Two executions on one day: a Texas child beheading case and an Oklahoma affair killing

Two American states were lining up executions for the same day. John Allen Rubio, 46, was scheduled to die in Huntsville, Texas, while James Pavatt, 73, faced lethal injection at Oklahoma's state penitentiary in McAlester, according to the Independent.

Rubio was convicted of killing three young children he was raising in Brownsville, on Texas' border with Mexico, in 2003. The victims were 3-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E. Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio, who died in the cramped, windowless apartment the couple shared. Court records show Rubio wasn't the biological father of the two older children but raised them as his own. His girlfriend, Angela Camacho, pleaded guilty and is serving life behind bars.

His path to Thursday's chamber was a long one. An appeals court threw out Rubio's first capital murder conviction after ruling that statements from Camacho had been wrongly admitted as evidence. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity at his second trial too, and was convicted and sentenced to death again. Defense experts diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, a finding prosecution experts rejected; they argued his violent childhood, which included "toxic" parents, drug use and prostitution, left him developmentally damaged. Rubio at points claimed the children were possessed and that he was the "chosen one" sent to save the world. The apartment building where they died was later torn down, and the land became a park and community garden.

Pavatt's case reaches back even further. He was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy in the 2001 shooting of Rob Andrew, a 39-year-old advertising executive killed in the garage of his Oklahoma City home as he collected his two young children before Thanksgiving. Pavatt attended the same church as the Andrew family and was having an affair with Andrew's wife, Brenda Andrew. The pair were tried separately and both sentenced to death — Brenda Andrew is now Oklahoma's only woman on death row. Prosecutors say the two plotted the killing together and that both are equally guilty regardless of who pulled the trigger.

Weeks before the shooting, Rob Andrew had told police someone was trying to kill him after the brake lines on his car were cut. Brenda Andrew told investigators that masked intruders shot her in the arm and fatally wounded her husband. She and Pavatt fled to Mexico with her two children and were arrested three months later as they re-entered the United States. At a clemency hearing last month, Pavatt insisted he was "not guilty of shooting anyone" and said he had fallen in love with Brenda Andrew and believed "everything she told me." He also told the board he only grasped at trial how badly he had been manipulated by her.

The two executions land in a year when the country is on pace to top 40 executions for a second straight year, a rate driven by Florida. California Gov. Gavin Newsom added fresh fuel to the debate last week, announcing he would commute hundreds of death sentences before he leaves office — a move experts call the largest mass clemency in American history.