toledoblade.com --

LUCASVILLE - Stephen A. Vrabel calmly and voluntarily went to his death yesterday for shooting his girlfriend and their 3-year-old daughter in 1989 and living a month in their apartment with their bodies in the refrigerator.

The 47-year-old bald, bearded man looked at his sister, Karen Koval, and smiled, as she mouthed the words "I love you" through the glass separating them.

"I want to thank my sister for all the joy and happiness she has brought into [daughter] Lisa's life, and I want to apologize to anyone I may have wronged in my life," he said shortly before a triple cocktail of drugs was used to sedate him, paralyze his lungs, and stop his heart.

"[Wednesday] is all about Susan and Lisa Clemente, the victims of this horrible and devastating tragedy, and that justice has been served upon the person who brutally murdered them," said Kenneth Kotouch, Susan's brother-in-law and Lisa's uncle.

"There were no winners today," he said. "There was only justice."

Dropping all appeals and refusing to seek Gov. Bob Taft's clemency, the former Struthers (Mahoning County) man spent the last night of his life watching the American League rout the National League in the All-Star Game.

With Vrabel's execution, Ohio quietly set a record with five so far this year, the most in a single year since the state resumed carrying out the death penalty in 1999. A sixth, also a "volunteer," is set for Tuesday.

In all, 13 death-row inmates have been executed by lethal injection since 1999.

After the Ohio Supreme Court voted 4-3 to uphold his conviction and sentence, Vrabel dropped his federal appeals, hastening his execution.

He never explained why he bought a gun on March 3, 1989, and killed his 29-year-old live-in girlfriend. But he told police he shot their hysterical daughter, Lisa, because he felt she would be better off dead with her mother dead and her father going to prison.

He poured floor stripper over their bodies and later placed his girlfriend's body in the refrigerator and his daughter's in the freezer along with two of her favorite stuffed animals. He lived off and on in the apartment until the bodies were discovered.

"The crimes are no doubt horrendous, but it took him five years in a mental institution to get to the point where he was competent to stand trial," said Neal Kookoothe, a Toledo native and North Olmstead priest who was outside the Southern Ohio Correctional Institution.

Contact Jim Provance at:
jprovance@theblade.com
or 614-221-0496.

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