JUST IN: Richard Rojem Jr. Execution | Crime, Last Meal + Final Words | US Death Row Oklahoma –
Rojem has denied responsibility for killing his former stepdaughter Layla Cummings. The child’s mutilated and partially clothed body was discovered in a field in western Oklahoma near the town of Burns Flat. She had been stabbed to death. On June 27th, 2024, Richard Rojem Jr. was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma.
He was 66 years old. He had been on death row for nearly 39 years, longer than any other inmate in Oklahoma’s history. In this video, we’re going to find out exactly what happened the night a 7-year-old girl named Layla Dawn Cummings disappeared from her home. We’ll look at the crime, the arrest, the trial, and the decades-long legal battle that followed.
We’ll talk about the controversy surrounding his case, what his final meal was, and the last words he ever spoke. This is the full story of Richard Norman Rojem Jr. To understand how a man ends up on death row for nearly four decades, you have to go back to the beginning, not just to the night of the crime, but to the man himself.
Richard Norman Rojem Jr. was not a stranger to the criminal justice system before 1984. In 1978, 6 years before the murder of Layla Cummings, Rojem was convicted in Macomb County, Michigan, of raping two teenage girls. He faced three counts of criminal sexual conduct. The court sentenced him to two concurrent terms of six to 15 years in prison.
He served 4 years and was released on parole. When he got out, Rojem’s life took a turn that, in hindsight, carries an unsettling weight. While incarcerated, he had met the brother of a woman named Mindy Cummings. After his release, he pursued a relationship with Mindy and eventually married her. Mindy had two children from a previous relationship, a 9-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl named Layla Dawn Cummings.
The marriage, by all accounts, was troubled from the start. Court records would later reveal that Rojem was reportedly sexually violent toward Mindy. His relationship with her children was described as poor. And then, things escalated. Layla, this 7-year-old little girl, reportedly disclosed that her stepfather had been sexually abusing her.
That disclosure triggered serious consequences for Rojem. He was sent back to prison, this time for violating the conditions of his parole. Mindy filed for divorce. A restraining order was issued against Rojem. The divorce was finalized in May 1984. Two months later, Layla was dead. The night of July 6th, 1984, was a night like many others in Elk City, Oklahoma.
Mindy Cummings had left her two children at home, her 9-year-old son and 7-year-old Layla, while she went to work a late shift at a local fast-food restaurant. It was a normal thing for parents to do in small towns in the 1980s. The kids were together. The neighborhood was quiet, but sometime during that night, someone entered that apartment. Layla was taken.
When investigators later pieced together what happened, the picture that emerged was horrific. Layla had been kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and stabbed to death. Her body was then transported, driven approximately 15 miles from her home, and left in a plowed field near the town of Burns Flat in Washita County.
A farmer discovered her body the following morning, July 7th, 1984. She was still dressed in her mother’s nightgown. The community was shattered. The investigation began immediately. And it didn’t take long before law enforcement’s attention turned to one person, her recently divorced stepfather, Richard Rojem Jr. Investigators built their case around several pieces of physical evidence and circumstantial connections.
A fingerprint was discovered on a cup outside Layla’s apartment. That cup was traced back to a bar, a bar that Rojem had reportedly left just before Layla was taken. His prints on a cup outside her door. A condom wrapper was found near Layla’s body in that field. Investigators linked it to a used condom found inside Rojem’s bedroom.
Tire tracks near the scene were said to be consistent with Rojem’s vehicle. And multiple friends and associates of Rojem reportedly made statements that worked against him. Prosecutors also leaned heavily on motive. Their theory was direct. Rojem blamed Layla for everything that had gone wrong in his life.
Her disclosure of abuse had led to his return to prison, the breakdown of his marriage, and the restraining order that kept him from his ex-wife. In the prosecution’s telling, Layla had cost him, and he made her pay for it. Richard Rojem Jr. was arrested and charged with kidnapping, rape, and first-degree murder.
On July 15th, 1985, he was sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. The first trial took place in Washita County. The evidence was presented, arguments were made, and the jury, a group of ordinary men and women from the community went to deliberate. They came back in 45 minutes, guilty. Richard Rojem Jr. was convicted of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Laila Don Cummings and was sentenced to death.
