Daniel Lewis Lee
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Daniel Lewis Lee (31 January 1973 - 14 July 2020) was an American white supremacist executed for the 1997 murders of William Mueller and his family. Lee and his accomplice Chevie Kehoe had abducted, tortured and suffocated Mueller, his wife Nancy and their 8-year-old daughter Sarah.
Biography edit
Lee was born in Yukon, Oklahoma. He was abused and neglected as a child. On 24 July 1990, Lee got into a fight with a man named Joseph Wavra. Lee and another man knocked Wavra out and dragged him into a sewer, where he was stabbed to death. Lee then went through his pockets before disposing of a body. Lee was sentenced to five years imprisonment in return for testimony against his accomplice, who received life without parole.
Lee met Chevie Kehoe in 1995 and was recruited into a white supremacist group. In January 1996 Lee and Kehoe travelled to Arkansas. On 11 January they arrived at the house of gun dealer William Mueller, who Kehoe had robbed previously. The two of them entered the Mueller house disguised as police officers before waiting until the Mueller family returned, at which point they subdued and tied up Mueller and his wife Nancy. Lee and Kehoe interrogated William Mueller's 8-year-old step-daughter Sarah using a stun gun about the location of the family's cash, guns and ammunition. After finding $50,000 in cash and gold and $30,000 worth of firearms and firearm parts, they shot each of the three victims with the stun gun. They then placed plastic bags over their heads which they sealed with duct tape, suffocating them to death. They took the victims in Kehoe's vehicle to the Illinois Bayou, where they taped rocks to them and threw each family member into the swamp. Lee departed with $3,000 or $4,000 and a pistol. The bodies were discovered in Lake Dardanelle, Arkansas, in 1996.
On 4 February 1996, Kehoe confessed his involvement in the murders to his family. His mother confronted Lee, who also confessed after being told that Kehoe had implicated him. Meanwhile two acquaintances of Kehoe and Lee, Travis Brake and Sean Haines, were arrested and found to be in possession of guns taken from the Muellers, which they told police they had got from Kehoe and Lee. After being informed of this development both Kehoe and Lee fled the state. Lee moved to Oklahoma.
Soon after this, Kehoe, now in Wilmington, Ohio, was involved in a shootout with police officers after they asked to search his car at a traffic stop. When Kehoe's car was found and searched, several guns taken from the Mueller household were found. A hair similar to Daniel Lee's hair was found in one of the gun caps. Later Kehoe's brother, who had been present at the shootout, turned himself in to police with Kehoe's GMC truck because he was afraid that Kehoe would kill him. The truck's blue paint was found to be consistent with small specks of blue paint found on the duct tape used to suffocate the Mueller family. Kehoe was arrested on suspicion of murder and a storage unit he rented was searched, revealing it was used to store property stolen from the Mueller home covered in Kehoe and Lee's fingerprints.
Lee was arrested, and he and Kehoe were both charged with the murders of the Mueller family. Kehoe was also charged with crimes relating to the Ohio shootout. Both men were tried and convicted at separate trials. Lee was sentenced to death while Kehoe received three life sentences. An appeal by Lee arguing that Kehoe only getting life in prison while he got death was unjust, but this was rejected and he was scheduled for execution on 9 December 2019. His execution was stayed after all federal executions were suspended indefinitely because the use of the pentobarbital drug in lethal injections violated the Federal Death Penalty Act 1994. This was eventually overturned by the United States Supreme Court and Lee was executed by lethal injection on 14 July 2020, the first person executed by the US Federal government since Louis Jones in 2003.