Wanda Jean Allen

Wanda Jean Allen was serving a four-year prison sentence for killing her roommate when she met Gloria Leathers, who was serving time for manslaughter. Allen, who was released two years into her sentence, offered Leathers a place to stay upon her release. By all accounts, theirs was a tumultuous relationship. Leathers and her mother had arrived at the Oklahoma City Village Police Department on December 2, 1988 to file a complaint against Allen when Allen approached Leathers, and shot her at point-blank range; she died 4 days later. Just 15 minutes before the shooting, a policeman was at their house so that Leathers could collect her belongings. Allen became a cause célèbre because she was black, a lesbian, and, her legal team claimed, had diminished faculties due to head injuries she suffered when she was a teenager. The last 3 months of her life was the subject of an HBO documentary which portrayed a justice system stacked against people who are poor non-whites and/or ID as non-heterosexual. Allen was the first woman executed by Oklahoma since 1903, and the first black woman executed in the U.S. since 1954. Ironically, the last black woman executed before Allen, Betty Butler, the wife of a cleric, had also been convicted of murdering her female lover.