Kleypas among 9 with executions on hold in Kansas

Feb. 16—PITTSBURG, Kan. — Twenty-eight years after his murder of a Pittsburg State University student, and seven years since the U.S. Supreme Court declined a review of his death sentence, Gary Kleypas remains alive at a state prison in El Dorado.

The slayer of 20-year-old PSU student Carrie Williams in 1996 is one of nine inmates currently sentenced to die in Kansas.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach this week urged state lawmakers to approve hypoxia as a new means of carrying out the death penalty. Kobach indicated that the appeals process of one inmate — whom he did not name — may soon be exhausted and his execution carried out before the end of the year if the state approves the use of hypoxia.

Kleypas, now 68 years old, was the first person to be sentenced to death following reinstatement of the state's death penalty in 1994 and is the second oldest of the nine.

At the time of Williams' murder, Kleypas was a nursing student who moved to Kansas while on parole from a Missouri prison, where he served 15 years for the beating death of an elderly woman near Galena, Missouri, in 1977. He lived near Williams in Pittsburg and is believed to have stalked her prior to stabbing her to death in her apartment.

Convicted and sentenced to die in 1998, his conviction was overturned two years later when the Kansas Supreme Court found fault with an instruction given jurors at his trial. He was retried in 2008 by a Wyandotte County jury and found guilty of burglary, attempted rape and capital murder and once again sentenced to die.

On appeal, the state high court in 2016 threw out the burglary and attempted rape convictions but upheld the capital murder verdict.

In 2018, Kleypas purportedly asked the Kansas Court of Appeals to dismiss any further post-conviction challenges. But the appeals court ruled that the trial court incorrectly dismissed the case without holding a hearing to determine if he was mentally competent and understood what he was doing.

The Globe was unable to reach the Crawford County attorney Friday to confirm the status of the case.

Jeff Lehr is a reporter for The Joplin Globe.