Nolan ClayThe Oklahoman
Oklahoma is set to execute one of the nation's longest-serving death row inmates.
An admitted psychopath, Richard Norman Rojem Jr., has been on death row almost 40 years. He faces a lethal injection of three drugs for murdering a 7-year-old girl in 1984. He claims he is innocent.
The execution is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. Rojem, 66, has not filed any last-minute requests for stays.
The victim, Layla Dawn Cummings, was his former stepdaughter. She was raped before being fatally stabbed.
Rojem was sent to the penitentiary on July 15, 1985, but has not been under a death sentence the entire time. He was resentenced twice, in 2003 and 2007, after successful appeals. Each time, a jury chose the death penalty as punishment.
He has spent decades on death row largely because of those appeals. Also, when he finally exhausted all his appeals in 2017, executions were on hold in Oklahoma. Lethal injections resumed in Oklahoma in 2021.
How long have inmates been on death row in the United States?
The execution will come four months after the lethal injection for serial killer Thomas Eugene Creech was called off in Idaho because the medical team could not establish IV access. Creech has been on death row for more than 40 years for beating a fellow inmate to death with a battery-filled sock in 1981.
More: What went wrong in the 'botched' lethal injection execution of Thomas Eugene Creech?
The Death Penalty Information Center reported in 2021 that more than half of all prisoners sentenced at that time to death in the United States had been on death row for more than 18 years.
The Death Penalty Information Center identified the longest-serving death row inmate as Raymond Riles. He spent more than 45 years on death row in Texas for a 1974 murder, according to the nonprofit. He was never executed because of his mental issues and was finally resentenced to life in prison in 2021.
About Layla Dawn Cummings' murder
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 5-0 on June 17 to deny Rojem clemency. That vote means Gov. Kevin Stitt cannot commute his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
"I wasn't a great human being for the first part of my life," Rojem told the parole board. "And I don't deny that. But I went to prison. I learned my lesson. And I left all that behind.
"I did not kidnap Layla, I did not rape Layla, and I did not murder her."
The girl was abducted late July 6 or early July 7 in 1984 from an Elk City apartment while her mother was at work at a McDonald's restaurant. A farmer found her body on the morning of July 7 in a plowed field near Burns Flat.
Rojem, then 26, lived at the time in Burns Flat. He married the victim's mother, Mindy Cummings, while he was in prison in Michigan for sex offenses against two teenage girls, according to court records. She was the sister of his cellmate. He came to Oklahoma after being paroled in 1982.
He and Mindy Cummings had been divorced for about two months at the time of the murder. He had been seeking a reconciliation.
The FBI’s behavioral analysis unit did a profile on Rojem and found him to be a psychopath "who will not accept responsibility for his actions," Attorney General Gentner Drummond and his assistants told the parole board in a packet of information about his case.
Rojem himself had told a parole officer, "I may be a psychopath, but I’m not psychotic,” according to the packet.
In a twist, his clemency hearing revealed that Rojem has a girlfriend. An assistant attorney general played for the parole board a recording of a recent phone conversation with a woman identified only as his "paramour."
The parole board was played the recording as proof he indulges in sexual fantasies about children.
Demonstrations planned ahead of Richard Rojem's scheduled execution
Death penalty opponents plan to demonstrate outside the Governor's Mansion in Oklahoma City on Thursday morning.
"Oklahoma continues to carry out a publicly acknowledged deeply disturbing and flawed process of serial murder, executing one person after the other in rapid succession," said Elizabeth Overman, the vice-chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
