Orlando Cordia Hall, 49, was put to death via lethal injection late Thursday at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, where he was pronounced dead at 11:47 p.m., the Department of Justice announced. He was the 8th federal inmate to be executed this year.
Hall was convicted of kidnapping resulting in death by a federal jury who unanimously recommended a death sentence, which the court imposed.
In September 1994, Hall and several accomplices ran a marijuana trafficking operation out of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. After a failed drug transaction involving $4,700, Hall and his accomplices drove to the Arlington, Texas, home of a man they believed had stolen their money. The man’s 16-year-old sister, Lisa Rene, refused to let them inside.
Although Rene — an honor roll student with dreams of becoming a doctor — had no role in the drug transaction, Hall and his accomplices broke into the apartment and kidnapped her at gunpoint. In the assailants’ car, Hall raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on him.
Hall’s accomplices subsequently drove her to a motel in Arkansas, where they tied her to a chair and repeatedly raped her. Hall arrived at the motel room the next morning, took Rene into the bathroom for fifteen to twenty minutes, and emerged to announce that “she know too much.”
That night, Hall and his accomplices took her to a park where Hall and another accomplice had dug a grave that afternoon, but they could not find the grave site in the dark. The next morning, they returned to the park with Rene. At the grave site, Hall placed a sheet over Rene’s head and hit her in the head with a shovel. Rene screamed and tried to run away, but the men tackled her and took turns beating her with the shovel. After soaking her with gasoline, they dragged her into the grave and buried her alive.
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One of Hall’s co-conspirators, Bruce Webster, was also sentenced to death, but a court vacated the punishment last year due to his intellectual disability. Three others, including Hall’s brother, cooperated at his trial and received lesser sentences.
Rene’s sister, meanwhile, said the execution capped a “very long and painful chapter” in the family’s lives.
“We have been dealing with this for 26 years and now we’re having to relive the tragic nightmare that our beloved Lisa went through,” Pearl Rene said in a statement. “Ending this painful process will be a major goal for our family. This is only the end of the legal aftermath. The execution of Orlando Hall will never stop the suffering we continue to endure. Please pray for our family as well as his.”
