Toledo man gets execution date for 1986 murders

William T. Montgomery, Toledo received the death penalty.

COLUMBUS — The Ohio Supreme Court today set a 2014 date for the execution of a Toledo man convicted in the 1986 murders of two roommates.

William T. Montgomery, 46, faces lethal injection on Aug. 6, 2014, for the killings of Debra Ogle, 20, and Cynthia Tincher, 19. The prosecution’s theory was that Ms. Ogle was murdered during the course of a robbery and Ms. Tincher was then killed to prevent her from connecting him and co-conspirator Glover Heard with Ms. Ogle.

The U.S. Supreme Court in May refused to hear an appeal in his case after a series of state and federal appeals. He is currently on death row at the Ohio State Penitentiary near Youngstown.

The state Supreme Court set three execution dates today. It has been scheduling executions to be carried out at roughly the rate of one per month, and the line leading to the death house at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville is now backed up to October, 2014.

In 2011, the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals splintered with six separate opinions in a decision that ultimately overturned a lower court ruling that had ordered a new trial for Montgomery.

The appellate judges had disagreed that a police report withheld from Montgomery’s defense at trial would have undermined the state’s case. That report suggested that Ms. Ogle had been seen alive on March 12, 1986, four days after she’d been reported missing and presumed dead.

Montgomery had accused Heard at trial of using the .380-caliber pistol that Montgomery had purchased two weeks earlier. But Heard struck a deal with prosecutors to testify against Montgomery. Now 50, Heard is serving a life sentence at North Central Correctional Institution in Marion.