For many people, that was the end of the story. Justice had been served. A monster had been caught and condemned. But the story was far from over. What happened next is one of the most unusual legal histories in Oklahoma death penalty cases. Over the next two decades, Rojem’s case would wind through the courts in ways that resulted in not one, not two, but three separate death sentences.
The first sentence overturned. Rojem had been on death row for nearly 15 years when a federal district court overturned his death sentence. Critically, the court did not overturn his conviction. It upheld his guilt, but it found that Rojem’s constitutional rights had been violated during sentencing. Specifically, the trial judge had failed to properly instruct the jury about the need to fully weigh mitigating evidence before choosing death.
The jury, it appeared, had operated under the assumption that if they found even one aggravating factor, death was essentially mandatory. That’s not how it works under the law. The jury needed to genuinely weigh both sides, and they weren’t told to do that clearly enough. A new sentencing trial was ordered.
The second sentence The DNA evidence emerges, then overturned again. By the time of the 2003 resentencing trial, something significant had happened. Rojem’s appellate attorneys had gained access to physical evidence from the original case and had it tested for DNA. What they found was striking. Scrapings taken from underneath Layla’s fingernails, material that had been collected at the time of her murder, produced a DNA profile, a male DNA profile, and that profile did not match Richard Rojem.
This was not a small detail. This was potentially someone else’s DNA found under the fingernails of a 7-year-old murder victim, suggesting she may have scratched or grabbed at whoever attacked her. The state’s own DNA analyst was called to testify at the re-sentencing trial and confirmed the finding. The jury heard it and still they sentenced Rojem to death again.
But that second death sentence was also reversed on appeal. This time, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found serious problems with how the jury had been selected. Defense attorneys had been forced to use up their challenges removing jurors with troubling connections to the case, including one man who had personally discussed the case with the local sheriff, someone he knew from church.
*PART 2*
With their challenges exhausted, the defense was left with a jury that the court found was skewed against Rojem. A third re-sentencing trial was ordered. The third sentence, 2007, this one holds. In 2007, in Custer County this time, a new jury heard the case. They sentenced Richard Rojem to death for the third time.
This sentence survived every subsequent appeal, and Rojem, who had now been in prison for over two decades, remained on death row as the legal process ground slowly forward. This case does not sit comfortably on one side of the line. On one side, you have three separate juries, three different groups of people from different counties across different decades, all arriving at the same conclusion, death.
You have physical evidence, fingerprints, condom wrappers, tire tracks, witness statements. You have a man with a prior conviction for raping two teenagers. You have motive. You have proximity. You have opportunity. On the other side, you have DNA evidence that points to someone else. Not once, not twice, three separate DNA tests failed to link Rojem to the crime.
The unknown male DNA profile found under Layla’s fingernails was never identified. No one ever explained who it belonged to. His attorney put plainly at the final clemency hearing, “If my client’s DNA is not present, he should not be convicted.” Rojem himself maintained his innocence from the first day to the last.
He never wavered on this in nearly four decades of incarceration. At the same time, the courts, including courts that were critical enough of the process to overturn his earlier sentences twice, never overturned his underlying conviction. Every review of the evidence upheld the finding of guilt. The courts, in essence, acknowledged the DNA question, but declined to let it undo the rest of the case.
Prosecutors also pushed back hard. They argued the DNA found under the fingernails didn’t prove someone else committed the crime. They pointed to the weight of the other physical evidence. They reminded the board of Rojem’s history, the prior rapes, the motive, the documented pattern of violence. During the clemency hearing, Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Crabbe told the parole board that the state had direct evidence linking Rojem to the crime, including the used condom with DNA analysis, the tire tracks, and statements from
multiple individuals in his life. This is a case where reasonable people, looking at the same facts, reach different conclusions. That tension never fully resolved. As Rojem’s execution date approached, his last realistic chance at survival was a clemency recommendation from the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board.
On June 17th, 2024, the board convened to hear arguments from both sides. Rojem appeared via video link from prison, wearing a red prison uniform, handcuffed. He was 66 years old. He had spent more years on death row than many people spend in an entire career. He looked into the camera and said, “I did not kidnap Layla. I did not rape Layla.
