Oklahoma Executes Man Who Killed 9

A drifter who fatally shot a family of three along a highway and six people in a meat locker went to his own death by lethal injection Saturday after a rambling final statement.

“I’d like to tell the world that you’re seeing an innocent man murdered,” Roger Dale Stafford said before his 12:30 a.m. execution at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He had spent 15 1/2 years on death row.

“They said truth would set you free,” he said, “but it didn’t me.”

Stafford, 43, was put to death for killing a Texas couple and their 12-year-old son on an Oklahoma highway in June 1978. He also had been sentenced to death for gunning down six employees he herded into a meat locker during the robbery of an Oklahoma City steak house that July.

Stafford was the 31st inmate executed this year in the United States.