Robert Lee Willie - Evil Killer & Rapist

When you read about a person being executed in the United States, you wonder just how bad their crimes have been, and upon researching the killer, you usually find they have left an appalling trail of death and destruction behind them.  it is difficult to fathom how anybody can plead for clemency for the condemned person when you discover just what they truly are.  Robert Lee Willie was one such person.  He went to the chair at Angola Prison, Louisiana, on December 28th 1984, for the abduction, rape and murder of 18 year old Faith Hathaway.  His co-defendant, Joseph Jesse Vaccaro, saw the light and made a plea bargain to avoid the chair also.  After sentencing, the trail of destruction he left became known.

    Faith Hathaway was walking home in the early hours of May 28th 1980, when she was snatched off Mandevile Road by Willie and Vaccaro.  She was blindfolded and driven to a quiet area of Washington Parish in Louisiana.  She was raped and then stabbed 17 times by her abductors.  She was due to enlist in the Army.  Then eight days later, Willie struck in a lovers lane, abducting at gunpoint a Madisonville couple and forced them to drive to Alabama.  He stabbed and shot 20 year old Mark Brewster, then tied him to a tree. Somehow he survived but ended up paralysed from the waist down.  When he went on trial for the murder of Faith, he and Vaccaro blamed each other but he was condemned to the chair.  Then, when on trial for the attack on the young couple, he taunted them by blowing kisses to his 16 year old victim and when Mark Brewster was helped into the witness box, he kept making throat slitting gestures to him.  The sort of attitude that endears killers to people who campaign for them on death row.  Like with the Prison Reform Trust and Liberty in this country, NO victim is as important as the offender!  Willie also confessed to the murder of a drug pusher, along with his cousin Perry Taylor.  Taylor admitted manslaughter and received 21 months prison.  The victim was Dennis Hemby, who was killed near to Covington and the pair stole $10,000 worth of marijuana. 

    In the chair, Willie told the parents of Faith "That killing is wrong" but it did not stop him.  A story was that his father, John Willie, serving a 27 year sentence for manslaughter, battery and rustling, wired up the chair for the prison, the year before, but this has been shown to be untrue.  He himself said that his son deserved to die for what he had done to Faith Hathaway.  Enough said.