“Me, Dennis B. McGuire, are fully responsible for the death of Joy Stewart and her unborn child and only me,” McGuire told Kasich in a three-page, hand-written letter. “…I’m deeply sorry and wish to live the rest of my life in prison. If not, I leave my soul to the Lord.”
Stewart, who was seven months pregnant, disappeared Feb. 11, 1989 after she was last seen with McGuire. Her body was found in the woods by hikers the next day. Her throat had been slashed and evidence showed she was raped.
McGuire, 53, is scheduled to be executed Jan. 16 for the crime. The parole board will make a recommendation Dec. 20 to the governor on the case.
McGuire said in the letter that he and Stewart had been carrying on an affair and got into a heated argument over Stewart’s insistence that McGuire leave his family to be with her. McGuire declined to appear before the parole board and answer questions.
Preble County Prosecutor Martin P. Votel dismissed the letter as just more lies and manipulation from McGuire. He said Stewart and McGuire barely knew each other and did not have a consensual affair.
“It is time for this sentence to be carried out,” Votel said.
At the clemency hearing Thursday, Assistant Ohio Public Defender Rob Lowe detailed McGuire’s harsh childhood replete with physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, family violence, poverty and illiteracy. In a video appearance, McGuire’s mother, Doris, described how the family survived on hunted squirrels and rabbits and Dennis was fed little more than sugar water and a mix of lard, meal and water as a baby.
Lowe said McGuire was born to a teen-age mother in a house with no running water, molested and raped, beaten, left on his own for long periods of time, and attended more than a dozen schools before dropping out.
Lowe maintained that the child abuse was not brought out at trial before the jury deliberated for 19 hours over whether to sentence him to death. Votel said all the relevant evidence was considered.
McGuire’s older brother, Genis McGuire, Jr., spoke by video conference from Chillicothe Correctional Institution where he is incarcerated for complicity to aggravated murder. McGuire Jr. had been facing the death penalty in his case but received 20 years to life for stabbing a convenience store clerk more than 60 times in Warren County in 1995.
The two brothers aren’t the only McGuire family members to serve time. Their father, sister, nephew and cousins have also been in prison, Genis McGuire Jr. told the parole board.
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