Iowa meth kingpin Dustin Honken executed, third federal execution his week
He killed children and government informants to avoid prosecution
A drug kingpin from Iowa was executed on Friday afternoon, after he was convicted of murdering two young women and three adults, marking the third time this week that a federal inmate has been put to death after a 17-year capital punishment hiatus.
The Bureau of Prisons said Dustin Honken, 52, was pronounced dead at 4:36 p.m. The victims’ family is expected to provide a written statement to the public at some point soon.
Honken had been sentenced to die for the murders of children and government informants, which he carried out to avoid prosecution for drug trafficking in 1993, according to The Associated Press.
Honken died by lethal injection at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., where he had been waiting on death row since 2005.
He’d also befriended Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, who was the first federal inmate to die this week, hours after the Supreme Court greenlit the first federal execution to take place since 2003.
Lee was convicted of multiple offenses, including three counts of murder in aid of racketeering in the 1996 slayings of William Frederick Mueller, his wife Nancy Ann Mueller and his 8-year-old stepdaughter, Sarah Elizabeth Powell, in Arkansas.
Wesley Ira Purkey was the second man to be put to death two days later, after being convicted in the 1998 kidnapping and killing of 16-year-old Jennifer Long, whose body was dismembered, burned and dumped in a septic pond.
That same year, Purkey also was convicted in a state court in Kansas after using a claw hammer to kill an 80-year-old woman who had polio.
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Honken was convicted in 2004, with the jury recommending a death sentence. U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett — who claimed to mostly oppose the death penalty — said, “I am not going to lose any sleep if he is executed,” The AP reported.
Fox News’ Vandana Rambaran, Greg Norman and Jake Gibson contributed to this report