A Texas woman convicted of the gruesome murder and robbery of her elderly neighbour will be the first woman put to death in the United States since 2010.
A Dallas County jury already found former nursing home therapist Kimberly McCarthy guilty of the 1997 killing when evidence at the punishment phase of her trial tied her to two similar murders a decade earlier.
"Once the jury heard about those other two, we were certainly in a deep hole," McCarthy's lead trial lawyer Doug Parks said. Jurors decided McCarthy should die.
Her execution early tomorrow, UK time, will be the first since a Virginia inmate, Teresa Lewis, became the 12th woman put to death since the US Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976. In that time, 1,309 men have been executed.
Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics compiled from 1980 through 2008 show women make up about 10% of murder offenders nationwide. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People's Legal Defence Fund, 3,146 people were on the nation's death rows as of October 1 and only 63 - 2% - were women.
McCarthy, 51, will also be the first woman executed in Texas in more than eight years and the fourth overall in the state, which puts to death the most people in the nation - 492 prisoners since capital punishment resumed 30 years ago.
McCarthy, who is black, was condemned for the July 1997 killing of neighbour Dorothy Booth, 71, a retired college psychology professor. All but one of McCarthy's jurors were white.
McCarthy exhausted her court appeals, as the US Supreme Court three weeks ago declined to review her case and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles last week turned down a clemency petition. On Friday, her lawyers asked Dallas County district attorney Craig Watkins to delay the lethal injection, citing his interest in Texas adopting a law to allow death-row prisoners to base appeals on race. Mr Watkins has not responded.
Evidence showed McCarthy phoned Ms Booth to borrow a cup of sugar, then attacked her when she went to retrieve it. Ms Booth was stabbed with a butcher's knife, beaten with a large candle holder and robbed of a diamond wedding ring.
"(McCarthy) quite literally took the woman, put her left hand on a chopping block of the kitchen and then used a knife to sever her ring finger while she was still alive," said Greg Davis, the former Dallas County assistant district attorney who prosecuted McCarthy.
"She took the ring from the finger that had been severed and continued the attack until she finally killed her."
Prosecutors showed McCarthy stole Ms Booth's Mercedes and drove to Dallas, pawned the ring for 200 dollars, then went to a crack house to buy some cocaine. Evidence also showed she used Ms Booth's credit cards at an off-licence and was carrying Ms Booth's driving licence.
McCarthy blamed the crime on two drug dealers she identified only as "Kilo" and "JC", but "we could never turn up anything that would indicate they existed", Mr Parks said.
Prosecutors presented DNA and fingerprint evidence that tied McCarthy to similar murders of two other women in Dallas in December 1988. Maggie Harding, 81, was beaten with a meat tenderiser and stabbed and Jettie Lucas, 85, was beaten with both sides of a claw hammer and stabbed. McCarthy, who denied any involvement, was indicted but not tried for those killings.
"When the jury saw the other two were equally gruesome, I think it sealed the deal for her," Mr Davis said.
McCarthy is a former wife of Aaron Michaels, founder of the New Black Panther Party, who gave evidence on her behalf.
In 1998, Karla Tucker, 38, became the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War for a robbery in Houston where two people were killed with a pickaxe.
Two years later, a 62-year-old great-grandmother Betty Lou Beets received a lethal injection for the murder of her fifth husband in north-east Texas to collect insurance and pension benefits. And in 2004, Frances Newton, 40, was executed for the 1987 murders of her husband and two children in Houston.