The Heinous and the Cruel

The inventory of Vaughn Flournoy's getaway car was as follows: a box of personal files, a jewelry case and a dresser drawer full of pennies, all his grandmother's; one knife, a personal keepsake of his own; and one hysterical girlfriend, again his own.

The car itself, a burgundy 1990 Oldsmobile, also belonged to his grandmother, Lillian Thomas. But Thomas sat in her favorite blue chair in her Kansas City, Kansas, home, dead from gunshots to the head and body. Beside her was a bowl of melted ice cream that she had been eating when her grandson and housemate, thirty-year-old Vaughn Flournoy, walked into her living room, blocked the television and fired a .38-millimeter revolver in her direction.

The girlfriend, Cheryl Key, had been sitting next to Thomas in a matching chair when Flournoy stormed in. She jumped up to stop him, but Flournoy, a physically dominating presence with the thick build of a fullback, aimed the gun over her left shoulder and fired. Screaming for him to stop, Key ran into the kitchen and winced as Flournoy put two more bullets into Thomas' head and chest.

"I have to put her out of her misery," Flournoy yelled, and then he fired again.

When the shooting stopped, Key returned to the living room and saw Flournoy kneeling beside his grandmother, stroking her hair and talking to her as if she were still alive. He then turned his attention to Key and showed her a dagger.

"I'm going to take this with me, and when the police catch me, I'm going to shoot myself, and I want to be buried with my knife," Flournoy told Key.

For the next several hours, into the early morning of November 25, 1997, Flournoy drove around Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, with Key beside him. Key would later say he looked puzzled, as if he didn't fully understand what had happened. He rarely spoke, even when she screamed at him about the murder.

When morning came, Flournoy made four stops to exchange the pennies, but neither an acquaintance nor bank tellers would honor his request. After six or seven hours' driving around, they checked into the Admiral Motel, a dingy inn east of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. There, Key finally persuaded Flournoy to surrender to police. That evening, almost 24 hours after the slaying, Flournoy walked Key to a bus stop and let her go.

The next morning, Flournoy walked into the Kansas City, Kansas, police department. A detective approached and asked how he could help. Vaughn Flournoy said, "I killed my grandmother."

At his trial, Flournoy asked for leniency because his mother had introduced him to demonology and Satanism when he was nine years old, but the jury didn't buy it after hearing contradictory testimony. Convicted of first-degree murder, Flournoy received the toughest prison sentence possible in Kansas: life without chance of parole for forty years -- the "Hard Forty."

But in December 2001, the Kansas Supreme Court disagreed. While affirming Flournoy's conviction, the court took issue with the reasoning behind his sentence. As has been the case in the past, the phrase "heinous, atrocious and cruel," the linchpin of a Hard Forty sentence, was turned on its side. A new hearing for Flournoy March 15 will determine his sentence. It might also dictate the future application of the sentencing law.

Vaughn Flournoy's case was hardly the biggest news from the Kansas Supreme Court last December. Headlines instead went to State v. Kleypas, the high court's first opinion declaring Kansas' 1994 death penalty law constitutional.

But Kansas, even without a mandatory life sentence on its books, has never been big on capital punishment. Next to kill-happy Missouri, it's downright skittish. In all, Kansas has conducted 24 executions -- nine of which took place in the nineteenth century. The state's last executions were in 1965, when Richard Hickock, Perry Smith, James Latham and George York were hanged at the state penitentiary in Lansing.

Meanwhile, Missouri has executed 94 prisoners since 1937, and 70 men now sit on the state's death row.

Kansas' relatively narrow definition of a capital crime -- state law lists seven crimes eligible for the death penalty; Missouri lists fourteen -- makes the Hard Forty sentence the toughest punishment for most first-degree murders.

So while Kleypas may have been the most prominent Kansas Supreme Court decision last December, Flournoy's case is more relevant. Since the Hard Forty law took effect in 1990, the court has muddled through many Hard Forty appeals -- gruesome cases involving child-killers, vengeful lovers and ax murderers -- and returned varying opinions. At one point, the court issued a decision so controversial that the Kansas legislature changed the law. In 1998, a family of four was driving down a road in Topeka, Kansas, when they heard gunshots and saw a nearby driver fall out of his car.

The driver, Carlos Martinez, had made the mistake of offering a ride to his girlfriend's daughter and her boyfriend, Adrian "Angel" Lopez, after the young couple had spent a night arguing. When the fighting continued in the car, Lopez pulled a gun from his bag of clothes and began firing at Martinez, who fell out of the car's broken driver's-side door. The driverless car continued to move at about 35 miles an hour until it crossed into a parking lot and struck a building.