John Frederick Thanos was convicted in 1992 of the 1990 murders of Billy Winebrenner, Gregory Allen Taylor, and Melody Pistorio. At his trial he taunted the families of his victims, saying he wished he could dig up their bodies and defile their corpses. "Their cries bring laughter from the darkest caverns of my soul.... I don't believe I could satisfy my thirst yet in this matter unless I was to be able to dig these brats' bones up out of their graves right now and beat them into powder and urinate on them and then stir it into a murky yellowish elixir and serve it up to those loved ones," Thanos said during his sentencing hearing for the murder of Winebrenner and Pistorio.

Thanos waived his appeals and refused to fight his death sentence after he was convicted and sentenced to die. He was executed in 1994 by the state of Maryland

Maryland

Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...

 by lethal injection

Lethal injection

Lethal injection is the practice of injecting a person with a fatal dose of drugs for the express purpose of causing the immediate death of the subject. The main application for this procedure is capital punishment, but the term may also be applied in a broad sense to euthanasia and suicide...

, aged 43, becoming the first person to be executed in Maryland since 1976 when the death penalty

Capital punishment

Capital punishment, the death penalty, or execution is the sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally...

was reinstated. His last word was "Adios."