A gentleman with the interesting name of Sedley Alley was executed by lethal injection in Tennessee on this date in 2006, for the positively horrific rape-murder of Lance Corporal Suzanne Marie Collins.

The ghastly crime occurred in 1985, when the 19-year-old Collins went for a jog at Millington Air Force Base; her attacker stabbed her about the head with a screwdriver and raped her with a tree branch so violently that the branch tore the young woman’s lung.

Alley’s next-day confession followed by his shifting accounts of the events led him to try a hail-mary insanity defense at trial … a surprising contrast to the innocence claim he floated late in his appeals process.

The generation-long labyrinth of judicial appeals between homicide and execution led Collins’s parents, Jack and Trudy, to become outspoken victims’ rights advocates. “There never will be closure,” Jack Collins once told a filmmaker. “What you get is a modicum of peace. You get a feeling that somebody cares. The state of Tennessee cared enough about our daughter that it carried out an execution on her killer. But no closure until the day we die.”

On this day..

• 1748: Marretje Arents, for the Pachtersoproer
• 1393: Karsten Sarnow, Stralsund mayor
• 1906: Four Egyptians for the Denshawai Incident
• 1680: The wife of Abdullah Celebi, and her Jewish lover
• 1816: Five Ely and Littleport rioters
• 1927: Jindrich Bazant, killer rake
• 1776: Thomas Hickey, plotting against George Washington
• 1844: Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes, "Placido"
• 1899: Ologbosere, of the Benin Empire
• 1890: Major Panitza, by Stefan Stambolov
• 1578: Five sodomite monks, by Calvinist Ghent
• 1905: Henri Languille, a man of science