Executed White Supremacist Who Murdered an Entire Family | Daniel Lewis Lee: Final Meal & Last Words
The name Daniel Lewis Lee shows up over and over in some of the most violent crime stories in the United States. Lee wasn’t a confused man or someone who just took a wrong turn. He was a committed white supremacist [music] and his brutality kept getting worse. He was involved in murders, bombings, and acts of extreme cruelty.
A path that eventually ended with his federal execution. In this video, we’re going to look at his case, his trial, his execution, and even his last meal. [snorts] Daniel Lewis Lee grew up in a home marked by violence and abuse. His stepfather physically assaulted him for years, and he struggled with ADHD and early use of inhalance and drugs.
Over time, he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. His behavior became so problematic that his own mother repeatedly reported him to the authorities, including for attacking his stepsister, who had cerebral palsy. Even so, officials always ended up sending him back to the same environment they were trying to shield him from.
In 1988, when he was just [music] 15, Lee had his first serious run-ins with the law in Oklahoma [music] County. Within a few days, he was arrested twice for burglary and arson. 4 months later, he was in trouble again, facing three secondderee burglary charges and accusations of threatening a witness.
In early 1989, Lee was kicked out of a psychiatric hospital in Miami, Oklahoma [music] after repeatedly assaulting, intimidating, and harassing other patients. [music] That same year, he escaped custody twice, forcing authorities to move him across state lines, first to Kentucky and later to Arkansas.
During those escapes, he began spending time with members of the Ku Klux Clan. He claimed he had found a father figure in a veteran KKK member named Bobby [music] Norman. That relationship became his gateway into organized racist ideology and [music] Nazi symbolism. In the summer of 1990, still only 17, Daniel Lewis Lee became involved in his first murder in Oklahoma City. It happened at a party.
Lee attacked Joseph Joey Wra III, a 22-year-old man. He punched him in the face, kicked him while he was on the ground, and then handcuffed him. With help from his cousin, John David Patton, they dragged Wra to a storm drain. They forced him to undress and climb into the narrow tunnel. While Lee got rid of the clothes, Patton slit Wra’s throat [music] and stabbed him several times.
Later, Lee testified against his cousin and took a plea deal for robbery. The murder charge was dropped and he received a 5-year suspended sentence. Patton, however, was sentenced to life without parole. As a young adult, Lee fully immersed himself in white supremacist circles [music] in the Pacific Northwest.
He stood out for his white power tattoos, including a swastika on his neck, [music] and for his aggressive attitude. In early 1995, Lee was arrested again, this time for assaulting his girlfriend, Jennifer Given, in Bowling Green, Kentucky. [music] It started when she tore up a photograph of Adolf Hitler she found among his belongings.
Given would later say that Lee was violent throughout their entire relationship, even while she was pregnant. Sometime before April 1996, Lee lost his left eye after being hit with a pool ball during a bar fight in Spokane, Washington. The [music] fight reportedly started after he hurled a racist insult at a Native American man.
He refused to wear an eye patch and within his neo-Nazi circles, he eventually adopted the nickname Cyclops. It was around this time that Daniel Lewis Lee met Chvy Kiho, a white supremacist obsessed [music] with creating a white-only homeland in the Pacific Northwest. Inspired by Christian identity theology, Kho had formed a group called the Aryan People’s Republic.
Lee, already well known in neo-Nazi circles for [music] his aggressive behavior, white power tattoos, and missing eye fit right in. whose members committed robberies, kidnappings, murders, and arms trafficking to fund their cause and expand their movement. In January 1996, Lee and Kho left Washington and traveled to Arkansas.
On January 11th, they arrived at the home of 52-year-old William Frederick Mueller, a gun dealer who lived near Tilly and was known to keep large amounts of cash, weapons, and ammunition. Kiho had already robbed this same house in February 1995 with his father and believed there were more valuables to be found.
Wearing clothing similar to a police tactical team, Lee and Kho tried to enter the house, but the family wasn’t home. When the Muellers returned, the two men subdued William, his wife Nancy Anne Mueller, 28, and later questioned 8-year-old Sarah Elizabeth Powell, NY’s daughter. To force her to talk, they used a cattle prod. They were looking for money, weapons, and anything of value.
