As firing squad looms, man facing execution shares his SC death row story

WHITNEY — Under darkness, Richard Moore strolled toward Nikki’s Speedy Mart, a boxy white building with barred front windows and the overnight promise of beer, hotdogs and snacks. Around 3 a.m. on Sept. 16, 1999, he passed the payphone and approached the glass front doors.

Moore, 34 at the time, came to Nikki’s often. The local car wash stood next door; a discount strip mall stretched across the street. 

Inside the convenience store, the only other customer was Terry Hadden, a regular who was playing Joker Poker at a bank of machines. Moore grabbed two cans of Icehouse beer and headed for the front counter, a space crowded with displays of cigarette lighters, lip balm and bite-sized Butterfingers. 

Although Nikki’s was in Spartanburg County’s rural Whitney area, the man behind the counter had been watching news of a hurricane headed for the coast several hours away. The clerk, James Joseph Mahoney III, was 42 with blue eyes and a head full of wavy brown hair. 

A slim man, he wore blue Levi’s with a .44-caliber revolver tucked in them, clearly visible. He liked having protection while working the third shift. The store’s owner also kept a pistol under a white towel by the cash register and another under the counter.

Mahoney, the clerk, set the beer into a brown paper bag.

Then, for reasons still unclear, he grabbed the gun tucked near the register. He and Moore struggled over it. 

Moore had come in unarmed. But he wrestled the pistol away. 

The clerk grabbed a second gun. 

Moore shot him. 

He shot Moore. 

But who fired first? And why?

That remains disputed, 23 years later, as Moore sits on South Carolina’s death row, likely the next man to be executed. 

On Jan. 5, the S.C. Supreme Court will hear arguments over the constitutionality of the state’s new firing squad option in what could present the final stand between Moore and execution. He would be the first person South Carolina has put to death since 2011. 

He became one of three dozen men on death row because Mahoney lay behind the counter with a devastating gunshot wound to his chest. And Moore, shot through his left arm, made a fateful decision: Instead of calling 911, he slipped around the counter, his blood dripping onto the dying man’s back, to snatch a blue vinyl bag of cash. 

Moore recently described those moments to The Post and Courier in his first prison interview with a journalist. He provided a rare look inside South Carolina’s secretive death row and detailed the realities of standing at the precipice of an execution date, twice now. 

Alone in his cell, he spoke at length of regret and loss, death and redemption, and all that the encounter inside Nikki’s cost both men and their families. 

“I hate that me and Mr. Mahoney’s paths collided as they did,” he said. “He lost his life, and I lost the life I knew, the opportunity to live a better life. Both of us lost that.”

Two men, two guns

The men, fairly close in age, one White and one Black, had crossed paths before. Moore said he frequented the store, and Mahoney had worked there for three years. 

Mahoney was the oldest of four siblings and a great lover of NASCAR, a “good-ole boy,” as a Nikki’s employee later described him.

When he was a kid, Mahoney treasured his model NASCAR collection. His brother recalled how he would build the models, with old-timey drivers like Buddy Baker and Cale Yarborough, spending hours meticulously painting them and applying decals. Then he’d try to keep his younger twin brothers from messing with them. 

As a man, Mahoney helped people when they had real-life car troubles, as he had just hours before he was killed. His coworkers recalled him as a jokester, a hard worker who would help anyone.

He wasn’t married and had no children, but was godfather to his sister’s oldest daughter, who he had taught to drive. An active uncle, every Sunday evening when he arrived at their home, he’d knock on the back door and call out, “Hey, Sue, what’s for supper?”

But no longer.

On the other side of that counter at Nikki’s was Moore. He and his common-law wife were raising their two young biological children and his stepson.

Moore had grown up outside of Detroit, the fifth of eight children, in a lower-income neighborhood with a network of family around him. When the crack epidemic roared into the area in the early 1980s, he was a teenager. 

First he sold this new drug to make money. Then he tried it himself. Soon, he used it every day. He craved it. 

“I convinced myself that I wasn't addicted, that it wasn't as bad as it was,” he recently told The Post and Courier. 

Although he often held a job and was an active parent over the years, he later came to realize he was living a second life. It revolved around crack cocaine and an escalating series of crimes. Habitual traffic offender. Unlawful weapon possession. Purse snatching. Breaking and entering. Robbery. Assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature.

As crack addiction ravaged communities like his, prisons filled with Black men charged by “tough-on-crime” prosecutors. 

Among them was Holman Gossett Jr., solicitor of South Carolina’s 7th Judicial Circuit, which includes Spartanburg County, where James Mahoney breathed his last and Richard Moore lay bleeding in a hospital.

