Brenda Andrew, Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
How do most people end up on death row in America? First, you’ve had the misfortune to be arrested and tried in one of the few states that still cling to this vindictive form of punishment. You’re likely to be male, poor, under-educated, black, Hispanic or Native American. You’ve got a criminal record. Your prosecutor was running for reelection or higher office. You were convicted of killing a white woman. Your lawyer was probably inexperienced, operating on a tight budget or incompetent.
But that doesn’t fit the profile of Brenda Andrew, the only woman on death row in Oklahoma. Andrew’s terrible journey to death row began when she fell in love with someone she got to know in a Bible study group at her church. The love affair ended with the murder of Andrews’ estranged husband, Rob, killed by her lover James Pavatt. Pavatt confessed to shooting Andrew’s husband and told the cops and prosecutors he acted alone.
But the prosecutors weren’t satisfied. They wanted Brenda Andrew, too, and charged her with being part of a murder plot with Pavatt to kill her husband and collect the life insurance money. In 2004, Brenda and Pavatt were both convicted of capital murder and the prosecutors asked the jury to impose the death penalty against both defendants. The case against Andrews was thin, much thinner than the case against Pavatt. In order to try to secure a death penalty verdict against Brenda, they put her character on trial, her sexual character. They accused her of being a bad wife, a bad mother, and a sexual predator.
Women are regularly sent to prison for murder in the US. In 2020, more than 2000 women were convicted of homicide offenses. But rarely are they sentenced to death. There are only 48 women on death row in the entire country. And few of them have the life story of Brenda Andrew: a white, educated, middle-class Christian mother of two with no criminal record.
No, Brenda Andrew doesn’t fit the modern profile of a death row inmate. The case against her is as old as the country itself, as old as the Salem Witch Trials. Andrew didn’t need to be put to death because she committed murder. She needed to be executed because her sexual allure was so intoxicating that she could seduce others to commit murder for her.
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Brenda Andrews met James Pavatt in 1999 at the North Pointe Baptist Church in Edmond, Oklahoma. Both were married, unhappily it seems. The Pavatt and Andrews families socialized together. Ate dinners at each other’s houses. A sexual attraction developed between Brenda and James while they were teaching Sunday school classes together. They launched into an affair. It wasn’t Brenda’s first fling. Pavatt’s marriage unraveled. His wife, Suk Hui, filed for divorce in 1991. News of the affair spread through the church and both were asked to stop teaching Sunday school.
James Pavatt was an insurance broker. He sold some policies to his friends Brenda and Rob, including an $800,000 life insurance policy. Brenda was the prime beneficiary.
By the time of Pavatt’s divorce, Brenda and Rob’s 17-year marriage was also on the rocks. A few months later Rob moved out, leaving Brenda with the couple’s two children, Tricity and Parker. Soon the Andrews’ were also seeking a legal separation. Rob tried to have Brenda removed as his beneficiary.
Then strange things began to happen. Someone cut the lining to the brakes on Rob’s car. Rob, an ad executive, called the cops. He blamed Brenda and James. No charges were filed.
But a few weeks later, Rob drove to Brenda’s to pick up the couple’s two children for a Thanksgiving dinner with his family. Brenda asked Rob if he could light the pilot on the furnace. Brenda and Rob were in the garage talking, while the kids were inside watching TV. Then, according to Brenda’s story, two men dressed in black and wearing masks appeared in the driveway, carrying shotguns and fired into the garage. Rob was hit twice, killing him. Brenda emerged with a gunshot wound to her arm. Brenda called 911, telling the operator: “I’ve been shot. My husband and I, we’ve been shot.”
The cops arrived to discover Rob’s body on the floor of the garage. He had two wounds from a 16-gauge shotgun: one to the chest and one to the neck.
There were holes in Brenda’s story, gaping ones. For example, her superficial gunshot wound wasn’t from a shotgun. There was evidence Brenda or James had surreptitiously altered Rob’s life insurance policy to make her the owner. The cops quickly focused on Brenda and James as the prime suspects. But before they could be arrested, Brenda and James absconded to Mexico, taking the two Andrews children with them. The money lasted only three months. James called home frequently, begging his daughter Janna to send them cash, not knowing she was relaying each conversation to the FBI. In February, they crossed the border back into the states at Hidalgo, Texas, were promptly arrested, and extradited back to Oklahoma to face trial.
