[Beth] Attorneys for a man scheduled to die in 10 days
filed a motion today asking the Tennessee Supreme Court to temporarily delay his execution.
Attorneys for Billy Ray Irick say his execution must wait on an appeals court
to hear a case challenging the state's lethal injection protocol.
The state has until Friday to respond.
Irick is set to die August 9 and that's next week.
Irick has been on death row since 1986.
So long, the public's memory of his crime has faded.
10News reporter Jim Matheny takes us through the case with the victim's family
to remember why the state plans to kill Billy Irick.
A warning, this report includes graphic details of a violent crime.
[Kathy] It's the crocheted pillow that she and I made together.
It was for her bed, and now, it stays on mine.
[Jim] Kathy Jeffers falls asleep and wakes up with a heartwarming keepsake.
A memory of her 7-year-old daughter, Paula Dyer.
A little girl, Kathy says, many have forgotten
while her killer, Billy Ray Irick, is still alive with his name in the news,
more than three decades after a jury sentenced him to die him.
[Kathy] All you ever hear about is him, nothing about her.
You know, what he did to her is the reason he's where he's at.
[Jim] Paula Dyer was Kathy's second child.
When Kathy and Kenny Jeffers got married in 1982, they already had several children.
[Kathy] We were kind of like the Brady Bunch.
[Jim] Paula, the bright, straight-A student, loved her big family of brothers and sisters.
[Kathy] Very outgoing and very friendly.
She never met a stranger.
[truck engine running]
[Jim] Kathy and Kenny Jeffers made ends meet by working odd hours,
fixing trucks and feeding truckers.
[Kathy] Kenny was a decent mechanic,
and I was a waitress at Hagaman's Truck Stop.
[Jim] In 1983, they met Billy Irick,
a dishwasher at the Dixie Plaza Truck Stop.
Before long, Billy became a roommate
who helped with the kids.
[Kathy] When our house caught fire,
he actually saved two of the boys from the house.
He was like part of the family.
[cars driving by]
The house burned and everybody had to split up.
I couldn't get a house big enough where he could stay with us.
[Jim] Kathy and five of the children found a small rental house nearby on Exeter Avenue.
Paula's personality quickly made a positive impression on the new neighbors.
[Kathy] There was this woman that lived next door to us.
Paula picked flowers and walked over and introduced herself
and said, "Can we be friends?"
That was what she was like.
[truck engine idling]
[Jim] The night of April 15, 1985,
Kathy had to work the graveyard shift.
A regular babysitter couldn't stay with the children
so Billy Irick came over instead.
But something about him that night made Kathy uncomfortable.
[Kathy] I just had a bad feeling.
Something's just not quite like it should be, you know?
But I didn't know what it was
so, you know, I stopped at a pay phone
and called Kenny and asked him to please get back there.
[truck engine running]
[Jim] About an hour later Kenny Jeffers got another call at the truck stop.
This time from Billy Irick
who said, "Come home. Paula's not breathing. She won't wake up."
[truck engine running]
When Kenny Jeffers got to the house,
he found Paula unconscious on the floor
with a pool of blood between her legs.
[car drives by]
Kenny rushed her to Children's Hospital
where doctors tried to revive Paula for 45 minutes.
But she wasn't breathing.
There was nothing they could do.
[Kathy] And I kind of went nuts.
They finally let me go back there and I kept trying to wake her up.
Kept telling her, "Mommy's here. Mommy's here."
And then that's when the chaplain came in and took me into the room to talk to me.
[Jim] Doctors said the cause of death was asphyxiation.
Billy Irick suffocated the life from the little broken body he brutally raped twice.
[Kathy] The four boys were in the house and they heard her screaming,
tried to get to her and couldn't
because he had the bedroom door barricaded.
And they still have nightmares.
He took away something precious.
He took a life.
[car driving by]
[Jim] Police found Irick the next afternoon
hiding beneath the Baxter Avenue Bridge on I-275.
Officers said he immediately showed remorse and confessed in writing.
Irick was behind bars.
And the community rallied to help the Jeffers pay for a funeral they couldn't afford,
just two weeks after losing everything in a house fire.
[coins clattering]
First graders at Beaumont Elementary School pitched in anything they could
to help put their new classmate, Paula, to rest.
[water hitting windshield]
People held car washes to raise money,
and truckers delivered a load of support.
[Kathy] There was so much that everybody did.
[Jim] The family was able to bury Paula
holding a popular toy she had wanted,
a Cabbage Patch doll.
[Kathy] It's the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
[Jim] A year and a half later,
a jury convicted Irick of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated rape.
Defense attorneys tried to save him from the death penalty
by pointing out he was institutionalized with mental illness when he was just 6 years old.
But there was no sympathy for 27-year-old Billy Irick.
The jury sentenced him to die in the electric chair.
[Kathy] I felt like it was deserved and that it was over or would be.
It's like it never ends.
It's 30 something years ago,
and it's still going on.
[Jim] Since landing on death row in 1986,
Irick's case has gone through every appeal from the High Court in Tennessee
to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Every time, the courts ruled his death sentence would stand.
Every time, courts determined he was mentally competent to pay the ultimate price for his crime.
But every time, the broader issues of capital punishment postponed Irick's date with death.
[Kathy] My kids had to go through this.
They had to live through it.
And now, my grandkids, her nieces and nephews, they're having to live through it too.
This suffering don't stop...it just doesn't stop.
I'm sick of hearing about his pain and his suffering.
This one doctor says his so-called panic attacks if he's given this injection.
She was 7 years old raped, sodomized, and strangled to death.
I'm sorry. I feel nothing for his panic attacks or his pain, nothing at all.
God forgive me, but I don't.
I don't.
[Jim] Kathy Jeffers says if and when Irick is finally executed,
it may not end her family's suffering.
But she wants closure.
And she wants people to remember why Billy Irick is on death row.
Remembering why means remembering Paula K. Dyer
[Kathy] I don't think she can rest in peace until this is resolved,
and Paula needs to rest in peace.
[Jim] In Knox County, Jim Matheny WBIR 10News
[Beth] Billy Irick's execution is set for the night of August 9
at 8 o'clock Eastern time, 7 Central at the prison in Nashville.
You can see a lot more on this story at WBIR.com.