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Execution set for Georgia man who kidnapped, raped and murdered ex-girlfriend
A man who killed his former girlfriend three decades ago is set to be put to death in March in what would be Georgia’s first execution in more than four years.
A judge on Thursday signed the order for the execution of Willie James Pye, who was convicted of murder and other crimes in the November 1993 killing of Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. The execution is scheduled for March 20 at 7 p.m., after the judge set an execution window between noon that day and noon on March 27.
Pye, 59, would be the first person executed in Georgia since January 2020. Georgia executions are carried out at the state prison in Jackson by injection of the sedative pentobarbital.
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Because of the coronavirus pandemic, executions were effectively halted for a certain group of people on Georgia’s death row by an agreement between their attorneys and the state. Pye’s lawyer cited that agreement when asking a court Wednesday to prohibit the state from seeking an execution warrant against him for the time being.
Pye and Yarbrough had dated on and off, but at the time of her death Yarbrough was living with another man, according to court filings. Pye, Chester Adams and a 15-year-old boy had planned to rob that man and bought a handgun before heading to a party in Griffin, prosecutors have said.
The trio left the party around midnight and went to the house where Yarbrough lived, finding her alone with her baby. They forced their way into the house, stole a ring and necklace from Yarbrough and took her with them when they left, leaving the baby alone, prosecutors have said.
Willie James Pye is seen in this Georgia Department of Corrections photo. (Georgia Department of Corrections via AP)
They drove to a motel, where they took turns raping Yarbrough and then left the motel with her in the teenager’s car, prosecutors have said. They turned onto a dirt road and Pye ordered Yarbrough out of the car, made her lie face down and shot her three times, according to court filings.
Yarbrough’s body was found on Nov. 17, 1993, a few hours after she was killed. Pye, Adams and the teenager were quickly arrested. Pye and Adams denied knowing anything about Yarbrough’s death, but the teenager confessed and implicated the other two.
The teenager reached a plea agreement with prosecutors and was the main witness at Pye’s trial. A jury in June 1996 found Pye guilty of malice murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, armed robbery, rape and burglary, and sentenced him to death.
Pye’s lawyers had long argued in courts that he should be resentenced because his trial lawyer didn’t adequately prepare for the sentencing phase of his trial. Pye’s lawyers argued that his trial attorney failed to do a sufficient investigation into his “life, background, physical and psychiatric health” to prevent mitigating evidence to the jury during sentencing.
They presented evidence that his childhood was characterized by poverty, abuse and neglect. They also argued that he suffered from frontal-lobe brain damage, potentially caused by fetal alcohol syndrome, that harmed his ability to plan and control his impulses.
A federal judge rejected those claims, but a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Pye’s lawyers in April 2021. But then the case was reheard by the full federal appeals court, which overturned the panel ruling in October 2022.
Adams, now 55, pleaded guilty in April 1997 to charges of malice murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, armed robbery, rape and aggravated sodomy. He got five consecutive life prison sentences and remains behind bars.
When Georgia courts were under a judicial emergency because of the coronavirus pandemic, lawyers for a group of people on death row entered into an agreement with the office of state Attorney General Chris Carr to temporarily suspend executions and establish conditions under which they could resume.
The agreement said that, with one named exception, executions wouldn’t resume until six months after three conditions had been met: the expiration of the state’s COVID-19 judicial emergency, the resumption of normal visitation at state prisons and the availability of a COVID vaccine “to all members of the public.”
The agreement applied to death-sentenced prisoners whose requests to have their petitions reheard were denied by the 11th Circuit while the judicial emergency was in place. That agreement is currently the subject of litigation in Fulton County Superior Court with executions for the prisoners in question on hold for now.
Pye’s lawyer argued in a court filing Wednesday that he qualifies as a third-party beneficiary of that agreement even though the 11th Circuit’s final rejection of his request for a rehearing came in March 2023. He asked the court to allow him to join the pending litigation, which would protect him from execution for the time being.
Lawyers for the state responded in a filing Thursday that Pye was not covered by the agreement and should not be allowed to join the pending litigation.
The judge who signed the execution order also wrote that Pye is not part of the agreement and that it, therefore, does not prevent his execution from proceeding.
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A North Carolina college professor and state House candidate was fired from his job after being recorded calling Charlie Kirk a “racist piece of s—” last week.
Chris Schulte had taught psychology at Coastal Carolina Community College since 2008, but he was fired on Thursday after a student recorded audio of a rant in which he disparaged both Kirk and Turning Point USA.
“Did he deserve to die? No. But he was a racist piece of s—. And Turning Point USA is a racist piece of s— organization,” Schulte could be heard saying in an audio recording.
Schulte made no apologies for his comments in a public statement after his firing. Schulte is a Democratic candidate for North Carolina’s State House.
Chris Schulte of North Carolina. (Chris Schulte campaign photo)
“Campus security had to escort me to my car because threats were made against me at my workplace after I spoke out for academic freedom and called out racism and censorship where I saw it,” Schulte wrote. “I spoke passionately on that topic because I care deeply about this country and I’m concerned about protecting constitutional freedoms, especially the First Amendment, that defines it. Today’s events only reinforced why those protections matter.”
“In an attempt to bring awareness to the censorship of faculty happening at UNC-Chapel Hill with secret recordings, I was secretly recorded by a student,” he wrote. “It is a sad statement about our country right now that my comments would elicit threats not just on my career, but also my life.”
Schulte is one of many academics across the nation who found themselves in hot water over a litany of crude commentary celebrating the TPUSA founder’s death last year.
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Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was murdered last year. (Lynne Sladky/AP Photo)
Many received short disciplinary stints and are now back in their roles.