Tough on crime

The severity of what had just happened inside Nikki’s did not hit Moore right away. He said he felt no pain from the gunshot wound as he fled. 

With the stolen bag of cash, he steered his old Chevy pickup truck to a drug dealer friend’s house several miles in one direction rather than to the hospital just blocks away.

When the man refused to take him to the emergency room, Moore backed out of the driveway and into a telephone pole. A deputy soon arrived and drew a gun on him.

Woozy, Moore dropped to the ground repeating, “I did it. I did it. I give up.”

Although Moore had been using crack and alcohol, a sheriff’s detective who arrived at the hospital around 6:30 a.m. found him answering questions intelligently. As he talked, Moore grew agitated.

The detective wrote in his report that Moore hollered over and over, “The (expletive) shot me. Is he in jail or what? He pulled a gun and shot me.” He begged to know the clerk wasn’t dead. 

But the detective also noted that he thought Moore was “putting on an act” and had claimed he didn’t know anything about the bag with more than $1,000 in cash in his truck, an open pocket knife beneath it. 

Four months later, Moore was indicted for murder. The following month, in February 2000, a rising young prosecutor left the U.S. Attorney's Office to run for 7th Circuit solicitor. Trey Gowdy challenged the longtime incumbent, Gossett.

Gossett boasted that he had sent more men to death row than virtually any other solicitor and tried to paint Gowdy as soft on crime.

The newcomer won. But before leaving office, Gossett left him something. One year after the shooting, he filed notice to seek the death penalty against Richard Moore.

Hands of justice

The trial began in mid-October 2001, a month after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The war on drugs had reached its crescendo. And a Princeton University professor had coined the term “super-predator” to describe perceived menace from typically Black, inner-city youths who were said to be ramping up crimes.

In this context, Moore arrived inside a Spartanburg County courtroom to see a White judge and all-White attorneys. After prosecutors struck both potential Black jurors, a group that was all-White with one Hispanic filed into the jury box.

Moore sat at the defense table. Dread filled him, his fate held entirely in the hands of more powerful White people. It was nothing new in Spartanburg County. Over the 16 years leading up to Moore’s trial, in all but one case in which prosecutors sought the death penalty, the victims were White.

Prosecutors began with two key witnesses.

Just weeks before the trial began, one of those witnesses, the drug dealer whose house Moore went to that night, had changed his story. George Gibson originally told police that Moore came to him wounded, seeking a ride to the hospital. 

But after a visit from a prosecutor, the man now said that Moore had come to him seeking crack cocaine the evening before the shooting but had no money. When Moore returned, bleeding heavily from the gunshot wound, he said Moore still wanted drugs — and indicated he could pay up. 

Those details gave prosecutors a critical motive: Moore went into Nikki’s to rob it.

By then, Gibson faced new pressure: a drug-trafficking charge with a hefty sentence. It was pending in the 7th Circuit, although he testified that prosecutors didn’t promise him anything in exchange for his new statement.

The other key person was Hadden, the only eyewitness. 

He testified about playing video poker when Moore came in that night, his back to the men. The next thing he heard was Mahoney say loudly, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” 

Hadden, who's blind in one eye, described how he spun around in his chair and saw Moore “had Jamie by both of his hands with one of his hands.”

Moore, he said, then fired the first shot at him with his other hand. Terrified, Hadden dove to the floor pretending to be dead as gunfire erupted. He didn’t see how Mahoney managed to get a second gun or how both men wound up shot. 

But Hadden’s first statement to police did not mention Moore clutching the clerk’s hands. Instead, after quoting the clerk, he had said Moore responded: "Get the hell back.”

This mattered because Moore maintained that he fired in self-defense after he and Mahoney argued and the clerk drew a gun. The jury never heard him say that though; Moore did not testify. 

Prosecutors also repeatedly mentioned a meat cleaver found at Mahoney’s feet, suggesting Moore brought it in with him. Employees of the store, which was part restaurant, said they hadn’t seen it before. 

But the most damning evidence was clearly undisputed. Moore, who just lost his job, had slipped around the dying man to steal a bag of money. 

Gowdy used that fact in his powerful closing argument:

“He didn’t call 911 to say that we've had a shooting. He didn’t call the police. There has been no evidence that he checked on the condition of Terry Hadden or James Mahoney. He stepped over a dying, broken body to get money to go back to George Gibson's house to get another rock of crack cocaine.”

It took the jury two hours to find Moore guilty of murder, assault with the intent to kill, armed robbery and a firearm offense.

