Man Executed for Murdering Beloved Elvis Impersonator

Alabama put Jeffery Lee to death by lethal injection on Thursday evening, nearly 28 years after he walked into a pawn shop west of Selma with a sawed-off shotgun and killed the owner, a singer who once had a national following as the masked Elvis impersonator Orion.

Lee, 49, was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, authorities said. The execution got underway just after 6 p.m.

"All is well. I just want to say to my family, I love them. To my brothers on life row. I love them," Lee said in his final words.

The lethal injection came three months after federal courts blocked Alabama from killing Lee with nitrogen gas, the method he himself had picked back in 2018, and after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in a second time.

His last day at Holman

Lee declined the offer of a final meal, the state Corrections Department said, though he ate other food and snacks during the day.

On September 16, the day before he died, Lee had 17 visitors and 3 phone calls. On the day of the execution he had 6 visitors and made no calls.

As the injection began, Lee clenched his fists on the prison gurney. His spiritual adviser held Lee's feet and appeared to pray. Lee closed his eyes and did not appear to open them again.

A wedding ring, then a shotgun

Lee was 21 on December 12, 1998, when he entered Jimmy's Pawn Shop in Orrville, a small town in Dallas County, with his brother and his cousin. He said he was looking at wedding rings for his girlfriend, browsed the display case, and told employee Helen King he had no money but would be back with some. He gave her the name "Chris Williams" and left.

He came back minutes later with a sawed-off shotgun. He shot store owner Jimmy Ellis, 53, in the left arm, then shot Elaine Thompson, 44, point-blank in the face. He shot King in the hand. When King collapsed, she played dead on the floor. Lee shot Ellis again, in the chest, tried to wrench open the cash register, failed, and walked out. King then used the telephone to call police.

Thompson was Ellis' ex-wife and also worked at the store. An autopsy showed Ellis died of the gunshot wound to the chest and had multiple shotgun wounds on his body. Thompson died from the shot to her face. The shop's security cameras recorded the crime.

Lee's 19-year-old brother and his 17-year-old cousin were arrested the same day as the killings. Lee was arrested a day later, holed up at a motel in Georgia. He confessed to the shootings but claimed the first shot went off by accident.

The man behind the mask

Ellis had a voice that sounded uncannily like Elvis Presley's, and in the 1970s and '80s he built a name for himself as a mask-wearing, country-singing performer under the stage name Orion. His life and his death were the subject of the 2015 documentary "Orion: The Man Who Would Be King."

King appeared in that film and described lying still on the pawn shop floor while Lee fumbled with the register. "I don't know why somebody would do that to somebody so nice as Jimmy," she said. "He made you feel like you're family."

A jury voted 7-5 for life. The judge said no.

A Dallas County jury convicted Lee in April 2000 of two counts of capital murder and one count of attempted murder. That same jury voted 7-5 to recommend a sentence of life without parole. The trial judge overrode the recommendation and sentenced him to death on October 11, 2000.

Alabama abolished judicial override in 2017, ending the practice of letting judges rewrite a jury's sentencing decision in capital cases. The change was not retroactive. Lee was one of about two dozen people on Alabama's death row sentenced to die after their juries recommended life.

Supporters pressing for clemency rallied Tuesday outside the Alabama Capitol under a banner reading "HONOR THE JURY." Gov. Kay Ivey refused to commute the sentence.

"In June, after Mr. Lee attempted to avoid his deserved death sentence, I reaffirmed my commitment that justice would ultimately be served," Ivey said in a statement Thursday.

The method fight that split the Supreme Court

Lee sued Alabama in 2016 over its lethal injection protocol. He agreed to drop that suit in 2018 after the state agreed that "if he is to be executed, defendants will carry out that execution by nitrogen hypoxia." He elected nitrogen years before Alabama had even written a protocol for it.

Then he sued last year to stop the state from using nitrogen on him, arguing the gas induces "conscious suffocation" that "is cruel and unusual because it superadds terror and pain during the execution."

