The Associated Press
DAYTON, Ohio — A man sentenced to death for fatally shooting a husband and wife at a Valentine’s Day dance in 1998 has died at a hospital, a prisons spokesman said Monday.
James Taylor Sr., who was from Huber Heights near Dayton, died early Wednesday at St. Elizabeth Hospital Medical Center in Youngstown, where he had been taken from death row and was on life support since Dec. 16, said prison spokesman Keith Fletcher. He was 77.
“We don’t have the death certificate yet, but he died of complications of his multiple illnesses,” Fletcher said. Life supports were not removed prior to the death, he said.
Taylor was convicted and sentenced to die for killing Ronald Rihm, 51, and Rihm’s wife, Carolyn, 57, at the dance at an Eagles Lodge in Fairborn in southwest Ohio.
Although not a lawyer, Taylor represented himself at his trial and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Prosecutors said Taylor went to the dance to kill his estranged wife, Patricia, who had left Taylor and moved in with the Rihms. She was not shot.
Taylor, a retired electrician with a 10th-grade education, said he took a gun to the dance to kill himself, and the deaths of the Rihms was an accident that happened when one of the victims bumped his arm, setting of the gun.
In 2003, he filed a notice of intention to file a habeas corpus petition, the first step in the appeals process. The case had been sent to U.S. District Judge Walter Rice for review in October 2006 and was reassigned last month.