Murder of Leesa Gray

Common card · No. 415730

On the night of June 22, 2000, 16-year-old Leesa Marie Gray was abducted by Marine Corps recruiter Thomas Edwin Loden Jr. after she finished her shift at a restaurant in Dorsey, Mississippi. Loden held Gray captive inside his van, where he sexually assaulted her several times before he murdered her by strangling and suffocating her during the early morning hours of June 23, 2000. On that afternoon, Gray's naked body was found inside Loden's van, and Loden himself was found lying on the roadside with the words "I'm sorry" carved into his chest and self-inflicted cut wounds on his wrists. In the following year of 2001, Loden, who waived his right to a jury trial, pleaded guilty to all six criminal charges, mainly capital murder, rape, and sexual battery, and he was sentenced to death for murdering Gray. Loden was on death row for 21 years before he was executed via lethal injection on December 14, 2022.

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