Capital attorneys with the Public Interest Litigation Clinic say they expect the Missouri Supreme Court to announce an execution date for Dennis Skillicorn, a 49-year-old inmate at the Potosi Correctional Center, of May 20, 2009. Skillicorn's previous execution date, August 27, 2008, was stayed after Skillicorn asserted that Potosi's warden was interfering with his council's attempts to interview prison staff in order to present a thorough request for clemency to the governor.Skillicorn and Alle
Courtesy of Missouri Department of Corrections Allen Nicklasson, the other half of the Good Samaritan Killers, was troubled from an early age. Dennis Skillicorn's lawyer, Jenny Merrigan, describes him as "fascinating," and "truly mentally ill." Merrigan told me that at age four, he stabbed a man he saw raping his mother, who worked as a prostitute and kept Nicklasson in a closet while meeting johns. At age nine, he attacked his stepfather, who pressed charges. Nicklasson moved from juvenile inca
Dennis Skillicorn's lawyers tracked down the man responsible for the murder that first sent Skillicorn to prison. James Betts is currently serving a life sentence at the Jefferson City Correctional Center. He shot and killed 81-year-old Wendell Howell while he, Skillcorn and another man robbed Howell's home in 1979. On September 18, 2008, Betts wrote the following statement, which is included in the clemency petition for Skillicorn:
Dennis Skillicorn, courtesy of Paula SkillicornWhen Dennis Skillicorn was picked up by California Highway Patrol and turned over to the FBI, he was pretty fried. On the run, he'd spent weeks with little food, even less sleep, and God knows how much meth. Meth, he explained to me during our prison interview at Potosi, can turn reality into a paranoid, shape-shifting nightmare. "It will literally have you shooting the neighbor's cat because you think he might have a radio transmitter in his collar
