[2] Late on August 30, 1978, George Mercer went drinking with friends from one of his motorcycle gangs at a lounge in Grandview, Missouri.

While there, he noticed 22-year-old Karen Ann Keeton, who was working at the lounge as a waitress, and commented to a friend that he would like to sleep with her.

[4] Mercer then left the lounge with David Gee, a fellow gang member, and went back to his Belton home, arriving shortly after midnight on August 31.

[5] After the multiple sexual assaults were over, Campbell would later testify that he went upstairs to comfort the victim, who was crying; afterwards, he fell asleep.

Gardner and Gee left the house while Mercer advanced upstairs, where he manually strangled Keeton to death.

He ordered Campbell to clean the crime scene and placed his sheets and blanket in his washing machine.

Three to four weeks after the murder, Campbell and his attorney found Keeton's badly decomposed body in the field where Mercer had left it.

[5][7] Over the next few weeks, Campbell would later testify that Kansas City police approached him three separate times to question him about Keeton's disappearance and what he might have known about it.

In late September, Campbell acquired an attorney, Sidney Willems,[7] who helped him to find Keeton's badly decomposed body.

[8] While Mercer awaited trial, he was brought in for a hearing regarding the gang rape of another woman which occurred on August 17, 1978, weeks before Keeton's murder.

[10] Campbell claimed during both a preliminary hearing and the trial itself that he thought Gardner was joking about killing Keeton and that Mercer took the supposedly facetious order seriously.

[4] In an interview that Mercer gave in 1981, he claimed that he was innocent of the murder; he also declared that he had undergone a religious conversion while on death row.

Then-governor of Missouri John Ashcroft also indicated that if he received a formal request to delay Mercer's execution, he would reject it.

[14] Mercer was executed by lethal injection just after midnight on January 6, 1989, in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.

The lethal injection began at 12:03 a.m., and witnesses claimed that Mercer coughed three or four times while straining against the straps on the gurney before he lost consciousness at 12:05 a.m.; an attending physician pronounced Mercer dead at 12:09 a.m.[13] The execution took place in Missouri's former gas chamber, which had been converted to accommodate a lethal injection gurney.