Gary Lee Sampson (September 29, 1959 – December 21, 2021) was an American bank robber and later spree killer who killed three people and was sentenced to death by a federal jury in Massachusetts.
Sampson pleaded guilty to the three killings on September 9, 2003, and was sentenced to death on December 23, 2003, by a federal jury in Massachusetts.
[4][11][12] Sampson's defense lawyers claim that at age four, he fell and hit his head, resulting in a brain injury.
Sampson had been frequently arrested as a juvenile, and as an adult was caught on surveillance tape robbing five banks in North Carolina while in disguise.
Gerald Hege, sheriff of Davidson County, North Carolina, stated that Sampson had lived with cross-dressers and transvestites, and had learned "elaborate makeup" from them.
Shortly after, he moved to South Carolina with a woman he had recently met, and Alexander filed for divorce that same year.
By the end of November, Sampson had moved to North Carolina, where he had a relationship with Ricky Carter, who recalled him as "angry with the world and having an explosive temper."
Sampson told police that, after McCloskey picked him up hitchhiking, he forced him at knifepoint to drive to a secluded area, where he tied him up with his belt and stabbed him 24 times.
Federal law was changed in 1994 to allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek the death penalty when a murder is committed during a carjacking or kidnapping.
[24] Although the United States has a federal "death row" at the United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute, in Indiana (where federal death row inmates are executed),[25] U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf of the U.S. District Court in Boston ordered that Sampson be executed in New Hampshire.
[29] Judge Wolf said that one reason for the delay until September was because Sampson had been transferred to United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners to undergo a mental health evaluation which had an effect of "obstructing his lawyers' efforts to meet with him.
"[30] A week before the September sentencing retrial was to begin, it was "stalled while prosecutors decide whether to appeal a federal judge's refusal to step down from the case."
[10] On December 21, 2021, Sampson died at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.