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Brenda was born in 1963 in Enid, Oklahoma to a devout Christian family called the Evers. She was a good student, attended church several times a week, and like many teenage girls in the Bible Belt, excelled at activities like baton-twirling. She met Rob Andrews when she was a senior in high school through her older brother. They began dating and Brenda eventually followed Rob, who was a couple of years older than her, to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Two years later, in June 1984, they were married and soon moved to Texas. By 1990, they were back in Oklahoma and had welcomed their first child, Tricity. Rob was working for an ad agency. Her husband didn’t want Brenda working outside the house, so she became a stay-at-home mom, growing increasingly bored and restless.
By the time Brenda gave birth to Parker in 1994, the marriage was on the skids. She told friends she should have never married Rob. She began to look elsewhere for affection, romance and sexual gratification. In 1999, Rob introduced her to his new friend James Pavatt, a 44-year-old insurance broker, who attended the local Baptist church. Brenda and James hit it off, almost immediately.
By all accounts, Brenda liked sex. On occasion, she dressed provocatively, at least in the eyes of the god-fearing people of Edmonds, Oklahoma. She showed cleavage, wore hot pants and short skirts in public. She’d had multiple sexual partners. She’d had sex before marriage and affairs while married. She liked to flirt. She dyed her hair. Surely, none of these things are all that uncommon, even for Oklahoma.
But Brenda’s husband had been murdered and Brenda’s boyfriend had killed him. Brenda had to pay. Not just for the murder of Rob Andrew, but for the mesmerizing power she exerted over James Pavatt. Brenda’s erotic magnetism had corrupted a good man, a Sunday school teacher. She’d seduced him into committing murder. And that kind of dangerous force not only needed to be punished, it needed to be extinguished.
Pavatt and Andrews were charged with the same crimes: 1st-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. The case presented against him was all about the facts: the guns, the insurance policy, the flight to Mexico. Andrew’s trial was about her being a slut, a dangerous woman, the alleged danger being her sexual appetite. The trial of Brenda Andrew was less about the evidence and motives for the murder and more about how Brenda could have convinced Pavatt to shoot Rob. It was some kind of sex magic, practiced by a temptress.
They indicted her character. She was a lustful woman, a harlot who was never faithful. She was called a “hoochie” by a witness. Pavatt was referred to repeatedly as “one of her lovers.” In his opening statement, the prosecutor told the jury, “Brenda had extracurricular activities. She liked to cheat on Rob…throughout the marriage Brenda had a boyfriend on the side.” She was accused of making passes at teenagers who were replacing a deck at her and Rob’s house. One of the items the prosecutor flourished as damning of Andrew’s guilt was a book the cops found in the second drawer of the nightstand next to her bed: 203 Ways to Drive a Man Wild in Bed by Olivia St. Claire (No relation, as far as I know..) The prosecutors put about as much emphasis on this book as they did on the altered insurance policy.
The prosecution put on a witness who told the jury that Brenda wore leather skirts and had rolled up her hair “really big.” The state claimed this ridiculous evidence demonstrated “her ability to manipulate and control men.”
As evidence of her witch-like ability to “control men,” the prosecutors called one of Andrew’s former lovers, Rick Nunley, whose affair with Brenda had ended four years before the murder. Even though their affair was remote in time from the murder and Nunley said that Brenda had never spoken ill of her husband or expressed any intention or desire to harm or kill him, the testimony was permitted, purely, it seems, to sex-shame Brenda before the jury:
Prosecutor: When did you begin to have a more than friendly relationship with the Defendant Brenda Andrew?
A: In the late Fall of ’97, probably late October or early November of ’97.
Q: Was there something [in] particular that caused that relationship to escalate?
A: Brenda seemed to experience common marital problems that I also experienced and we shared those things over the years, that may have contributed to it.
[…]
Q: Now, at the time you began your affair with Brenda Andrew were you married, sir?
A: I was married, however, we had filed for divorce I think on October 1 of 1997.
Q: And was Brenda Andrew married?
A: Yes.
Q: Was she married to Rob Andrew?
A: Yes.
Q: Did Rob Andrew know about your relationship with Brenda Andrew at the time it was going on?
A: Not to my knowledge.
