authorities moved in with overwhelming force, arresting Wanda Jean and recovering the .38 caliber revolver stashed nearby. Initially charged with shooting with intent to kill, Wanda’s legal peril escalated dramatically just two hours after her capture. At the age of 29, Gloria Gene Leathers succumbed to her injuries. The charge was immediately upgraded to homicide.
To understand the sheer magnitude of Wanda Jean Allen’s path to the execution chamber, investigators had to look deep into her past—a past defined by tragedy, violence, and profound intellectual limitations. As a child, Wanda frequently took on the burden of feeding her impoverished family. When resources were scarce, she resorted to stealing food and cash, bringing her to the attention of juvenile authorities at a remarkably young age.
But her struggles were not purely socioeconomic. At the tender age of 12, Wanda was struck by a truck, sustaining a severe head injury that left her completely unconscious. Just two years later, at 14, she was violently stabbed in the head. Despite these massive traumas to her developing brain, the medical and educational systems utterly failed her. No comprehensive neurological tests were ever administered to evaluate the long-term cognitive damage she had undoubtedly suffered.
It wasn’t until she was 15 years old that a psychologist finally evaluated her, discovering significant signs of intellectual disability. Wanda’s IQ hovered around 69, placing her in a category of severe cognitive impairment. The psychologist strongly urged a full neurological workup, but the recommendation was ignored. She slipped seamlessly through the cracks of a broken system.
Dropping out of school, Wanda’s life devolved into a cycle of theft and incarceration. By the time she reached her early twenties, she possessed a lengthy criminal record, a notoriously volatile temper, and a firearm. Tragically, Gloria Leathers was not her first victim. In 1981, Wanda shot and killed her roommate and former romantic partner, Dedra Pettis. Wanda claimed self-defense, alleging Dedra’s boyfriend had brandished a weapon from 30 feet away. However, forensic evidence, including powder burns and facial bruising, indicated Dedra had been pistol-whipped and shot at point-blank range. Despite the evidence of a targeted execution, prosecutors offered Wanda a shockingly lenient plea deal: manslaughter with a four-year sentence. She accepted, serving less than two years before walking free.
When Wanda stood trial for the murder of Gloria Leathers, her past violently collided with her present. Her court-appointed attorney had absolutely no experience with death penalty litigation. When he discovered the state was seeking execution, he desperately petitioned the presiding judge for co-counsel or a public defender with capital experience. The judge flatly denied the request, refusing to allow the attorney to withdraw from the case. Armed with a meager $800 budget provided by Wanda’s impoverished family, the defense was doomed from the start.
The jury did not view Wanda Jean as an emotionally fraught woman acting out of panicked desperation; they saw a repeat offender who had already been granted a second chance after killing a former partner. They found her guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced her to death.
Years later, during the appeals process, her new legal team attempted to introduce her childhood IQ score of 69, a factor that could have legally precluded her from execution due to intellectual disability. However, during her initial trial, Wanda, likely driven by a misguided sense of pride and an inability to comprehend the legal ramifications, had lied on the stand. She falsely claimed she had graduated high school and held a medical assistant certificate. The prosecution wielded these lies like a weapon, successfully arguing that she was not intellectually disabled, but rather deeply manipulative.
Having exhausted all appeals, Wanda Jean Allen spent 12 years on death row. During this time, she underwent a profound personal transformation, becoming a born-again Christian. Her spiritual advisors noted her desperate search for redemption and connection.
On January 11, 2001, the state of Oklahoma carried out the sentence. In the viewing room, separated by thick tinted glass, stood 24 relatives of the victims. Some mourned Gloria Leathers, others wept for Dedra Pettis. Wanda Jean requested a shockingly simple final meal: a single bag of potato chips.
Strapped securely to the execution gurney, draped in a white sheet over her gray inmate uniform, Wanda appeared remarkably calm. As a chaplain read solemn verses from the Bible, the warden asked for her final words. Her voice was quiet but unwavering as she echoed the dying words of Jesus Christ: “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. That’s it. Thank you.” In a final, inexplicable moment of defiance, she smiled at her attorney through the glass and stuck out her tongue.
At 9:21 p.m., Wanda Jean Allen was pronounced dead at the age of 41. She made grim history as the first Black woman executed in the United States in over half a century, and the first woman executed in the history of Oklahoma.
