This week, the Alabama Supreme Court approved the execution by nitrogen hypoxia of Carey Dale Grayson, who was convicted in 1994 of kidnapping and murdering a hitchhiker.
If successful, this will be the third nitrogen hypoxia execution in the United States. To date, Alabama is the only state in the U.S. to have carried out an execution using this method. The first was Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was executed in January. The second such execution is scheduled for Alan Eugene Miller between midnight on September 26 and midnight on September 27.
According to court records, Grayson was one of four men convicted of torturing and murdering Vicki Lynn DeBlieux before she was thrown off a cliff. Grayson, a teenager at the time, is now 49. Grayson’s execution has not yet been set, but it could be the fourth this year.
According to court documents, on the evening of February 21, 1994, four teenagers, including Grayson, Kenny Loggins, Trace Duncan and Louis Mangione, all of whom had been drinking alcohol and taking drugs, saw DeBlieux hitchhiking on I-59 at the Trussville exit in Jefferson County. They offered to take her to Louisiana; instead, they took her to a wooded area under the guise of picking up another vehicle.
According to court documents, after arriving in the area, they all got out of the vehicle and began drinking. Grayson and the others threw bottles at Deblieux, who ran away from them. They threw her to the ground and began kicking her repeatedly. When they realized she was still alive, one of them stood on her throat, supported by Grayson, until she gargled blood and said, “Okay, I’m going to celebrate,” and then died.
The group then loaded her body and luggage into the back of a pickup truck and threw Deblieux over the edge of Bald Rock Mountain. This was after they removed her clothing and a ring and “played with her corpse,” according to court documents. After taking one of their squad members home, the remaining group returned to the body, where they began “mutilating the corpse by stabbing and cutting it 180 times, removing part of a lung, and severing her fingers and thumb.”
“The medical examiner found the following injuries: nearly every bone in her skull was broken, every bone in her face was broken at least once, lacerations to her face above these fractures, a missing tooth, left eye was collapsed, right eye had a hemorrhage, tongue was discolored, 180 stab wounds (postmortem), two large lacerations to her chest, her left lung had been removed, and all of her fingers and both thumbs were severed,” the court documents state. It goes on to say, “The medical examiner believed the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head and that she was alive during the beating.”
At an appeal hearing, Grayson admitted throwing a beer bottle at DeBlieux but denied involvement in the mutilation.
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