Featured Image Credit: South Carolina Department of Corrections
Topics: South Carolina, Death Row, Crime, True crime
Joe Yates
Topics: South Carolina, Death Row, Crime, True crime
A South Carolina inmate who killed a man and scrawled a haunting message on the wall with his blood has had his execution date set.
Willard 'TJ' Tietjen was brutally murdered by Stephen Bryant back in 2004, having initially called by his rural home in Sumter County pretending he had car troubles.
Bryant, who was in his early 20s at the time, unloaded several rounds into the 62-year-old before mutilating his corpse by putting out his cigarettes on Tietjen's eyes.
However, he wasn't finished there. He then proceeded to create his own deranged vigil, lighting candles around his victim's body and even answering Tietjen's incoming call from his daughter, Kimberly Dees.
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When he answered, she asked Bryant if she could speak to her father.
"And he said, ‘you can’t, I killed him.’ And I said, ‘This isn’t funny, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler'," Dees testified in court.
Prosecutors said Tietjen was shot several times before Bryant surrounded the body with candles and used the corner of a potholder that was made by Dees for her parents when she was a child to dip into the victim’s blood.
He then scrawled a chilling message across the wall: "Victim 4 in 2 weeks. catch me if u can."
Investigators soon claimed that Bryant had also killed two other men in separate attacks; both victims had been lured out of their cars on quiet country roads.
One of them was his friend, 36-year-old Clifton Gainey, who had gotten out of the car to urinate on the side of the road, with the body of 35-year-old Christopher Burgess also found on an isolated road.
The fourth victim, Clinton Brown, survived after driving himself to the hospital following a gunshot wound to the back. He was fishing from a riverbank at the time.
Bryant was caught just days later and confessed to the killings in 2008, when he was placed on death row.
Now, the 44-year-old is set to die on November 14, after the South Carolina Supreme Court issued a death warrant on Friday (October 17).
His legal team had asked for a delay, claiming the ongoing US government shutdown made it impossible to work properly with federal courts, but judges rejected the request.
Bryant will have until October 31 to choose how he’ll die - either by lethal injection, firing squad, or the electric chair.