Oklahoma veteran is executed for a 2001 murder. His final plea from death row: ‘I am not guilty of shooting anyone’

73-year-old Air Force veteran and death row inmate James Dwight Pavatt was executed on Thursday by lethal injection for the murder of his friend, 39-year-old advertising executive Rob Andrew, in November 2001. Andrew was the husband of Pavatt’s girlfriend, Brenda Andrew.

The Frontier reported that the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board rejected Pavatt’s clemency appeal in October. In his appeal, Pavatt maintained that he was only guilty of falling in love and having an affair, adding, “I am not guilty of shooting anyone.”

Pavatt’s last meal consisted of a strawberry milkshake and a barbecue dinner featuring three meats: smoked chicken, smoked brisket, and pulled pork, per ABC. He was pronounced dead at 10:12 a.m.

Pavatt helped his girlfriend’s husband get an $800,000 life insurance policy

Rob and Brenda Andrew had separated and were in the middle of a divorce when she started dating Pavatt. At the time, Pavatt worked as an insurance salesman and helped Rob Andrew obtain a $800,000 life insurance policy.

In October and November 2001, Rob Andrew filed a series of reports with the Oklahoma police, as detailed by the Oklahoman. In the first, Andrew reported that he suspected Pavatt had cut his car’s brake lines and tried to lure him onto the highway. The second report, filed on November 2, states that Andrew suspected his wife and Pavatt were conspiring to murder him to collect his life insurance.

Weeks later, on November 20, Rob Andrew was shot twice in the garage of the home he previously shared with his estranged wife. He was there to pick up the couple’s two children for Thanksgiving. Brenda Andrew suffered a superficial gunshot wound in her upper left arm, later telling police that two masked intruders murdered her husband.

Brenda Andrew did not attend her husband’s funeral. Instead, she fled to Mexico with Pavatt and her two children. In February 2002, authorities arrested her and Pavatt when the pair were caught crossing the border back to the United States. In 2003, the pair were tried separately for first-degree murder, and both received the death sentence.

“There is absolutely no credible evidence that Jim shot and killed Andrew,” Pavatt’s attorney Hunter Labovitz told ABC in October. “The last thing they told the jury was that the last thing Rob Andrew saw was his wife standing over him with a rifle about to shoot him again.”

Prosecutors argued that Pavatt and Brenda Andrew conspired to murder her husband to collect the $800,000 life insurance payout, for which Brenda was named a trustee. “It’s hard to imagine that two individuals work so closely together to commit premeditated murder,” said Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Crabb. “They are truly equally capable.”

“Jim was having an affair with Brenda before the crime,” Labovitz added. “We don’t dispute that. But how does that prove that Jim was present at the crime scene and shot and killed Rob Andrew?”

While Pavatt’s attorneys failed to secure clemency before his execution, another Oklahoma man, Richard Glossip, was released from jail in May this year. Glossip spent nearly three decades on death row and survived nine scheduled execution dates. Brenda Andrew is the only woman on Oklahoma’s death row. Her execution has yet to be scheduled.