Published: August 03, 2006 11:32 pm      

State puts ex-jailer to death for murder

William Wyatt proclaimed his innocence and asked for forgiveness in the same sentence Thursday evening before being executed inside the Huntsville “Walls” Unit.

Wyatt was sentenced to death eight years ago for the 1997 murder of 3-year-old Damien Willis in Texarkana.

In his final statement, Wyatt thanked his friends and family for their support.

“I went home to be with my father, and I went home a trooper,” he said.

He then professed his innocence to members of his victim’s family.

“I did not murder your son. I did not do it,” Wyatt said. “I just want you to know that — I did not murder Damien, and I would ask for all your forgiveness and I will see all of you soon.”

A few moments after he was finished talking, Wyatt drew a deep breath and waited for the lethal dose of drugs to set in. When it did, he sputtered once and took several slow breaths before he quietly stopped breathing.

He was pronounced dead seven minutes later at 6:20 p.m.

Wyatt, 41, said he may have been irresponsible in leaving little Damien Willis alone to drown in the bathtub of his Texarkana home 9 1/2 years ago, but didn’t kill the toddler. Evidence, however, showed the boy did not drown and Wyatt’s own confession after the child’s Feb. 4, 1997, death, tied him to the slaying. Wyatt contended his statements to police were coerced.

In a statement to authorities — his third version of events in the three days following his arrest — Wyatt acknowledged sexually assaulting the boy. In the first of his three statements, Wyatt said he found the child under water.

A day later, he acknowledged sodomizing the boy before putting him in the tub. Then the following day, he blamed something he saw on television for prompting him to sexually assault the child and told police of beating and smothering the boy with a plastic bag.

“I felt threatened,” Wyatt said in a recent death row interview. “When they told me I was charged with killing a kid, it was like a bad nightmare. I felt helpless.”

Wyatt, a Detroit native known to fellow inmates on death row as “Motown,” was watching the 3-year-old while his mother — Wyatt’s girlfriend — was at work.

Wyatt was arrested after physicians determined the child likely had been the victim of repeated sexual assaults.

Michael Shepherd, the Bowie County district attorney who prosecuted Wyatt, said this week he believed the last sexual attack was so brutal it couldn’t be hidden, so Wyatt “concocted the idea of smothering the child and set up the fake drowning,” Shepherd said.

During the punishment phase of Wyatt’s trial, two psychologists described him as a psychopathic manipulator. The child’s mother testified she had been raped by Wyatt.

A prosecution psychologist testified Wyatt was “a sexual sadist and presented himself as an individual that relished in not only the sexual part of it, but also with giving of pain to a victim,” Shepherd said.

Wyatt, who worked as a jailer in Bowie County, was the 17th prisoner put to death this year in Texas

— The Associated Press contributed to this story.