In the end, they found about $50,000 in cash and gold worth more than $100,000 today, plus another $30,000 in guns and gun parts. After that, Lee and Kho used a stun gun on their three victims and suffocated them with plastic bags sealed with tape. After the murders, the two men moved the bodies in a vehicle and drove more than 70 kilometers to the Illinois River.
They tied rocks to the bodies with duct tape and dumped them into the water. For his role, Lee received between 3,000 and $4,000 and a handgun. The bodies were found months later in late June 1996 in Lake Darnell near Russellville. On April 29th, 1996, Lee placed a nail-filled pipe bomb built by Kiho at the historic city hall in Spokane, Washington.
The blast, which went off at 3:00 a.m., shattered a window and scattered shrapnel across two blocks, but no one was injured. Later, Kho’s brother said the attack was meant to cause chaos in American society to advance their plan for a white-only homeland. On June 17th, 1997, Kho was arrested in Cedar City, Utah after a confrontation with police.
By then, Lee had returned to Oklahoma, where he worked for about a month in El Reno. Federal authorities monitored him for weeks until a joint operation by the FBI, ATF, and the Pope County Sheriff’s Office arrested him on September 24th, 1997 at his mother’s home in [music] Yukon.
After his arrest, Lee was taken to Pope County, Arkansas, where he was disciplined for assaulting other inmates. In February 1998, he tried to convince a cellmate to help him escape by smuggling in a hidden weapon inside a hollowedout radio, which was later discovered. Lee’s preliminary hearing for the murders took place on October 31st, 1997, and he was formally indicted on December 12th.
His joint trial with Kho began in November 1998 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. The murders of the Muller family were prosecuted as a federal crime because they were carried out to further an organized criminal enterprise. Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty for both men.
However, when Kho received life without parole, local prosecutors planned to pursue the same sentence for Lee. Even so, the Department of Justice in Washington, DC ordered them to continue seeking the death penalty. During the trial, [music] prosecutors presented multiple episodes of violence from Lee’s past, assaults against his mother, sister, and pregnant girlfriend along with the killing he committed as a teenager.
The defense [music] tried to frame his abusive childhood as a mitigating factor, but the government countered with evidence of numerous uncharged violent acts. On May 4th, 1999, a jury found Daniel Lewis Lee guilty of three counts of murder committed to benefit a criminal organization. 10 days later, on May 14th, the same jury voted for the death penalty, pointing to his long history of violence and previous convictions [music] as proof that he would remain dangerous even inside a federal prison.
Lee spent 21 years on federal death row in Teroot, Indiana, filing appeal after appeal. He exhausted all legal options on April 17th, 2017. But at that time, the federal government had an effective moratorium on executions. His situation changed when Attorney General William Bar ordered executions to resume in 2019, leading to a date being set for his [music] death.
In a rare turn of events, the victim’s family opposed the execution. Erlene Branch Peterson, [music] Nancy Mueller’s mother, and Sarah Powell’s grandmother publicly pleaded for Lee’s life. She said, “I can’t see how executing Daniel Lee will honor my daughter. She wouldn’t want it, and I don’t want it either.
” Lee was ultimately executed on July 14th at 7:36 a.m. at the Federal Prison in Teroot, Indiana. In the execution chamber, he was strapped to a gurnie, an oximter clipped to his left hand. His tattooed arms were secured with black straps, and IV lines ran from a metal panel [music] in the wall.
When asked if he had any last words, he lifted his head and said, “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man.” Daniel Lewis Lee received two intravenous doses of pentoarbital along with saline solution. The execution proceeded just 31 minutes after the final legal barrier was lifted.
At 8:07 a.m. on July 14th, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, was pronounced dead. An official announced the time and the curtain of the execution chamber was drawn closed. And that is the story of Daniel Lewis Lee. A brutal case of violence, white supremacy, and a federal execution surrounded by controversy. Now, tell me in the comments, what do you think about this monster and everything surrounding his case?