The Sunday School Teacher’s Sinister Betrayal: Marilyn K. Plants
While Wanda Jean Allen’s crime was an explosion of deeply damaged, toxic passion, the case of Marilyn K. Plants was a masterpiece of cold, calculating, and greed-driven betrayal. After spending 12 years on Oklahoma’s death row, Marilyn faced the lethal injection needle. To comprehend how a church-going, suburban mother orchestrated such a macabre nightmare, we must revisit a sweltering summer morning in August 1988, when the charred remains of a pickup truck were discovered in a remote, desolate area of northeast Oklahoma City.
James Earl Plants was a 33-year-old dedicated husband and father. He worked grueling, exhaustive overnight shifts at the Daily Oklahoman, sacrificing his sleep and health to provide a comfortable life for his family. On the evening of August 25, 1988, he kissed his wife goodbye and headed out for another long night of labor. Back at their home, Marilyn tenderly tucked their two young children—nine-year-old Trina and seven-year-old Christopher—into their beds. To any outsider, the Plants household was a sanctuary of normal, quiet, American domesticity.
But Marilyn was harboring a monstrous secret. She was not the devoted wife she pretended to be. Hours before her husband left for work, Marilyn had quietly picked up 17-year-old William Clifford Bryson and his teenage friend, Clinton McKimble. The trio spent the early evening aimlessly driving around the city. Marilyn casually withdrew funds from her family bank account, purchasing beer and crack cocaine to fuel the teenagers. They waited in the shadows until James departed for his shift.
Once the coast was clear, the unlikely trio returned to the family home. The two teenage boys drank heavily and smoked crack in the front living room while Marilyn finished her motherly duties before retiring to bed around 10:30 p.m. This was not an isolated incident. Marilyn, a woman nearly twice Clifford’s age, had initiated a disturbing and highly inappropriate affair with the aimless 17-year-old months prior. While her husband worked tirelessly to pay the mortgage, Marilyn played the generous benefactor to her teenage lover, allowing him to drive her vehicles, supplying him with cash for narcotics, and treating her home as his personal playground.
The illicit affair quickly bypassed mere recklessness and descended into lethal conspiracy. Marilyn wanted her husband dead, and the deeply manipulated, drug-addled Clifford was more than willing to serve as her executioner. Marilyn falsely convinced Clifford that James was physically abusive and that she was a desperate woman trapped in a dangerous marriage. A standard divorce was never an option for Marilyn; she was singularly focused on a massive, $300,000 payout from her husband’s life insurance policy. To secure that wealth, James had to be completely erased from existence.
The conspirators brainstormed multiple murderous plots. Initially, Marilyn provided Clifford with a loaded firearm, instructing him to shoot James. Instead, the teenager pawned the weapon for quick drug money. They then conceptualized an ambush, planning to lure James home early while the teenagers waited in the darkness, but the timing fell through. Marilyn even suggested a staged boating accident, where the men would push James into a lake to drown.
Despite these failures, Marilyn’s bloodlust never waned. By the early hours of August 26, a new, brutally simple plan was put into motion. Just after 4:00 a.m., James returned home from his exhausting shift. He walked into his kitchen, carrying groceries and whistling a lighthearted tune, entirely unaware of the predators lurking in his own home.
As James set down the groceries, Clifford blindsided him from the shadows, swinging a heavy baseball bat with devastating force directly into the back of James’s skull. The hardworking father staggered, bleeding heavily, and cried out desperately for his wife to help him. Marilyn never answered his pleas. She remained silently in her bedroom, listening to the slaughter she had orchestrated.
Clinton quickly joined the assault. The two teenagers rained relentless, sickening blows upon James until his body collapsed onto the kitchen floor. Incredibly, despite the catastrophic head trauma, James was still clinging to life. The attackers dragged his broken body out of the house and unceremoniously dumped him into the bed of his own pickup truck.
It was at this moment that Marilyn finally emerged from the bedroom. Stepping over the massive pools of her husband’s blood, she stared coldly at the battered man she had once vowed to cherish. Evaluating the grotesque scene, she casually remarked that the murder was entirely too messy. “His head’s busted open. It’s not going to look like an accident,” she coldly instructed her teenage accomplices. “Burn him.”
