Grocery store killer faces death chamber

All of Mark Andrew Fowler's appeals had been rejected, and nothing stood in the way of his scheduled execution just after 9 p.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, a spokesman for state Attorney General Drew Edmondson said.

The 35-year-old's execution date came two days ahead of that of Billy Ray Fox, 34, Fowler's accomplice in an early morning robbery that left three employees of Wynn's IGA dead.

"I have always believed in an `eye for and eye,' " Linda Barrier, the sister of victim John Barrier, wrote to a clemency board earlier this month. "I have waited 15 years for the final chapter."

Fowler and Fox were arrested in Edmond the day after the July 3, 1985 murders of Barrier, 27, Rick Cast, 33, and Chumpon Chaowasin, 44. A teen-age girl found the three men lying face-down in a massive pool of blood in the store's back room.

Cast and Chaowasin died of shotgun wounds to their heads and Barrier had been beaten and stabbed. Police testified that the murderer couldn't have acted alone.

Fowler's father, Jim Fowler, planned to be within his son's view when state officials administer the lethal injection.

Jim Fowler has lived on both sides of the death penalty; first, as the father of a condemned inmate and secondly, as the son of a murder victim. Robert Miller Jr. spent 11 years on Oklahoma's death row before DNA evidence exonerated him in Anne Laura Fowler's death.

"If we had killed Mr. Miller you would never had known about him being innocent," said Jim Fowler, who believes the death penalty lowers citizens to a killer's level.

Catholic leaders, including Fowler's uncle, the Rev. Gregory Gier of Holy Family Cathedral in Tulsa, made pleas for his life before the state clemency board earlier this month.

Fowler had maintained he was a lookout during the murders, but he apologized to the victims' families at his clemency hearing.

"I'm not here to deny my involvement or participation because I was there and I was equally responsible for what happened," he said. "I cannot change the past or make the bad things disappear.

I apologize for what I have done and thank God for taking care of my family."

Fowler asked for two orders of onion rings, a cheeseburger, a bacon cheeseburger, a grilled chicken sandwich and a medium cherry limeade as his last meal.

Frank Cast, Rick Cast's brother, pointed to lives cut down by the two killers. All three victims were working at night and attending college by day, he wrote in a letter to the clemency board.

Grief took a toll on his mother, who watched as Fox and Fowler snickered and passed notes during their court proceedings, Frank Cast said.

"I believe to this date that Ricky's murder and the trial is what killed her," he wrote. "Our mother lingered on her death bed for 14 years, withering into a skeleton, waiting for justice to be carried out."

Fowler's execution is the fifth of eight scheduled through Feb.

1 in Oklahoma.

Death penalty opponents, who have gained momentum with national attention around Oklahoma's record January execution pace, found themselves looking for a new site in which to stage a protest Tuesday.

Kevin Acers, president of the Oklahoma City chapter of Amnesty International, said a homicide survivor's support group received the permit to stand outside the Governor's Mansion.