He lost at first. U.S. District Judge Emily Marks ruled that nitrogen did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment, she was reversed on appeal in June and then found the protocol unconstitutionally cruel and a violation of the Eighth Amendment, barring the state from ever using it on Lee. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found nitrogen executions most likely violate the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court denied Alabama's application for a stay or vacatur, leaving those rulings in place and giving no reason. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch noted they would have granted it.

His original execution date had been June 11. Within days of losing, the attorney general's office filed paperwork for a new date and a different method. Marks agreed the state could proceed by lethal injection because her injunction covered only the nitrogen protocol.

Lee's lawyers went back to the high court. Their petition asked the justices "to determine whether the State may execute Mr. Lee by lethal injection notwithstanding its prior representation that it would execute him by nitrogen hypoxia." Lee had proposed a firing squad as his alternative, and Marks found it feasible. His lawyers said the state could fix its nitrogen protocol or use that method instead. Alabama does not authorize a firing squad.

The attorney general's office asked the justices to let the execution go forward. "An unpunished murder is an intrinsic and ongoing harm to those interests and to the rule of law," state lawyers wrote. "Nearly twenty-eight years is decades too long."

The state also argued Lee was the one who moved the goalposts. "It is Lee who has changed positions," it wrote. "He challenged the very method he elected."

Austin Sarat, a political science and law professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts who writes about botched executions, said supporters of capital punishment might view Lee's litigation as pure delay, but that Alabama could have revised its nitrogen protocol instead of returning to a method it had taken off the table. "There's a possibility that Alabama can't make it work," Sarat said of a constitutionally sound nitrogen procedure. "But you offered a choice. When we make a contract and enter into an agreement, the whole purpose is to bind us to perform against all future possibilities."

The Supreme Court denied Lee's petition on Thursday.

What the state said afterward

Attorney General Steve Marshall had said earlier that he was "prepared to do whatever is necessary to see Mr. Lee's lawful sentence carried out." After the execution, he said: "The case against Jeffery Lee was overwhelming and unambiguous."

Lee's attorneys said Alabama "chose to execute Jeffery Lee by lethal injection, an equally problematic method it had told a federal court in 2018 it would not use." After Ivey set the new date, they said the state "revives the very lethal injection method it promised to abandon," adding: "Alabama isn't complying with the Constitution. It's trying to outrun it."

Where nitrogen gas stands

Alabama first used nitrogen gas in early 2024, replacing breathable air with the gas through a respirator mask. It has been used in seven executions in Alabama and one in Louisiana. Five states authorize the method: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Kenneth Smith was the first person executed that way. His family watched from the witness room at the prison in Atmore. He was pronounced dead 32 minutes after the curtains opened, and witnesses saw him shake and writhe for at least four minutes; the state had told courts he would lose consciousness in seconds. "It was the awfullest thing I've ever seen in my whole life," Smith's son, Steven Tiggleman, said Wednesday. "You got a scuba mask strapped to your face, and they're suffocating you to death."

During the October 2025 execution of Anthony Boyd, the last person put to death with nitrogen in Alabama, one media witness reported Boyd gasping for air more than 225 times. The Rev. Jeff Hood, spiritual adviser to both Smith and Boyd, said Wednesday: "Nitrogen doesn't put a man to sleep. It makes him drown in a room full of air." He added: "Nitrogen hypoxia is dead because of Jeffery Lee."

The 27th execution of 2026

Twenty-seven people have been executed around the United States so far in 2026, and Lee's was the second in Alabama this year. In Texas, a man was given a lethal injection for his conviction in a triple murder at his neighbor's home. In Georgia, a judge blocked the state's plans Wednesday to execute a man who killed two real estate agents.

Lethal injection remains Alabama's primary execution method. States turned to alternatives after problems getting and administering the drugs, and Alabama reviewed its own injection procedure in 2022 following failed executions.

Lee spent nearly 26 years on Alabama's death row. He was born in Alabama on December 26, 1976, the third of seven children, and had two children of his own. He served as a board member of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, an anti-death penalty group made up of death row prisoners.