Following her horrific directive, Clifford and Clinton drove James’s pickup truck to a deserted stretch of rural road. They hauled his limp, agonizingly injured body into the driver’s seat, slumping him over the steering wheel. Clinton initially attempted to ignite the gas tank with a flaming rag, but the fire failed to catch. Frustrated, Clifford retrieved a canister of gasoline, soaking the interior of the cab and the area surrounding the truck before striking a match.
The vehicle erupted into a massive, roaring inferno. As the teenagers sped away from the scene, they glanced back and witnessed a sight that would haunt them forever. James Plants, utilizing the very last reserves of his dying strength, was attempting to sit upright. He was still conscious and alive as the flames consumed him.
Back at the house, Marilyn was demonstrating a chilling lack of emotional distress. She had already begun meticulously scrubbing her husband’s blood from the linoleum floors. When the teenagers returned, she ordered them to strip off their blood-soaked garments, providing them with clean clothes that belonged to the very man they had just butchered. She carefully bagged the evidence, instructing them to dispose of it far from the property to ensure no forensic traces led back to her immaculate suburban life.
Operating on a toxic adrenaline high, the teenagers later stopped at a convenience store, using cash stolen from James’s wallet to purchase sandwiches and drinks. They casually visited a friend’s house, openly bragging about the murder as if it were a thrilling adventure. When the friend inquired about the safety of Marilyn’s children, Clifford callously noted that the kids had slept peacefully just a few feet away from the horrific bludgeoning.
At 5:15 a.m., local firefighters discovered the smoldering wreckage of the pickup truck. Inside the charred cab, slumped over the wheel with his left foot desperately stretched toward the open door, was the unrecognizable body of James Plants. He had tried to crawl out of the inferno but failed. Dental records were required to confirm his identity.
The police investigation moved with blistering speed. The rumors of Marilyn’s deeply inappropriate affair with the teenager surfaced almost immediately. When brought in for intense questioning, Clifford’s bravado shattered. He confessed to the brutal killing, leaning heavily into Marilyn’s fabricated narrative of domestic abuse to justify his actions.
Initially, Marilyn’s carefully crafted persona as a terrified, abused wife held strong. Even members of James’s own family initially believed her, unable to fathom that the quiet, smiling Sunday school teacher could be the architect of such an atrocity. They believed she must have been a victim of manipulation.
However, the agonizing truth was eventually laid bare by diligent detective work. Marilyn had not been a passive victim; she was the puppet master. She had promised Clifford that the moment James was dead, they would collect the life insurance, flee the state, and begin a luxurious new life together. Clinton McKimble accepted a plea deal, taking a life sentence in exchange for testifying against both Marilyn and Clifford. On the witness stand, he exposed every horrific detail: the planning, the brutal beating, the agonizing fire, and Marilyn’s cold, calculating instructions.
In March 1989, the jury convicted both Marilyn and Clifford, sentencing them both to death. Clifford was executed on June 15, 2000, expressing deep remorse to the victim’s family in his final statement.
For 12 years, Marilyn fought her sentence from her prison cell, desperately attempting to shift the blame to a deeply troubled childhood. Her sisters testified to a background of severe poverty and an aggressively strict, controlling father, painting Marilyn as a lifelong victim of male dominance who merely traded her father’s abuse for her husband’s. Despite these late revelations, the profound cruelty and premeditation of her crime overshadowed any plea for mercy.
At her final clemency hearing, Marilyn tearfully asked to have her life spared, claiming a renewed purpose in life after reconnecting with her daughter, Trina, who was only nine when her father was brutally murdered. Trina, sitting in the audience weeping, had submitted a pre-recorded video statement that shattered the room. “I want the chance to forgive her,” Trina’s voice trembled. “But I can’t bear the thought of finally having a relationship with a mother I haven’t seen in 13 years, only to watch her die in three weeks. That makes me cringe.” Despite the emotional plea, the board voted unanimously to proceed with the execution.
Marilyn consumed a massive final meal of Mexican fast food before being strapped to the gurney on May 1, 2001. In her final moments, she displayed no fear and offered absolutely no apology for the agonizing murder of her husband. Instead, she leaned into religious fervor, stating calmly: “What God has given me is love, and I have overcome the world. And I just want you all to know that nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of God.” She urged her family to become “born again” if they wished to see her in the afterlife. At 9:11 p.m., Marilyn K. Plants was pronounced dead at the age of 40.