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Q. Had your affair ended with Brenda at the time you’re testifying about, around the 1st of October of 2001?
A. Yes. We had stopped seeing each other that way for a number of years.
Q. And while you were having an affair with Brenda Andrew was that a sexual relationship?
A. Yes.
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Q: You testified that Brenda Andrew was a very hospitable person. She was really hospitable to you, wasn’t she, Mr. Nunley?
A: Yes.
Q: And she was hospitable to Mr. James Higgins as well, wasn’t she?
A: I haven’t heard his testimony.
Q: She was hospitable to Mr. Pavatt as well, wasn’t she?
A: I haven’t heard his testimony either.
In the state’s closing arguments jurors were treated to the spectacle of the prosecutor in Brenda’s case, Gayland Gieger, hauling a suitcase toward the jury box, from which he extracted a pair of her thong panties, which he waved in front of them, saying, to audible gasps in the courtroom: “This [dangling a pink thong] is what we found in [the suitcase]. It’s been introduced into evidence. The grieving widow packs this [brandishing a red thong] to run off with her boyfriend. The grieving widow packs this [pulling out a black thong] to go sleep in a hotel room with her children and her boyfriend. The grieving widow packs this [pulling out a lacy bra] in her appropriate act of grief.”
Not only did the prosecution suggest that Brenda was a sex-crazed adulterous, but they also argued (against all evidence from people who knew her) that Brenda was a bad mother, whose execution would in some depraved way benefit her children: “Would a good mother allow her children to read murder mysteries with their father laying in his grave?” “Would a good mother take them out of school…and have them eat tuna fish and wash dishes in a pot and live on the beach?”
The appalling tactic, which an appellate judge later said had “no purpose other than to hammer home that Brenda Andrew is a bad wife, a bad mother and a bad woman,” worked. The jury convicted Brenda of first-degree murder and two days later sentenced her to death.
In Brenda’s case, as in so many others of women convicted of spousal murder, the enhancing factor was not the “profit motive” of the insurance policy, but the adultery, the penultimate transgression. The sociologist David Baker studied 42 cases of women given the death sentence by American courts between 1632 and 2014 and found that the women’s sexual affairs were used as evidence against each of them.
Brenda Andrew has been on death for 20 years now. Her character has been grossly savaged by the state, not only in her trial and its penalty phase, but she has been repeatedly dehumanized and humiliated, reduced to some kind of contagious sex object, in every appeal her lawyers have brought before state and federal courts. But is this 60-year-old woman still a threat to the men of Oklahoma? Does she retain the power of sexual enchantment, the ability to seduce men from behind bars and bend them to her murderous will?
In his dissenting opinion in Brenda’s appeal, 10th Circuit Judge Robert E. Bacharach wrote:
The state focused from start to finish on Ms. Andrew’s sex life. This focus portrayed Ms. Andrew as a scarlet woman, a modern Jezebel, sparking distrust based on her loose morals. The drumbeat on Ms. Andrew’s sex life continued in closing argument, plucking away any realistic chance that the jury would seriously consider her version of events.
Bacharach rightly said the evidence was so prejudicial and irrelevant that it fatally tainted the entire trial against Andrew and he would have overturned not just her death sentence but her conviction for murder as well.”
Brenda Andrew may well have helped arrange the murder of her husband. But by all accounts, Brenda is not the cold, morally depraved, sexual deviant portrayed by the state in its morbid quest to execute her. Brenda was a dutiful and doting mother. She was a kind and considerate neighbor, who helped care for a friend stricken with Alzheimer’s. She was described by a former boss as a good employee when her husband allowed her to work. Brenda’s cousin said she was “the glue” that held her family together after their father died prematurely. Until she moved to Stillwater, Brenda helped raise and care for her brother, who suffered from a severe mental impairment. This woman is not a witch.
Now Brenda’s fate rests with a Supreme Court that has rejected its own precedents in favor of divining Constitutional meaning through historical traditions, traditions that in this case a jurist like Samuel Alito is likely to trace back to the Court of Oyer and Terminer, set up by Governor William Phips in 1692, to decide the fate of the Salem women accused of practicing witchcraft. At the time of the Salem trials, women were regularly whipped for cheating on their husbands. By contrast, there’s not a single record of a man being prosecuted for adultery.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
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