THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sunday, November 24, 1996

SOUTH CAROLINA AND VIRGINIA EXECUTE INMATES

by The Associated Press

A man who raped and suffocated two women only days after escaping from a prison work crew was executed by injection in Columbia, S.C., on Friday, hours after Virginia had executed a man who had also killed a woman. The man put to death in South Carolina was Frank Middleton Jr., 33, who raped and killed Shirley Mae Mack, a 49-year-old night-shift cook, in 1984 who had been walking home from work in Charleston. Mr. Middleton, who had escaped from the prison work crew while serving a six-year sentence for stabbing a 13-year-old boy, also raped and killed another woman, Janell Garner, while he was a fugitive. He was sentenced to life in prison for that killing and to death for the slaying of Ms. Mack. On Thursday night in Jarratt, Va., Ronald Bennett, 42, was executed by injection for the murder of Anne Keller Vaden. Ms. Vaden, 28, was robbed bludgeoned, stabbed and strangled 11 years ago at her home in Chesterfield County, just south of Richmond. Mr. Bennett was a maintenance man in the apartment complex where

she lived. Ms. Vaden's killing went unsolved for about a year, until Mr. Bennett's former wife, Mary, talked to a friend about the slaying, and the friend called the police. At Mr. Bennett's trial, in 1987, Mary Bannett testified that the two of them along with Mr. Bennett's cousin, had been drinking and using cocaine the night Ms. Vaden was killed. She said that Mr. Bennett had then left home and that when he returned the next day, he was covered in blood and said he had killed a woman in the apartment complex. In a 1994 videotaped affidavit, Mrs. Bennett recanted her testimony, saying she had lied to protect herself. She said that she had been present at the murder and what it was the cousin who had killed Ms. Vaden. But a year after that, she recanted again, saying she had lie in the affidavit to save her former husband.