Feds Execute Man Who Thought He Killed 'Tinkerbell'

That was the name William LeCroy used for a former sitter who he thought put a hex on him
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Sep 23, 2020 8:33 AM CDT
Feds Execute Man Who Thought He Killed 'Tinkerbell'
On Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020, William Emmett LeCroy was the sixth federal death-row inmate executed this year at the US prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Another execution is scheduled for Thursday.   (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

The US government on Tuesday executed a former soldier who said an obsession with witchcraft led him to kill a Georgia nurse he believed had put a spell on him. William Emmett LeCroy, 50, was pronounced dead at 9:06pm EDT after receiving a lethal injection at the same US prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where five others have been executed in 2020 following a 17-year period without a federal execution. LeCroy broke into the Cherrylog, Georgia, mountain home of Joann Lee Tiesler on Oct. 7, 2001, and waited for her to return from a shopping trip. When she walked through the door, LeCroy struck her with a shotgun, bound, and raped her. He then slashed her throat and repeatedly stabbed her in the back. The AP reports LeCroy had known Tiesler because she lived near a relative’s home and would often wave to her as he drove by.

He later told investigators he’d come to believe she might have been his old babysitter he called Tinkerbell, who LeCroy claimed sexually molested him as a child. He had ruminated for days before the slaying about how Tiesler was Tinkerbell and that assaulting her would reverse a hex she put on him. After killing Tiesler, he realized that couldn’t possibly be true. On Tuesday, LeCroy's spiritual adviser, Sister Barbara Battista, stood a few feet away from him inside the chamber. When a prison official asked if he had any last words, LeCroy responded matter-of-factly: “Sister Battista is about to receive in the postal service my last statement." Lawyers had asked President Trump in a petition to commute LeCroy’s sentence to life in prison, saying that LeCroy’s brother, Georgia State Trooper Chad LeCroy, was killed during a routine traffic stop in 2010 and that another son’s death would devastate their family.

(More execution stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X