William Clinton Clayton Jr. , a 43-year-old father of seven and contract delivery driver, made a simple stop at a Regions Bank ATM in downtown Centre, Alabama, on March 6, 1998. He wanted cash to take his wife out for the evening.
He never made it home. The man who shot him twice, stole his van, and left him to die would spend the next quarter-century on death row fighting for his life. On the evening of July 18, 2024, Keith Edmund Gavin, 64, was pronounced dead by lethal injection at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama.
The execution, which began at 6:32 p. m. and lasted 23 minutes, brought a close to one of the most legally complex and morally fraught capital cases in recent state history.
Gavin’s final words, spoken to witnesses in the death chamber, were a quiet declaration: “I love my family.” Then, witnesses reported, he uttered what sounded like a prayer in Arabic, a reflection of his conversion to Islam during his decades on death row. He refused a last meal and declined breakfast on the morning of his execution, but he ate lunch and a few snacks later in the afternoon.
In his final hour, his attorneys filed a handwritten appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court.
The justices rejected it, clearing the way for the injection.
The case against Gavin was not straightforward, and the questions it leaves behind are far from simple. To understand how this man ended up on Alabama’s death row, one must travel back more than four decades and across state lines. In 1982, a young Keith Gavin was convicted of murder in Cook County, Illinois.
The specific details of that earlier crime remain largely shielded from public view, but the outcome is clear: he was sentenced to 34 years in prison. He served 17 of those years, and in 1998, he was released on parole. He had spent the better part of two decades locked up, emerging into society in his late 30s.
Freedom did not last. Within months of his parole, Gavin committed the crime that would permanently seal his fate. The evening of March 6, 1998, was ordinary for William Clayton Jr.
He was driving a Corporate Express delivery van, working hard to support his family. He stopped at the ATM, withdrew cash, and sat back in the driver’s seat. That is where Gavin found him.
According to testimony from Gavin’s own cousin, Dwayne Meeks, who was with him that evening, Gavin approached the van, opened the driver’s door, and shot Clayton twice. He then pushed the wounded man into the passenger seat and drove away.
Law enforcement caught up quickly. An investigator from the District Attorney’s Office of the 9th Judicial Circuit spotted the stolen van and gave chase. Gavin stopped the vehicle in the middle of an intersection but, instead of surrendering, opened fire on the officer.
He then fled on foot into nearby woods. Clayton was found in the passenger seat, barely alive. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival.
A search dog tracked Gavin to a creek where he was hiding. When he tried to flee again, an officer fired a warning shot into the air, and Gavin surrendered.
He was charged with two counts of capital murder: one for murder committed during a robbery (stealing the van) and one for murder committed by a person previously convicted of a murder within the past 20 years (the Illinois case). He was also charged with attempted murder for firing at the officer. At trial, the jury recommended the death penalty, but the vote was 10 to 2.
In most U. S. states, a death sentence requires a unanimous jury.
At the time in Alabama, only 10 votes were needed. Had one more juror voted for life, the outcome might have been starkly different. The judge accepted the recommendation, and Gavin was sentenced to death.
Over the next 25 years, Gavin’s life on death row took an unexpected turn. He converted to Islam, studied the faith, and eventually became the prison’s Imam, leading prayers for other condemned men. His faith became the center of several legal battles in his final years, mostly over religious accommodation requests.
The prison denied many of his requests rooted in Islamic practice, following what Gavin’s legal team described as a documented pattern of discrimination against Muslim prisoners. One request, however, was honored: Gavin asked that no autopsy be performed on his body after death, as Islamic belief requires the body to remain intact. The state agreed.
While Gavin sat on death row, his attorneys continued to fight not over his guilt but over the fairness of his sentencing. The central argument was that his trial lawyers had been deeply, fundamentally unprepared. During the penalty phase—the part of the trial where a jury decides whether someone lives or dies—Gavin’s defense called only two witnesses.
One was his mother. The other was a minister who had never met Gavin before his arrest. Defense counsel spoke with that minister for only five minutes before putting him on the stand, and during the testimony, the lawyer misstated the minister’s name in front of the jury.
The jury deliberated for just 75 minutes. A trial court later found that Gavin’s lawyers had failed to present a single mitigating circumstance—not one factor that might have persuaded even one more juror to choose life. In 2020, a federal district court agreed, ruling that Gavin had received constitutionally ineffective counsel and that a new sentencing trial was required.
But that ruling did not hold. A federal appellate court reversed, concluding that even with better representation, the outcome at sentencing would not have changed. The road to appeal narrowed, and by the summer of 2024, Gavin had exhausted nearly every legal avenue.
The execution date was set for July 18, 2024. That morning, Gavin refused breakfast. He ate lunch and a few snacks later.
When offered a final meal, he declined. No special order, no last indulgence. With about 30 minutes before the scheduled injection, his attorneys filed a final handwritten appeal directly to the U.
S. Supreme Court. The justices rejected it.
The execution moved forward. Media witnesses and officials gathered in the death chamber. Gavin, who had spent more than a third of his life on that death row unit, spoke his last words and offered his prayer.
Then the lethal injection began.
Keith Edmund Gavin was the second person executed in Alabama in 2024. His case leaves behind deep questions about the fairness of capital sentencing, the integrity of legal representation for the condemned, and the extent to which a person can change—or be denied the chance to change—while awaiting death. Whether justice was fully served, partially served, or imperfectly served is a question that will endure long after the final injection.