The Matriarch of Malice: Lois Nadine Smith
The final woman executed in this grim Oklahoma trilogy represents perhaps the most visceral and deeply disturbing case of the three. After spending 19 agonizing years on death row, Lois Nadine Smith—infamously known in her community as “Mean Nadine”—was executed by lethal injection. To fathom how a 42-year-old mother orchestrated a torture session that ended in a gruesome execution, we must travel back to the sweltering morning of July 4, 1982.
Cynthia “Cindy” Lucille Bailey was an incredibly vulnerable 20-year-old woman. Struggling with the heavy burdens of addiction and the harsh realities of raising a child alone, she was temporarily residing in a cheap motel in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Early that morning, she received an unexpected phone call from her volatile ex-boyfriend, James Gregory Smith, who went by Greg. He requested a meeting, claiming they needed to clear up some lingering misunderstandings from their toxic relationship.
Cindy, hoping to permanently close a painful chapter of her life, agreed to the conversation. However, when the vehicle arrived to pick her up, Greg was not alone. Behind the steering wheel sat his fiercely protective mother, Lois Nadine Smith, and in the back seat sat an associate named Teresa Baker.
Initially, the atmosphere in the car was tense but manageable. However, as the vehicle drove further away from the safety of the motel, the tone shifted drastically. Casual small talk morphed into aggressive, sideways interrogations. Suddenly, Nadine turned violently in the driver’s seat, her voice dripping with venom. She openly accused Cindy of plotting to have Greg assassinated.
Cindy was completely blindsided and deeply terrified. She desperately denied the horrific accusation, repeating over and over that the rumors were entirely fabricated. But Nadine was not seeking the truth; she was seeking a target for her rage. As Cindy’s panicked denials grew louder, Nadine’s fury exploded.
Without a shred of hesitation, Nadine lunged across the center console, wrapping her hands viciously around the young woman’s throat. Cindy gasped, thrashing wildly to break the suffocating grip. But the physical assault was merely the terrifying prelude. Reaching into Cindy’s own purse, Nadine produced a sharp knife and plunged the blade directly into Cindy’s neck. Blood immediately sprayed across the interior of the vehicle. Astonishingly, the car continued speeding down the highway, the other passengers watching the gruesome violence unfold without making a single attempt to intervene.
Bleeding profusely and paralyzed by fear, Cindy was trapped as the vehicle eventually pulled up to a dilapidated trailer in Gans, Oklahoma. The property belonged to Jim Smith, Nadine’s ex-husband and Greg’s father. Jim was home with his new wife, Robin. Sensing the horrific aura radiating from the new arrivals, Robin immediately fled the property, wanting no part in the nightmare that was about to unfold.
Inside the claustrophobic confines of the trailer, the atmosphere descended into pure, unadulterated sadism. Nadine forcefully shoved the bleeding, terrified Cindy into a worn recliner. Brandishing a loaded pistol, Nadine began to pace the floor like a twisted ringmaster, barking cruel threats and feeding off the palpable terror radiating from the young mother.
Then, the torture reached its crescendo. Nadine aimed the weapon and pulled the trigger. The first bullet missed, burying itself into the fabric of the chair mere inches from Cindy’s head—a terrifying warning shot. But the subsequent shots were deliberate and deadly. Nadine fired repeatedly, striking Cindy five times in the chest and head.
Cindy collapsed onto the dirty trailer floor, bleeding catastrophically but still miraculously clinging to life. It was here that the true depth of the family’s depravity was revealed. While Cindy gasped for her final breaths, Greg calmly stepped forward, took the empty revolver from his mother, and meticulously reloaded it. As he did this, Nadine leaped into the air, bringing both of her feet crashing down onto Cindy’s wounded neck, stomping the dying woman with unfathomable brutality.
The most chilling detail recalled by witnesses was the sound echoing through the trailer: Nadine was laughing. She found genuine joy in the absolute destruction of the young woman. Once the weapon was fully reloaded, Nadine snatched it back from her son, stood over Cindy’s broken body, and fired four more bullets at point-blank range into her head and back.
