[1] Baker was born to an underage rape victim and suffered physical and sexual abuse during his childhood by his mother, stepfather and two teenage girls.

Wesley Baker approached Jane Tyson, 49, on June 6, 1991, in the parking lot of Catonsville's Westview Mall as she got into her car with her grandchildren, a 6-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl, after shoe shopping.

He noted the license number and called the police, who apprehended Wesley Baker and Gregory Lawrence a short time later.

[7] Baker was convicted by a jury in the Circuit Court for Harford County on October 26, 1992, of first-degree murder, robbery with a deadly weapon, and use of a handgun in the commission of a felony.

Baker received a stay of execution in 2002, days before he was scheduled to die, when Governor Parris N. Glendening imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in the state to allow a study by Professor Raymond Paternoster of the University of Maryland, College Park to be completed.

After meeting with him, Keeler made a personal plea, together with the two other Catholic bishops in Maryland, for the governor to grant clemency and commute the sentence to life imprisonment without parole.

Jennifer McMenamin, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun who witnessed the execution, said that Baker showed little reaction during the injection of the lethal doses of chemicals.

Unlike other U.S. states, Maryland did not offer the condemned a special last meal; instead prisoners set to be executed received whatever was on the menu the day of their death.