The Ohio Attorney General's office says 41-year-old Richard Cooey died at 10:28 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.
     
Relatives of Richard Cooey, 41, visited him last month at the Ohio State Penitentiary but chose not to make the trip to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Andrea Carson said.
     
Cooey and a co-defendant were convicted in the sexual assaults and slayings of University of Akron students Dawn McCreery, 20, and Wendy Offredo, 21, in September 1986.
     
Prosecutors said Cooey and Clinton Dickens disabled the victims' car with a chunk of concrete thrown from an overpass and then offered to help them. Instead, they took the women to a secluded spot where they sexually assaulted, stabbed and bludgeoned them, and carved the letter "X" into their stomachs.
     
The Offredo family gave up its witness seats to allow McCreery's parents, brother and three cousins to witness the execution, Carson said.
     
The three seats representing Cooey went to his lawyers from the Ohio Public Defender's Office, including Dana Cole, whom Cooey said should receive the personal items he brought with him from death row in the Youngstown prison.
     
Although no family members were present, Cooey was to be visited by Jim Cole, a nondenominational lay person from Nashville, Tenn., whom Cooey said was his spiritual adviser, Carson said.
     
Cooey dined Monday evening on the special meal he ordered, including T-bone steak with A-1 sauce, onion rings, french fries, four eggs over easy, toast with butter, hash browns, a pint of rocky road ice cream, a Mountain Dew soft drink and bear claw pastries.
     
Cooey was a 19-year-old soldier on leave from the U.S. Army at the time of the killings. Dickens was 17 and was sentenced to life in prison because of his age.
     
The 5-foot-7, 267-pound Cooey had tried to avoid execution by arguing that his obesity would prevent humane lethal injection because viable veins in his arms are hard to find.
     
He was given a visual examination by the state when he arrived at the death house on Monday, and officials found nothing that should cause a problem in delivering the deadly chemicals, Carson said.
     
A more detailed examination was conducted Tuesday morning.
     
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied pending appeals to stop the execution. It turned down without comment Cooey's claim that his obesity was a bar to humane lethal injection. The argument also had been rejected by a federal appeals court in Cincinnati and the Ohio Supreme Court, with both courts ruling that he missed a deadline for filing appeals.
     
Cooey was still waiting for a ruling on his appeal of the Ohio Supreme Court's dismissal Monday of his complaint that the state's protocol for lethal injection could cause an agonizing and painful death. He wanted the state to use a single drug rather than a three-drug combination, and asked for a stay of execution pending a hearing on that motion.
     
The Ohio Board of Parole and Gov. Ted Strickland have refused his plea for clemency.
     
Cooey is 75 pounds heavier than when he went to death row - the result of prison food and 23-hour-a-day confinement, his lawyers said.
     
They also argued that Topamax, a migraine medicine prescribed by a prison physician, could reduce the effect of the anesthetic used as part of the three-drug lethal injection.
     
They claimed that Ohio has a history of botched executions.
     
The last Ohio inmate to be executed was Christopher Newton - who was similar in size to Cooey - in May 2007. The execution team had trouble putting IVs in his arm, delaying his execution nearly two hours. There were similar problems in the execution of Joseph Clark in 2006.
     
Cooey made an earlier trip to Lucasville's death house. But a U.S. District Court judge intervened hours before his scheduled execution in July 2003 when the Ohio Public Defender's office said it needed more time to assess the case after an appeals court dismissed his previous attorneys for inadequate representation.

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