Poplar Bluff killer executed

POTOSI, Mo. -- Over the 19 years since Kenneth Kenley killed one of her sons in a crime rampage lasting several hours, Jackie Felts kept a scrapbook about the case, clinging to hope of watching the killer's death sentence carried out.

The Poplar Bluff woman heralded Jan. 7, when Kenley's execution was set. Finally, a surviving son says she believed, two decades of torment of hearing so much about the killer and so little about her slain son Ronald would end with Kenley's last breath.

But murderer outlasted mother, who died Jan. 22 at 68 when her heart gave out in her home. She never got to early Wednesday, when something she pined for so long took just two minutes in a sterile prison death chamber.

Ronald Felts' widow, now remarried, and their two grown daughters looked on as Kenley, 42, got three lethal doses of drugs at the Potosi Correctional Center.

To Sam Felts, his late mother was there in spirit.

"Did she die heartbroken? Probably," Sam Felts, who did not witness the execution, said hours earlier.

"But granted, she would have wanted to be there to see him die."

Sam Felts said he'd be stunned if Kenley offered any remorse for killing his brother, 27, during a bullet-filled January 1984 night that left two other people wounded in and around the southeast Missouri town of Poplar Bluff.

And Kenley -- the man who told police when arrested, "I hate people. People get on my nerves" -- offered no apologies. He snubbed requests for interviews. His final statement was a few sentences of love for three of the five people he picked to watch him die.

And while strapped to the gurney, Kenley kept his head tilted toward his witnesses, never looking at the Felts' family's representatives as he mouthed something to his friends and nodded after one of them said through the glass, "I love you."

Then the drugs flowed, and his mouth went agape as he slipped out of consciousness. Two chest heaves later, he was gone.

"Granted, I believe in rehabilitation," said Sam Felts, now 44 and managing a supermarket in Missouri's Bootheel. "But with this guy, there was no chance."

Kenley's backers argued as much with a different spin, saying his violence -- some say evil -- was mental illness cultivated by years of abuse from a father unchecked by a mother who abandoned the family when Kenley was just 5.

Among other things, his attorneys argued in 11th-hour appeals, Kenley was too mentally unfit to be executed.

But Kenley's fate was sealed a little more than an hour before he died, when the U.S. Supreme Court and Gov. Bob Holden refused to intervene. Lower federal courts had done the same hours earlier.

Sam Felts, who had planned to witness the execution to support his mother but backed out after her death, said Kenley's departure meant the family could move on.

"Anywhere he goes, he's put fear in people's lives," Felts said. "It's unbelievable that people would stand up for him in court and say he's a good guy who just had a bad life."

Those Kenley chose to watch him die declined to comment afterward, as did the people there on the victim's behalf.

Kenley became the first Missouri inmate executed this year and the 60th since the state's 1989 reinstatement of the death penalty.

Kenley shot Ronald Felts in the head during a holdup of a rural Poplar Bluff tavern where the victim was playing pool with friends.

Earlier that night, Kenley robbed a Poplar Bluff liquor store, then fled with a hostage he shot in the back as she jumped from their moving car.

When he later stormed the former Blue Moon tavern and ordered Felts and others there to hit the floor, Kenley shouted, "I mean business. I'll kill you just like I'm going to kill him." He then shot Felts dead with his .38-caliber pistol.

Kenley shot the bartender in the jaw and put his pistol to a teenager's forehead. When he tried to shoot an abducted woman as she fled, his pistol wouldn't fire.

During a motel holdup later that night, Kenley aimed at the owner but fled when he resisted -- and after his gun again failed.

Kenley exchanged gunfire with police in Arkansas and eventually surrendered, telling officers who arrested him, "You all were lucky."