Life or death

During the penalty phase, Mahoney’s loved ones described the agony of his killing. His father, a Korean War veteran, tried to explain the singular pain of losing a child, of only seeing his son at a cemetery. 

“Part of you is gone, never to return,” he said.

Mahoney’s coworkers described a man who was like family to them. His brother, who testified in his Army uniform, said Mahoney had wanted to go into the military as well, but health problems thwarted those dreams.

To contrast the men, prosecutors emphasized Moore’s long and growing rap sheet. They called two female victims, including one who described a terrifying incident when Moore grabbed her purse, punched and kicked her, then beat her fiancé so badly he landed in the hospital.

When the time came for Moore’s defense attorneys to present mitigating evidence, they produced just two witnesses. 

Lynda Byrd, his common-law wife, described Moore as an active father and asked the jury to spare his life.

“He has three children who need him, adore him,” she said.

Their two biological children were 8 and 7, too young to testify. So the rest was up to Moore’s 16-year-old stepson, who described a loving father figure who stepped in to coach his basketball team. 

“He is the only dad I ever had,” he told the jury. “You know, if he is gone, I just couldn’t take it. My brother and sister, they couldn’t take it either. I don’t know what to say.”

That was the final word of testimony.

It took the jury 90 minutes to deliver a death sentence.

Years later, several Cornell Law School students interviewed seven of the jurors. One juror called Moore “the scum of the earth,” according to an affidavit signed by one of the students.

The forewoman told one student that she didn’t buy the self-defense argument and thought Moore seemed arrogant. In fact, an affidavit says, she said the jury was so intimidated by Moore that when they returned to the courtroom for the sentence to be read, the men filed in and sat in front “to protect the women.”

Redemption resolve

As Mahoney’s family grieved his violent death, Moore moved to death row, a concrete-and-steel world then housed at Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville.

Then 36 years old, he looked around at the men he would spend the rest of his life with. Some screamed from their rooms at all hours. One man ate off the floor. 

One man had slashed his mother’s face and neck and crushed his father’s skull with a baseball bat and hammer. 

Another had stabbed a woman in the chest while raping her, then shot her in the head and scalped her. 

Another had gone to an elementary school and opened fire, killing two 8-year-old girls and wounding seven other students and two teachers.

Moore wondered why he faced the death penalty when he had gone into the store unarmed. He wondered how things would be different if he were rich and White.

But mostly, he hated himself. He hated that Mahoney was dead. He hated that he was on death row. He hated that his children would grow up without him.

He wondered how he would preserve his own humanity in this place.

Then he received his first letter. Byrd wrote it nine days after he received the death sentence. She called him her soulmate.

“You have never left my heart,” she wrote. “How can you every time I'm looking at these children? They were born out of the love we have.”

She urged him to stay positive, to lean on his faith and keep fighting through the long appeals ahead.

“Remember that you are loved by all of us.”

Several days later, Moore received a card with the Powder Puff Girls on it. His 8-year-old daughter, Alexandria, had drawn pictures of cookies and birds for him.

“I love you so much Daddy,” she wrote. “Please come home.”

Moore made a redemption decision then. He would be the best father possible from prison, however long he had left.

Daddy’s girl

Although his romantic relationship with Byrd ended, she played a critical role in helping their children keep in touch with him. A routine emerged. He called every Sunday evening, and they visited him when they could.

Alexandria is 29 today. She joined the Air Force and married an Air Force man. She has since gotten out, but he is stationed in Spain.

From their home overseas, she recently recalled how her father wrote to her often, how he sent cards and drawings of SpongeBob and Ren & Stimpy, how they sent each other homemade word puzzles that she loved. She stored them in a big tote, which she still keeps with her.

“Despite the circumstances, my father has never stopped being a father,” she told The Post and Courier. “I know that he would never do anything intentionally to hurt us or to hurt the family. I felt his love throughout my entire life.”

She was daddy’s girl, then and now. 

It wasn’t perfect. They weren’t perfect. She admits that sometimes when he called, she didn’t answer the phone.

She knew he was in prison, that he had killed someone, but not much more. Her parents protected her from the worst details, and their phone calls revolved around normal life — her and her two brothers’ normal lives.

One day, when she was 21 or 22, she got to thinking. 

She Googled his name.

“It was not that it was tough to read, because that's not who I knew. That's not how I grew up,” she said. “He has made sure to play such a strong fatherly role through the distance that it was hard for me to picture. I have only known him as a great father, a good man, a teacher, a mentor.”

The difference is that now they talk about his case — and his punishment. When she gets teary, he assures her, “It will work out the way it is meant to work out.”

Life on death row

For more than a decade, Moore’s appeals stretched on, none of them successful. 

