Unless the governor or the courts intervene, Kent Jermaine Jackson will die Thursday for the murder of a widow who lived across the hall from his Newport News apartment.

The body of Beulah Mae Kaiser, 79, was discovered April 18, 2000, amid her modest, ransacked belongings. She died two days earlier, on a Sunday after returning from church.

The killers were Jackson, 26, and his roommate, Joseph M. Dorsett, 29.

They were arrested more than a year after the murder, and Jackson made a recorded confession. According to media accounts of his sentencing, he told the jury: "You've already said I'm guilty of

capital murder. . . . Now finish the job."

The jurors complied, some of them crying as the sentence was read.

In the slaying Kaiser's jugular vein was cut, her skull was fractured, and she was sexually assaulted. Her cane was driven into her mouth, knocking out most of her teeth and blocking her airway.

If Jackson is put to death Thursday at 9 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center, it would be the 101st execution in the state since capital punishment was allowed to resume in 1976.

After a hiatus of more than a year, Virginia is in the midst of a spate of executions, with one in May, one in June and another scheduled after Jackson's. The crimes live on not just for the families and friends of the victims and the condemned but for others as well.

One of them is Misty M. Mercer, a retired police homicide detective who led the investigation for Newport News police. Reached by phone last week, she said, "this was my one and only death-penalty case."

She said that when the death sentence was imposed, she was asked how she felt about it. "I guess people think that you're going to jump up and down and give everybody the high five and stuff like that but . . . you don't," she said.

"A hundred percent, I feel justice was served. I just didn't feel the way that I thought I would feel.

"There's no winners in all this," Mercer said.

"You think you'd feel some type of closure. But the bottom line is, it doesn't bring Ms. Kaiser back and it also opens up wounds for everybody else," Mercer said.

Jackson, she said, "came from a wonderful family. . . . You have to ask yourself, 'Why?'"

In his confession, she said, Jackson told police: "We were just two damn fools."

"I guess the simplest thing to say is, senseless," Mercer said.

Mercer knows members of Kaiser's family and said they do not wish to comment on the pending execution. "They just want to put it behind them."

Kaiser, Mercer said, "was a very remarkable woman."

She was a volunteer worker at the Peninsula Rescue Mission for more than 30 years, Mercer said. "She would have given those young men anything they wanted if they just asked her for it. They didn't have to do what they did."

Jackson later said the confession was false and tricked out of him by police. Among other things, he said he gave a statement only after being promised he could speak with his mother.

He was convicted in 2002 of capital murder in the commission of a robbery, burglary, robbery and felony stabbing.

Dorsett, 29, was sentenced to 135 years for first-degree murder, object sexual penetration, burglary and robbery.

Jackson is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court and has a clemency petition before Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. Among other things, his lawyers argue that the cane, used only by Dorsett, was the murder weapon and, therefore, Jackson should not be executed.
Contact Frank Green at (804) 649-6340 or fgreen@timesdispatch.com.