Dustin Honken, the drug lord from Iowa who is a living example of the famous 'Breaking Bad' character "Heisenberg," as he is known as a meth kingpin is scheduled on Friday, July 17 to become the third convict in the U.S. to be executed this week, after the capital punishment of Daniel Lewis Lee and Wesley Ira Purkey.
The 52-year-old criminal was sentenced to death, following a 17-year pause in federal executions, for killing five people, including government informants and two young girls in his efforts to prevent his drug trafficking prosecution in 1993.
He is set to die by a lethal injection of the powerful sedative pentobarbital at the Terre Haute federal prison in Indiana, where Honken has been on the death row since 2005. His execution would be the 10th carried out in the U.S. in 2020, including three in Texas.
Who Was Dustin Honken?
Infamous drug kingpin Honken grew up in Iowa but he later moved with a friend to Arizona to become rich by cooking meth, which he learned during his college education. Honken and his friend used to distribute their product through two dealers based in Iowa.
As per a report, in 1993, one of those dealers, Greg Nicholson, began cooperating with investigators. Later, authorities arrested Honken after the dealer-turned-informer Nicholson secretly recorded him and testified before a grand jury. Even though Honken told the court that he would plead guilty, days before his July 1993 plea hearing, he and his girlfriend, Angela Johnson, went on searching for Nicholson.
Honken and Johnson found Nicholson and his girlfriend Lori Duncan, as well as her daughters Amber and Kandi, aged between 6 and 10, at their home. The whole family was kidnapped, shot to death, and buried but bodies were' t found for seven years. The meth kingpin then killed another drug dealer Terry DeGeus and his body was found a few miles away from Honken's other victims.
In 2004, Honken was convicted for the killings in Iowa in a trial that featured extraordinary security measures and included an anonymous jury. During the trial, he was wearing a stun belt under his clothing to prevent escape attempts. The jury recommended a death sentence and U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett said, "I am not going to lose any sleep if he is executed. Normally I would, but the evidence was so overwhelming."