He lived alone in a cell on death row with a stainless steel sink and toilet combination bolted to the wall and a metal door with a small window in it. A foot locker stored the letters, word puzzles, Father’s Day cards, a blue photo album and a dictionary his family gave him. A desk with a bench and a metal bunk bed filled out the space. 

Over the years, he saved enough to buy a TV and a coffee pot. From his window, he could see a tree line and watched for a deer or hawk.

He also met other inmates he could talk to, remembering life outside, dealing with life inside. 

And he formed relationships with prison staff.

In September 2020, almost two decades after Moore’s trial, an unexpected ally emerged. Jon Ozmint, the former head of the state Department of Corrections, wrote a letter to the governor. He supported clemency for Moore.

Over eight years, Ozmint had overseen the executions of 14 people. He left the post just months before the state’s last execution, in 2011.  

He reminded the governor of his tough-on-crime bona fides: his support for capital punishment, his work as a judge advocate general officer in the Navy, his decade prosecuting crimes. He had dealt with a lot of inmates who had done horrible things.

And he had never written a letter like this.

Ozmint explained that he favored commuting Moore’s sentence to life in prison without parole. Moore could influence hundreds of other prisoners with his “story of redemption and his positive example.”

Ozmint insisted that Moore had developed and maintained strong character in prison, even when facing an execution date.

“Our criminal justice system has already achieved its highest and most lofty purpose in the life of Richard Moore,” he wrote.

On death row, Moore had only two minor disciplinary issues, both more than a decade old, one for using foul language, the other for having Skittles outside of his cell, he wrote. (In 2006, Moore also was caught with an illicit cellphone, a serious infraction, records show.)

Finally, Moore had walked into Nikki’s with no firearm.

“Objectively reviewed, Richard’s crime would have never been considered for the death penalty in most counties in our state,” Ozmint wrote.

But Gov. Henry McMaster recently told reporters that the jury had spoken. He had no interest in considering clemency, which hasn’t been granted in South Carolina since 1976.

‘Mental torture’

Three weeks after Ozmint wrote the letter, Moore received an execution date: Dec. 4, 2020. 

His appeals exhausted, he could be dead before Christmas.

He described how on the day he found out, the unit’s officers ordered all three dozen men on death row to their rooms, by then moved to Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. Officers came to his cell, put handcuffs and shackles on him, then took him to a room where prison officials waited.

Someone read the death warrant to him.

He signed and dated it.

The officers didn’t return Moore to his room to live out his final month of life. Instead, they took him to another area of the building and locked him in an isolation room. A prison spokeswoman said inmates are moved at that point for safety reasons, similar to how they are treated in its crisis unit. 

Moore was allowed only a couple of pairs of socks and underwear, two T-shirts, a towel, his emerald green prison jumpsuit. He couldn’t take his photographs. No TV, no radio, no other prisoners to talk to, nothing but thoughts of dying.

In the anxious fog, he recalled praying that he had told his family he loved them enough. He prayed that Mahoney’s family had forgiven him. He prayed that he had forgiven himself. He prayed for mercy.

“I've done everything I can,” he thought. Now, it was up to God. 

Yet his nerves frayed; the stress ramped.

A camera watched him every second, even when he used the bathroom. Someone came by every 15 or 30 minutes to be sure he hadn’t harmed himself. He recalled the room’s blaring lights staying on 24/7, although the spokeswoman said they are turned off between checks. Mental health workers visited frequently. So did chaplains. 

“Those were the worst days of my entire incarceration over 20-plus years,” he recalled. “Those last 30 days are the most tiring, nerve-shattering, miserable days.”

And the questions. What did he want for his final meal? What did he want done with his personal property? What about his remains? He could have two visitors to witness his execution. Who did he want there?

He recalled, “It’s mental torture.”

Continued nightmare

Mahoney’s family has not spoken often to journalists. But as the execution date approached, his sister told The Post and Courier about his loved ones’ ceaseless pain. 

“Our family has suffered for over 20-plus years and it is past time that the state carries out his sentence,” Kathy Kelley said. 

Yet a major barrier stood between Moore and death. The state couldn’t obtain one of three drugs used in the lethal injection cocktail. His attorneys asked the state Supreme Court to halt his execution, given corrections officials could not explain how they planned to kill him. 

When Justice 360, a nonprofit death penalty reform group, posted about the move on its Facebook page, one of Mahoney’s loved ones responded in the comments: “Would you like to know how we’re still dealing with the consequences of (Moore’s) decision to rob and murder an innocent man 21 years later?” 

She wrote about Moore’s criminal record and how he stepped over her loved one’s dying body to steal money rather than help him.