In a pathetic, highly transparent attempt to cover their tracks, the mother and son dragged the mutilated corpse into a bedroom, forcibly placing the revolver into Cindy’s lifeless hand to stage a suicide. They then walked out the door, leaving the young mother to bleed out on the cold floor like she was nothing more than discarded garbage.
The origins of this monstrous cruelty lay deep within Nadine’s history. Born in 1940, she was raised in a harsh, unforgiving environment that hardened her soul. By her teenage years, her aggressive, cruel demeanor earned her the moniker “Mean Nadine”—a title that served as a legitimate warning to anyone who crossed her path. Her entire universe revolved entirely around her only child, Greg. By her mid-forties, she was a heavy-drinking, domineering force in her community, maintaining a terrifying, iron-fisted grip on anything that threatened her son.
Greg, at 19, was deeply entrenched in a dangerous underworld of stolen firearms and narcotics. His brief, explosive relationship with Cindy Bailey ended disastrously. When the baseless street rumors began whispering that Cindy wanted Greg dead, Nadine didn’t bother to search for evidence. The rumor became her gospel, and that gospel demanded a blood sacrifice. She had openly bragged around town about her intentions to “teach Cindy a lesson,” yet no one dared to intervene or warn the young woman.
The investigation into Cindy’s murder was remarkably brief. Neighbors had heard the barrage of gunfire and witnessed the vehicle fleeing the scene. When investigators brought Nadine in for questioning, they expected denials and legal maneuvering. Instead, they were met with a chilling wall of remorseless pride.
Leaning across the interrogation table, Nadine looked the detectives dead in the eye and confessed immediately. “Yes, I shot her,” she stated with a flat, terrifyingly calm voice. She offered no apologies, framing the gruesome execution as a righteous justification to protect her son. Greg, sitting nearby, fully admitted to his active participation, confessing that he had reloaded the weapon while his mother stomped the victim.
The trial was a mere formality. The prosecution presented horrifying crime scene photographs depicting a young woman covered in severe bruises, a deep laceration across her throat, and nine massive bullet wounds. The defense’s desperate attempt to portray Nadine as a fearful, overprotective mother completely collapsed under the weight of the sheer, sadistic brutality of the stomping and the laughter.
The jury quickly found Lois Nadine Smith guilty of first-degree murder, sentencing her to death. Greg was convicted as a vital accomplice and sentenced to life in prison. Though he was paroled after serving 27 years, his freedom was marked by continuous, violent criminality. In 2014, he was arrested in Montana for tracking down another ex-girlfriend, holding her hostage in a motel room, and brutally beating her for two months before she managed to desperately call 911 for rescue. The cycle of terrifying violence he learned from his mother continued long after her incarceration.
For 19 years, “Mean Nadine” sat in the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, exhausting endless appeals based on claims of jury bias and mental incompetence. All were decisively rejected by the courts, up to the United States Supreme Court.
On the evening of December 4, 2001, her time finally ran out. Strapped to the gurney after consuming a massive final meal of barbecue ribs and strawberry banana cake, Nadine utilized her final moments to seek the absolution she had so violently denied Cindy Bailey. “To the family, I want to say I’m sorry for all the pain I caused you,” she stated softly. “Please forgive me. You must forgive to be forgiven.”
Watching through the heavy glass was Cindy’s daughter, Brandy Fields, who had been forced to grow up without a mother due to Nadine’s monstrous cruelty. While Brandy listened to the apologies, the words offered little true comfort. “It doesn’t bring back my mom,” Brandy stated through heavy tears. “I wish she thought of this before she did what she did.”
At 9:13 p.m., the lethal cocktail of drugs took full effect. Lois Nadine Smith was pronounced dead at the age of 61. She had been the first woman sentenced to death in Oklahoma following the reinstatement of capital punishment, and fittingly, she became the final woman executed by the state during that exceptionally dark and bloody year.
These three executions stand as a haunting testament to the darkest corners of human nature. From the tragic, system-failed desperation of Wanda Jean Allen, to the cold, calculated suburban butchery orchestrated by Marilyn K. Plants, and the sadistic, fiercely twisted maternal obsession of Lois Nadine Smith, the state of Oklahoma witnessed a spectrum of female criminality that remains unparalleled. The finality of the lethal injection needle may have closed their individual chapters, but the lethal legacies of their actions will echo endlessly through the families they destroyed and the dark annals of American criminal history.
