Casey McWhorter spoke calmly about dying.

McWhorter, 49, is set to die by lethal injection sometime Thursday night or early Friday for the 1993 slaying of Edward Lee Williams Sr. in Marshall County. Gov. Kay Ivey set a 30-hour possibility for the execution to happen, with the timeframe ending at 6 a.m. Friday.

And, he said he’s ready.

“Let me make it very clear, I’m hoping that we get the stay and whatnot. But at the same time, I’m okay with whatever happens,” he said in a lengthy phone interview with AL.com late Wednesday. While he’s talked to reporters in the past, McWhorter said this was his final interview.

“I’m in a great place,” he said confidently. “I’m in a really good place. I’m more concerned with my family and friends, how they’re going to deal with things. How they’re going to feel.”

He told his family not to be sad if he dies by lethal injection Thursday night. “I know where I’m going, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. My concern is how they’re going to handle things.”

McWhorter doesn’t argue that he’s guilty of murder. But the state is guilty, too, “in the most premeditated way possible.”

“If a normal citizen did what they are trying to do now, they would be labeled a Ted Bundy. They would be labeled one of the worst of the worst. But because its state-sanctioned, it’s okay.”

The case

McWhorter said he’s sorry to the Williams family, and he regrets what happened that night in 1993.

When asked what he would say to the family, he replied: “That I’m sorry. That I hope they found some peace and I hope that they’ve found, you know, reasons to smile at the memory of the person that’s gone.”

McWhorter is set to be executed for the 1993 shooting death of Williams Sr., who was the father of one of McWhorter’s friends. McWhorter was 18 at the time of the slaying, and has been on Alabama Death Row since 1994 after a jury voted 10-2 for him to die. He was 19 when, on Friday the 13th, he was sent to William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore where Alabama Death Row is housed and he will soon face execution.

It will have been more than 30 years since the crime.

Court records state that ahead of Williams Sr.’s death, McWhorter and two other teens — one who was Williams’ son, then-15-year-old Edward Lee Williams Jr.—formed a plan to rob the elder Williams. While court records say the teens planned to rob and shoot Williams Sr. at his home, McWhorter said that isn’t true.

“It was something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Yeah, we talked kid, tough talk… (but) it was just talk. It was never supposed to go down the way it went down.”

“He came home early. He wasn’t supposed to be there. It just spiraled so fast to hell.”

On the night of the slaying, court records state McWhorter and a 16-year-old co-defendant entered Williams’ house while he wasn’t home. They were there for hours, ransacking the house and making silencers for the two rifles they found inside. When Williams finally returned home, the teens struggled with him over the guns, before shooting Williams “at least 11 times,” records show.

The teens stole the victim’s wallet and fled in the victim’s truck, dividing the money and items taken from the house and separated.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case in 2021.

While McWhorter, at just 19, headed to death row, none of his co-defendants faced capital punishment.

After the 1993 shooting, McWhorter said he tried to take his own life by overdosing. “It just was playing over and over in my head, and I didn’t know how to get rid of it. And I still haven’t. I’ll never get rid of it.”

“There’s some things that you see that you can’t unsee, and the death of a person is one of those things.”

Growing up

McWhorter said his childhood and resentment against his father affected him in a way where he always sought attention, even if that was bad attention. “It was a really mean cycle that I didn’t know how to communicate to people, I didn’t know how to fix in my own head. It put me in some really bad situations.”

When he was sentenced to death and hauled south down I-65 in a police car, McWhorter said all he could think was, “Oh my god, I’m going to death row.” The first night he spent there, McWhorter said he panicked about big, scary murderers breaking into his cell to kill him.

But then he listened and heard other men on death row talking and even laughing, being what he called “everyday people.”

“I thought, ‘did they carry me to the wrong place?’”

It took a bit of time to adjust and to grow up behind bars, but McWhorter did. It was his grandmother who finally convinced him that he was better than the actions that put him there, and it was time to act like it.

McWhorter, who proudly proclaimed he could have played college basketball, got his GED. Then, he took more than a dozen hours of college courses, remembering the work he put into his AP classes in high school. Science and math classes were his favorite, he said — skills that would have helped him if he had joined the Air Force, like he once thought he would.

After the Alabama Department of Corrections took away college classes for people who were sentenced to death and life without parole, McWhorter became a book worm, reading anything he could put his hands on. He started writing letters, becoming an avid pen pal.

McWhorter’s closest friends also sit on death row. His former best friend, a man he calls a brother, was Max Landon Payne. Payne was executed in 2009, McWhorter recalled emotionally.

Now, one of his closest friends is Kenneth Smith. Smith was set to die last November, but prison workers couldn’t get his intravenous line established for the lethal drugs in the allotted time frame. Now, Smith is set to be the first person in the world to be executed using nitrogen hypoxia in January.

Smith claims he went through hours of torture while prison workers jabbed him with needles, trying to start the IV. McWhorter said he worries that could be his experience.

He didn’t get to say goodbye to Smith, which made McWhorter emotional during an hour-long phone interview.

Executions

By his estimation, McWhorter thinks about 75% of people on Alabama Death Row don’t deserve to be there – including him.

“I’ve said I did something wrong and I deserve time to be taken from me for that. But I don’t feel that my life should be that price,” he said.

Court records show two co-defendants took plea deals in the case. Edward Lee Williams Jr. is currently serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling prevents juveniles who were under 18 at the time of a crime from being sentenced to death.

For many years, it upset him that he was the only one facing death for his crime.

Growing up, McWhorter said he knew what capital punishment was. But he didn’t know it could apply to “someone like me.”

“I didn’t know that your average Joe could go out and get a capital case. I thought it was for the Ted Bundys, the Timothy McVeigh.”

“I didn’t think one mistake could put you here.”

He said the Williams family didn’t push for the death penalty, and it was prosecutors who were set on capital punishment.

He’s still holding out hope for a court-ordered stay, or for Gov. Kay Ivey to issue clemency, but he’s prepared to die. He’s still deciding if he’s going to make a final statement.

“At this point in the game it’s in God’s hands and I’m okay with whatever decision he makes.”

When asked what he wanted to tell the world before he died, McWhorter said: “To not judge your fellow man by the worst mistake that they’ve made. But to judge that man by the lesson he learned from that mistake, and how he’s applied it to his life.”

McWhorter spoke calmly about dying. He spoke calmly and quietly about everything, except when he mentioned his mom.

“That woman is a saint,” he said. “That’s what’s so hard on me sometimes. I’m ashamed of all the tears I’ve caused her, and she’s done nothing but love me and support me and be there for me. Sadly, it just took years for me to put that in perspective.”

“I hope I leave her enough to be proud.”

Read more about Alabama executions.