(CNN) -- An Ohio inmate, convicted of killing and dismembering a 22-year-old woman in 1991, was executed Tuesday using a new, untested one-drug method of lethal injection, state officials said.
Kenneth Biros, 51, was pronounced dead at 11:47 a.m. at a prison in Lucasville, Ohio, the state attorney general's office said in a written statement.
His last words, according to Department of Rehabilitation and Correction spokeswoman Julie Walburn, were: "Sorry from the bottom of my heart. I want to thank all of my family and friends for my prayers and who supported and believed in me.
"My father, now I'm being paroled to heaven," Biros said, according to Walburn. "I will now spend all of my holidays with my lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Peace be with you all. Amen."
According to accounts of that evening, Engstrom's relative took her car keys, insisting that she not drive. Her relative knew Biros from the bar, and when Biros offered to intervene, the relative trusted him enough to take her out for coffee to help sober her up. Biros was supposed to bring her back to the bar, but they never returned. The relative assumed that Biros had driven her home instead.
But Engstrom never did go home. After learning about the night before, her husband paid Biros a visit. Biros had a cut over an eye, as well as cuts and abrasions on his hands, which he explained that he'd gotten in two separate incidents. The cut on the eye, he said, had occurred while chopping wood, and the injuries to his hands had been caused from climbing through a window he'd broken after locking himself out of his house.
Biros first told Engstrom's husband that his wife had jumped from his car and ran off somewhere. He later told investigators that she had struck her head on railroad tracks and died from an accident after jumping from his car. In yet another version, he said that he had struck Engstrom with his car after she jumped out, while he was following her alongside railroad tracks.
He claimed that she began throwing rocks and swearing at him, so he stabbed her twice with a pen knife. Later, he said, he cut her up and buried her body parts.
In actuality, he had cut off her head and right breast, and eviscerated her naked torso -- removing her anus, rectum, bowels, bladder, and sex organs. The part of his story that he seemed truthful about was that she had died near the railroad tracks -- detectives found her intestines, her coat, and a shoe in marshland that bordered railroad tracks, along with a lot of blood, where instructed the cops to look. A portion of her liver was found inside the trunk of Biros's car, and additional body parts were discovered at another dumping site.
It was a pretty open and shut case. Engstrom's blood was found on his clothes, and he reportedly tried to rape her inside a concrete shed behind his house. An autopsy determined that she had suffered ninety-one injuries and stab wounds before succumbing to death, and there were at least five knife wounds inflicted to her body after death.
December 8th, 2009, 03:13 PM
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