The state of Missouri executed Christopher Collings, 49, on Tuesday, for the 2007 sexual assault and killing of 9-year-old Rowan Ford.
“Right or wrong I accept this situation for what it is,” Collings wrote in his final statement. “To anyone that I have hurt in this life I am sorry. I hope that you are able to get closure and move on.” He added, “I hope to see you in heaven one day.”
He was pronounced dead at 6:10pm, after receiving a single dose of pentobarbital, with family members of Ford in attendance.
Collings admitted to police that in November of 2007, he abducted Ford in her sleep. She was the daughter of a close friend who called him “Uncle Chris.” The Missouri man then took her to the camper where he lived and sexually assaulted her.
When Rowan saw that it was Collings who took her, he “freaked out” and strangled her with a rope, then dumped her body in a sinkhole in a rural area, he said in his confession.
“Chris was taken too early from this Earth,” his legal team said in a statement. “We share Chris’s desire that his death will provide a measure of closure for the victim’s family and that the people hurt by him will be able to carry on. What occurred today, though, was an act of vengeance, but it will not define Chris, nor will it be how we remember him.”
In their clemency petition, Collings’s lawyers noted that the inmate had been abused and sexually abused as a child and that a brain abnormality left him with “functional deficits in awareness, judgment and deliberation, comportment, appropriate social inhibition, and emotional regulation.”
Groups opposed to the death penalty including the Missouri Catholic Conference and Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty called on state officials to grant Collings a life sentence without parole.
“We do not seek to minimize the tragedy of Rowan Ford’s death. Her loss is felt deeply, and our hearts go out to her family and loved ones,” the latter group wrote in an online petition before the execution. “However, executing Chris Collings will not bring her back. It will not bring the healing or justice that society hopes to achieve. Instead, it will perpetuate a broken system that devalues human life and fails to recognize the possibility of redemption.”
Rowan’s stepfather, David Spears, also came under police scrutiny in the killing. He drank and used marijuana with Collings before the attack. He claimed Collings handed him the rope and that he killed Rowan himself, according to a police transcript included in Colings’s clemency petition.
He was allowed to plead to lesser charges for unclear reasons and was released from prison in 2015 after serving more than seven years.
Collings’s last meal was a bacon cheeseburger, breaded mushrooms, tater tots and a chef salad.
The killing marks the 23rd execution nationally this year and the fourth in Missouri.
