2010: Melbert Ray Ford, abusive partner
June 9th, 2019 Headsman
Melbert Ray Ford was executed by lethal injection in Georgia on this date in 2010, for murdering his ex-girlfriend and her niece.
On tilt from when Martha Chapman Matich broke up with him several weeks prior to the March 1986 crime, Ford had menaced her repeatedly by phone while openly fantasizing to friends about murdering her execution-style after forcing her to beg for mercy. It did not require the benefit of hindsight to know that this was more than idle talk; Ford had a previous conviction (from 1978) for making terroristic threats and criminal trespass. He’d also been violently abusive to Matich during their relationship of more than a year.
On March 6, Ford hired an unemployed teenager to drive him to the Newton County grocery where Matich worked, just after closing. (That driver, Roger Turner, got a prison sentence and was paroled in 1991.) Matich was working alone there — another employee had gone home sick — accompanied only by her 11-year-old niece Lisa.
As the terrified woman sounded the store’s alarm, Ford blasted his way through the locked glass door, then shot his former lover thrice. As for the little girl, “Lisa was at the store playing with the minnows and crickets sold as bait and didn’t want to leave her aunt alone at the store. According to the March 23, 1986 edition of The Covington News, Turner confessed that ‘Ford described killing Lisa Chapman in the bathroom at the grocery. Turner said that Ford told him that she was crouched by the toilet staring at him, so he felt he had to shoot her.’ ‘She was begging him not to do it in the bathroom where she went to hide,” said [Lisa’s mother Cindy] Chapman-Griffeth.”
Ford fled the store with a sack of loot and left the scene with his confederate — the last night he would spend at liberty on this earth. Police responding to the store alarm rolled up minutes later, to find Martha Matich dead behind the counter and Lisa Chapman convulsing on the restroom floor with a mortal gunshot wound to the head.
On this day..
- 1980: Ten Hafizullah supporters - 2020
- 1944: The Massacre of Tulle - 2018
- 1863: Lawrence Williams and Walter Peters, bold CSA spies - 2017
- 1741: Cook, Robin, Caesar and Cuffee - 2016
- 90: Cornelia, Vestal Virgin - 2015
- 1715: Margaret Gaulacher, Cotton Mather ignorer - 2014
- 1809: Andreas Bichel, Bavarian Ripper - 2013
- 1944: Johanna Kirchner, Frankfurt antifascist - 2012
- 1904: Mart Vowell, aged Civil War veteran - 2011
- 1716: Banda Singh Bahadur - 2010
- 1864: Doctor Edmond-Désiré Couty de la Pommerais, poisoner - 2009
- 1983: Simon Thelle Mogoerane, Jerry Mosololi and Marcus Motaung, anti-apartheid soldiers - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Georgia,Lethal Injection,Murder,Theft,USA
Tags: 2010, 2010s, domestic violence, june 9, lisa chapman, martha matich, melbert ford
Headmaster, third paragraph, after 1991 parole date replace Ford with Matich
Thanks!