On Dec. 30, Austin Peay State University in Tennessee sent a message to community members notifying them that Darren Michael, an associate professor of acting and directing, had been reinstated. Michael was fired on Sept. 12, two days after Kirk’s assassination. He shared a post with a 2023 remark by Kirk that gun deaths were “unfortunately worth it” to protect the Second Amendment.
On top of being rehired, Austin Peay acknowledged that it had not followed its own policies for terminating tenured faculty, and paid Michael a $500,000 settlement, according to local reports.
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Erika Kirk speaks onstage during the New York Times DealBook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Dec. 3, 2025, in New York City. (David Dee Delgado/Getty Images for The New York Times)
At the University of South Dakota, art professor Michael Hook was fired for slamming Kirk in the wake of his assassination.
“OK. I don’t give a flying f— about this Kirk person,” Hook said hours after Kirk was killed, according to Inside Hire Ed. “I’m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I’m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives. But geez, where was all this concern when the politicians in Minnesota were shot? And the school shootings? And Capitol Police? I have no thoughts or prayers for this hate spreading Nazi. A shrug, maybe.”
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Hook sued the school after his termination, and on Sept. 26, a federal judge ordered him to be temporarily reinstated while the legal proceedings continued, deciding that he had a reasonable chance of prevailing in his suit.
Shortly thereafter, the South Dakota Board of Regents agreed not to fire Hook, and he dropped his lawsuit, The Argus Leader reported.
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A Florida high school teacher is accused of engaging in repeated sexual encounters with a student who had moved into her home, and plying the teen with alcohol, according to an arrest affidavit.
Mackenzie McLean, a 49-year-old economics teacher at Crooms Academy in Sanford, was arrested Tuesday on two counts of sex offense by an authority figure and one count of distribution of a controlled substance.
The male student, a senior who was friends with McLean’s daughter, moved into the teacher’s home around March 2024 after he was kicked out of his own home, according to the affidavit.
The victim said that on one occasion when he was playing video games with McLean and her daughter in a bedroom, McLean gave him 12 shots of gin, causing him to become severely intoxicated, according to the affidavit. She then allegedly told her daughter to leave the room before engaging him in sexual activity.
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Mackenzie McLean, 49, is an economics teacher at Crooms Academy in Sanford, Florida. The school district said she was placed on administrative leave following her arrest on Tuesday. (Seminole County Sheriff’s Office)
It “went on for a very short time,” the student told authorities, alleging that he “pushed McLean off him and told her it was wrong.”
The student lived with McLean for nine months, though he estimated that he was sexually abused “approximately five to ten times” in the two months when she was still his teacher.
McLean taught the male student at Crooms Academy of Information Technology, a magnet school in Sanford, Florida. (Google Maps)
As the student told authorities about the alleged sexual encounters, detectives noted in the affidavit that he appeared “quite emotional” and started crying with visible tears.
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The student said he allowed the sex to continue because he was afraid that if he stopped, he would no longer have a place to live or food to eat.
The student also brought a friend to speak with detectives who said she had also spent time at McLean’s home, sometimes sleeping over. The teen girl alleged that McLean provided her with alcohol and Adderall, a schedule two controlled substance.
The friend said that she witnessed McLean ask the student to sleep in bed with him, though she did not have direct knowledge of any sexual activity until sometime later, according to the affidavit.
McLean was arrested on Tuesday and is being held on $35,000 bond. (iStock)
Text messages between McLean and the teen girl show that McLean claimed she knew the sexual relationship with the student was wrong, though she alleged that the student initiated the sex.
“I’m well aware that I’m the adultier adult and so I intentionally never initiated anything because I didn’t want to make him feel any kind of way,” reads one alleged message from McLean.
McLean was placed on administrative leave Tuesday morning after spending nearly 25 years working in the district, a Seminole County Public Schools spokesperson told FOX35 Orlando in a statement.
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“Any allegations of misconduct by our staff will be taken seriously and handled quickly,” the statement said. “The safety of our students and staff is our highest priority, and any type of behavior that jeopardizes that safety will not be tolerated in Seminole County Public Schools.”
McLean is being held on a $35,000 bond. Her next court date is scheduled for March 31.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday blamed what he called “venom” from the political left following a deadly incident at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
“Two would-be assassins dead, one in jail for life, and this venom coming from the other side…” Bessent said during “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“They are normalizing this violence. It’s got to stop.”
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Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to members of the media outside the White House on Nov. 5, 2025. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Bessent pointed to a campaign commercial from an Illinois Democratic Senate candidate in which Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton showcased people declaring, “F— Trump, vote Juliana,” urging that the “profane” video be taken down.
“We don’t know whether this person was a mastermind, unhinged or what, but they are normalizing this… violence,” he said.
Fox News Digital reached out to Stratton’s office for comment and did not immediately hear back.
Bessent’s comments came as authorities investigate a security incident at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where a young male suspect was shot and killed early Sunday.
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An aerial view shows the Mar-a-Lago estate and the north gate in Palm Beach, Florida, following reports of a shooting incident on Feb. 22. (Fox News)
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw confirmed to Fox News that the suspect was 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin of North Carolina.
The president was in Washington, D.C., at the time of the incident. No Secret Service agents or law enforcement personnel were injured.
“I want to congratulate Sean Curran and the Secret Service for protecting the president and his family,” Bessent said, adding that Trump and his family are safe.
The Treasury secretary declined to discuss potential changes to the president’s security posture at Mar-a-Lago following the incident but insisted that protections around Trump are “as strong as it’s ever been.”
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Fox News’ Alex Nitzberg contributed to this report.
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