And I did not murder Layla.” He acknowledged his past. He didn’t try to pretend he had been a good person. He said, “I wasn’t a good human being for the first part of my life, and I don’t deny that. But I went to prison.” Then Layla’s mother, Mindy Lynn Cummings, spoke. She had carried this weight for 40 years.
She addressed the board and spoke about a little girl who never got to grow up. Everything she might have been was stolen from her one horrific night. She never got to be more than the precious 7-year-old that she was. And so she remains in our hearts, forever seven. The board deliberated. It took them less than 1 minute.
The vote was five to zero against clemency. Richard Rojem would not have his sentence commuted. His execution was confirmed for June 27th, 2024. In the days leading up to his execution, Rojem did not file any last-minute requests for a stay. He did not make any final legal moves. He had said his goodbyes. His spiritual adviser, Reverend Master Daishin Yalon, a member of the Shasta Abbey Buddhist Monastery, was with him in those final days.
Rojem had converted to Zen Buddhism during his decades of incarceration. It had become a central part of who he was. He had even taken the Buddhist name Daiji. On the evening of Wednesday, June 26th, 2024, the night before his execution, Richard Rojem Jr. was served his last meal. At 5:48 p.m., the Oklahoma Department of Corrections brought him a small Little Caesars pizza, double cheese, double pepperoni, eight salt packets, eight crushed red pepper packets, a bottle of Vernors ginger ale, two cups of vanilla ice cream, and a large Styrofoam cup. That
was it. A simple meal. The kind of meal you might order on a Friday night when you don’t feel like cooking. He ate it. And then the night passed. At 10:03 a.m. on June 27th, 2024, the execution began. Richard Rojem Jr. was strapped to a gurney inside the execution chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
An intravenous line had been inserted into his tattooed left arm. His spiritual adviser, Reverend Yalon, was present in the room. The friends who had stood by him during his years in prison watched tearfully from the witness room next door. Two Buddhists prayed over him. The first drug, the sedative midazolam, began to flow.
Before it did, the question was asked, the standard solemn question they ask every condemned person in that room. “Do you have any last words?” Rojem looked briefly toward the witnesses watching from behind the glass, and he said, “I don’t. I’ve said my goodbyes.” Five words. At 10:08 a.m., he was declared unconscious. At 10:16 a.m.
, the doctor entered the chamber, checked for a pulse. Richard Norman Rojem Jr. was pronounced dead. He was 66 years old. He had been incarcerated for 39 years. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond released a statement shortly after. “Justice for Layla Cummings was finally served this morning with the execution of the monster responsible for her rape and murder.
Layla’s family has endured unimaginable suffering for almost 40 years. My prayer is that today’s action brings a sense of comfort to those who loved her.” Layla’s mother, Mindy Lynn Cummings, issued her own statement, read aloud by Drummond. “We remember, honor, and hold her forever in our hearts as the sweet and precious 7-year-old she was.
Today marks the final chapter of justice determined by three separate juries for Richard Rojem’s heinous acts nearly 40 years ago when he stole her away like the monster he was. This was Oklahoma’s second execution of 2024. Rojem had been the longest-serving inmate on death row in the state’s history.
That record ended that Thursday morning just past 10:00 in a small room in McAlester. Layla Dawn Cummings was 7 years old when she was taken from her home in the middle of the night, she never turned eight. She never had a birthday party after that. Never went back to school. Never grew up, fell in love, had children of her own. Her mother described her as forever seven.
And that is the truth of it. Frozen in time. A little girl in her mother’s nightgown found in a field at sunrise. Her case took 40 years to reach its legal conclusion. 40 years of trials, appeals, retrials, DNA tests, court orders, parole hearings, and a final five-word goodbye from the man convicted of killing her.
Whether justice was fully served, whether the right man died in that chamber, is a question this case cannot entirely silence. So, I want to leave you with this. If you were on that parole board, having heard everything, the three convictions, the DNA, the fingerprint, the condom wrapper, the prior crimes, the motive, all of it laid out in front of you.
Would you have voted to spare his life? Let me know in the comments. And as always, thank you for watching.
