Who is on death row in Idaho?
Published at
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a two-part series on the death penalty in Idaho. You can read part one here.
IDAHO – For a high-profile criminal, the worst-case scenario is often death row.
Defense lawyers are trained to do everything in their power to keep their clients from being executed by the government. If they fail, there is no going back. It is the only irreversible legal act in the United States’ justice system.
According to Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Idaho, Samuel Newton, the prosecution in a death penalty case is tasked with the decision to find the “worst of the worst.”
RELATED | A closer look at the history of the Idaho death penalty
“It has to be a certain type of murder. The classic example is that you have to have killed more than one person, maybe you torture someone when you kill them, but it has to be something that differentiates you from the ordinary murder, which is already bad,” says Newton. “But it’s gotta be the worst kind of murder.”
So who in Idaho has met these aggravating factors? What did the crimes entail?
Here is a list of who is currently on Idaho’s death row.
Azad Abdullah – on death row since Dec. 2004
Azad Abdullah was sentenced to 999 years in the Idaho Department of Correction for the murder of his wife, Angie, and attempted murder of their four children.
According to the Lewiston Tribune, Abdullah killed his wife in their Boise home, before setting their house on fire with their four children sleeping inside, to conceal the evidence.
The children made it out of the house alive.
Abdullah was found guilty on November 24, 2004 of first-degree murder, felony first-degree arson, three counts of felony attempted murder, and felony injury to a child.
According to the Idaho Press, Abdullah’s attorneys announced in 2020 that the “Ada County Prosecutor’s Office has for 16 years held onto information helpful to his case they likely should have turned over during his 2004 trial.”
Abdullah’s attorney reportedly stated made that a lead detective lost evidence that could have been helpful to Abdullah’s case.
The defense attorney reportedly asked for a new trial and that Abdullah’s sentence be vacated.
As of now, Abdullah is still on death row, but does not have a date set for execution pending the results of the new motions.
Thomas Creech – on death row since Jan. 1983
Thomas Creech is Idaho’s longest-serving death-row prisoner. As of January, He will have been on death row for 40 years.
According to Idaho News 6, Creech has claimed to have killed over 40 people, but is on death row for the murder of fellow inmate, David Dale Jensen on May 13, 1981.
At the time of the murder, Creech was serving time for two previous murder convictions in Idaho.
According to court documents, Jensen was partially disabled. In an earlier attempted suicide, Jensen shot himself in the head, resulting in the partial removal of his brain and a plastic plate being placed in his skull, causing impaired speech and motor functions.
According to Idaho News 6, Creech has issues with Jensen, while Creech worked as the prison janitor. Jensen dirties the floor, and Creech was reportedly upset that he had to clean it.
David Dale Jensen later attacked Thomas Creech with a sock filled with batteries, but Creech was able to get the weapon away from him, and beat him to death with it.
Timothy Dunlap – on death row since April 1992
Timothy Dunlap was convicted of first-degree murder after using a sawed-off shotgun to kill 25-year-old bank-teller, Tonya Crane during a 1991 bank robbery in Soda Springs, according to the Associated Press.
Dunlap was also convicted and sentenced to death for killing Belinda Bolanos, a murder that took place in Ohio ten days before he killed Crane. According to court testimony, Dunlap blindfolded Bolanos and shot her in the neck with a crossbow.
The AP reported Dunlap “told police that he began a relationship with Bolanos with the intent of killing her for her car, credit cards and checks.”
Sixth District Judge William Woodland sentenced Dunlap to death by lethal injection for first-degree murder in 1992, but in 2005, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that procedural mistakes made after Dunlap pleaded guilty entitled him to a new sentencing hearing.
According to the Idaho iCourt system, the latest motion filed in Dunlap’s case was in 2013 for a rehearing.
James Hairston – On death row since Nov. 1996
James Hairston was convicted of first degree murder after shooting and killing two people in Bannock County.
According to AP, Hairston murdered two elderly Downey residents in what the judge called “executions for money.”
Police said Hairston and an accomplice acquired $30, a credit card and a saxophone in the robbery.
At the time, Hairston, who was 20, was the youngest person on Idaho’s death row.
Judge McDermott, who sentenced Hairston, reportedly said it was a difficult decision to impose the death penalty, but he believed Hairston is a “cold-blooded, pitiless killer who would kill again if paroled from prison or if he escaped from a less-than-secure prison setting.”
Erick Hall – On death row since Oct. 2004
Erick Hall was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for raping and killing Lynn Henneman in 2000 and Cheryl Ann Hanlon in 2003.
