DaytonDailyNews.com

LUCASVILLE — Richard Cooey, who always blamed his co-defendant for killing two University of Akron sorority sisters in 1986, went to his death this morning, Oct. 14, without a word of remorse.

Instead, said Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh, "he was vulgar and hateful to the end."

Cooey died by lethal injection at 10:28 a.m., 13 minutes after he was led into the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility here.

Despite Cooey's claims that his obesity could make it difficult for him to be executed humanely, it took executioners less than 10 minutes to insert intravenous lines in both of his arms.

When prison Warden Phillip Kerns asked him if had a final statement, Cooey said, "For what? If you (expletives) haven't paid any attention to what I've had to say over the past 22 years, why are you going to pay attention to what I have to say now?

Cooey never looked at the glassed-in booth where six members of victim Dawn McCreery's family witnessed the process. Relatives of the other victim, Wendy Offredo, declined to attend the execution and gave their three seats to the McCreerys.

The family was quiet and attentive during the execution and declined to comment after Cooey's peaceful death. Walsh said they found "some sense of peace and relief" that Cooey was executed after 22 years of appeals, longer than the lives of both of his victims.

But the crime "was too brutal and too tragic for this to ever really be over for these family members," Walsh said.

Accomplice Clinton Dickens dropped a chunk of concrete from an Interstate 77 overpass onto Offredo's car in the early morning of Sept. 1, 1986. Then Dickens and Cooey, under the guise of helping Offredo and passenger McCreery, raped, robbed, strangled and beat them, and dumped their bodies in a woods. Each victim had an X carved in her abdomen.

Because he was a minor at the time of the crime, Dickens could not be put to death and is serving a life prison sentence.

Cooey is the first Ohio inmate to be put to death since May 2007. There was an unofficial nationwide moratorium on executions while the states waited for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the three-drug lethal injection protocol used by most states with the death penalty.

Cooey came within 12 hours of being executed in 2003, but he was spared by a court order.

Dana Cole of Akron, who described himself as Cooey's attorney and friend, said the man who was executed today "bore no resemblance" to the 19-year-old Army soldier who committed the crimes in 1986. Cole called him "good and decent and bright and articulate."

"Rick is now beyond pain and beyond suffering and beyond calls for his blood," Cole said. "The mercy we refused to show Rick is mercy we'll all someday need. God have mercy on us all."

Contact this reporter at tbeyerlein@coxohio.com or (937) 225-2264.