“Look, I understand your desire to fight for ‘justice’ but what you consider ‘justice’ is a continued nightmare for my family.”

She thanked another commenter for her prayers and noted that her family had no peace, no closure.

“There is always a void. There is always an ache. Nothing will ever fix it.”

A few days later, the Supreme Court stayed Moore’s execution. He returned to his usual cell.

Death by firing squad

The following spring, state lawmakers took a new tack to jump-start executions: They amended a statute to give condemned inmates another option, the firing squad. 

In the past, the Republican-controlled General Assembly had faced opposition from one of their own: state Rep. Gary Clary — the former circuit judge who had presided over Moore’s trial, the last of nine capital murder cases he oversaw.

When Clary charged Moore’s jury, he told them a death sentence could be carried out by lethal injection or electrocution, not a firing squad. Clary would not support enacting a new way of executing people retroactively. 

“That went against all the rules of constitutionality, fair play and due process in my mind — and my almost 50 years as a member of the bar,” Clary said. “It was just repugnant to me.” 

Clary had recently retired from office when lawmakers adopted the changes. In May 2021, McMaster signed the amended law, making South Carolina one of four states to use a firing squad, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. 

Four death-row inmates, including Moore, swiftly challenged its constitutionality in court.

Meanwhile, Corrections officials got to work refurbishing the execution room, with its century-old electric chair, and crafting protocol for a firing squad. Only three people have been executed by firing squad since 1976, all in Utah. 

In March 2022, Corrections leaders notified the Supreme Court that they were ready.

The first inmate set to die was Richard Moore.

‘Turned back the clock’

Back to the isolation room, the clock to death ticked again. Moore’s new execution date was on April 29, 2022. This time, he pondered a grim new decision. 

Would he rather die in the electric chair or by firing squad?

He chose the firing squad but argued he was being forced to choose between two unconstitutional methods. 

“Both ways that the state presented to me are barbaric,” he told the newspaper. “How do you choose one evil over the next?”

Nine days before he was set to die, the high court stayed his execution while the constitutionality question went before Circuit Judge Jocelyn Newman. 

Moore returned to his usual room. He had been in isolation for two weeks. When he arrived, he collapsed. An indescribable weight lifted, replaced by bone-deep exhaustion. 

The next day, when he emerged from his cell, his fellow inmates congratulated him. He tried to convey his thanks.

“It was rough,” he recalled. “You're trying to stay manly, I guess, but it's a relief to where it humbles you, and it can break you down to where you take a breath and you freaking cry. The tears come down your face because you realize just how close you've come to death.”

In September, Newman issued a scathing 38-page ruling that deemed the firing squad and electrocution both unconstitutional. She wrote that the Legislature had “turned back the clock” and “ignored advances in scientific research and evolving standards of humanity and decency.”

McMaster and the prison director appealed, sending the question to the state Supreme Court, where it now rests.

A story to tell

Moore was 34 when he shot Mahoney. He is now 57 — and a grandfather. 

Alexandria has a 3-year-old daughter. Every time he calls, she can say a few more words. On a recent video call, she took the phone from room to room showing him their home. 

Now, when the phone rings, she asks, “Is that Papa?”

Moore remains the last person on South Carolina’s death row convicted by a jury without a single Black member.

In the quiet hours, he said he thinks about Mahoney as he faces whatever lies ahead. His attorneys advised him against reaching out to the man’s family, but Moore told the newspaper he hoped Mahoney's loved ones might contact him to express whatever they need. He also wants to seek their forgiveness. 

“I would let them know that I'm sorry, that each day Mr. Mahoney is not forgotten,” he said. “I am truly, truly sorry that he died at the hands of my actions.”

He added, “I am not the same person I was the night I took Mr. Mahoney’s life. I have grown. I feel as though I still have a story to tell.”

Sitting alone in his cell with night approaching, the dictionary and letters from his children nearby, Moore turned circumspect. He spoke about love and remorse.

On Jan. 5, the state Supreme Court will hear arguments in the execution methods case. If they overturn Newman’s decision, “execution dates could follow quickly,” said Lindsey Vann, Moore’s attorney and executive director of Justice 360. 

He could die by gunshot to the chest, as Mahoney died. 

Had he lived this long, Mahoney would be 65. His father died last year without seeing his son's killer executed. His family will celebrate another Christmas without him. 

And Moore’s granddaughter will open presents without him. He soon might have to tell his family about yet another execution date.

“I'm still breathing — at this time,” he said. “But you know, my family has lost, as well.” 

They just haven’t lost him to death, at least not for now.