Hall was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Henneman in 2000. He was then charged with the murder of Hanlon in 2003, and sentenced to death again.
Hall’s defense attorneys argued throughout the 2003 trial that Hall and Hanlon had “rough, consensual sex” and that Hanlon’s death was an accident, according to the Spokesman Review.
Hanlon’s body was eventually found by a teenager, who was walking their dog along a trail in the Boise foothills on March 1, 2003. The prosecution told the jury she had been beaten so severely that she looked like the victim of a traffic accident.
At the time, detectives were still looking for the person who killed Henneman three years earlier. Similarities between the cases included that both women had been strangled with something other than a pair of hands, and both had been severely beaten and raped.
Gerald Pizzuto – On death row since May 1986
Gerald Pizzuto was convicted of first-degree murder for the “beating deaths” of two people in Idaho County.
According to KTVB, Pizzuto was camping with two men when he came across 58-year-old Berta Herndon and her 37-year-old nephew Del Herndon, who were hunting in the area.
RELATED | He killed 2 people in Idaho in 1985. Now he’s asking the state not to execute him.
Pizzuto later entered their cabin, tied the pair up and beat them with a hammer before stealing their belongings and bragging that he had “put those people to sleep, permanently.”
Pizzuto kidnapped and raped a woman at gunpoint in Michigan in 1975. He was later convicted and served nine years in prison, but broke parole after he was released and made his way to Washington.
While in Washington in 1985, he strangled 51-year-old Rita Drury to death in her home and shot 31-year-old John Jones to death.
RELATED | Idaho Supreme Court won’t reconsider death row clemency case
Pizzuto then made his way to Idaho, where he murdered the Herndons, and days later, pulled a gun on a man he met at Gold Fork Hot Springs, robbed him, and left him tied to a tree.
Pizzuto was later convicted of the double-murder and was sentenced to death in 1986. His lethal injection date was set for June 2, 2021, but was pushed back after the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole voted 4-3 to recommend that Pizzuto’s death sentences be commuted to life without parole.
This was because of his numerous medical problems, including advanced bladder cancer, chronic heart and coronary artery disease, coronary obstructive pulmonary disease, and Type 2 diabetes.
RELATED | Little won’t commute sick death row inmate’s sentence
Pizzuto has been on hospice care since 2019, and doctors estimated his life expectancy at less than a year at the time. In August of this year, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that the governor can reject clemency recommendations made by the Commission of Pardons and Parole, reversing the decision that had blocked the state from executing Pizzuto.
Jonathan Daniel Renfro – On death row since Nov. 2017
Jonathan Daniel Renfro was convicted of first-degree murder for the shooting death of a Coeur d’Alene Police Sgt. Greg Moore in May 2015.
According to KREM, Moore stopped Jonathan Renfro while walking through a Coeur d’Alene neighborhood that had been experiencing an increase in car burglaries.
RELATED | Convicted cop-killer sentenced to death in Coeur d’Alene
Investigators said Renfro pulled out a gun, shot Moore, took the officer’s gun and then sped off in his car.
Renfro was sentenced to death after eight weeks of proceedings and six weeks of court hearings and testimony.
Robin Row – On death row since Dec. 1993
Robin Row was convicted of first-degree murder for the arson deaths of her husband, son and daughter in Ada county. She is currently the only woman on Idaho’s death row.
According to KTVB, Row set her home on fire on Feb. 10, 1992. The carbon monoxide killed her husband Randy Row and her two children – 10-year-old Joshua and 8-year-old Tabitha.
She was sentenced to death in 1992 and continued to make many appeals in an attempt to get off death row.
In Aug. 2011, a federal judge dismissed her appeal but approved her request to ask a higher court to consider some other issues in her case, including whether or not her attorneys were ineffective and whether she was forced to wait too long to be arraigned.
According to former Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney, who arrested Row, she had taken out life insurance policies on her family that covered her children for a quarter of a million dollars. The most recent policy had been taken out just a couple weeks before their murders.
Ada County law enforcement also believed Row murdered two of her other children, a 15-month old daughter in New Hampshire in 1976 and her 6-year-old son in California in 1980, according to Raney.
The daughter’s cause of death was listed as SIDS, but Raney told KTVB that evidence shows children that age do not die from SIDS. He believes Row smothered the baby.
As for the son, Raney said Row was staying in a cabin with her 6-year-old son Keith, when a fire broke out and killed him.
According to KTVB, “forensics suggests the boy’s bedroom door was locked and an electric heater was pushed up against his bed blankets. Raney says the boy probably tried crawling to the door, couldn’t get out, and died trying to get to the window.”