State of Oklahoma has executed Kevin Underwood on what was also his 45th birthday.  This does not bring our Jamie back, but it does allow the space in our hearts to focus on her and allow the healing process to begin.  In 2006, Bolan was found in Underwood’s apartment. He later confessed to police that he planned to eat parts of her body.

 An officer is standing inside a small apartment bedroom. He’s staring at a plastic storage tub on the closet floor. It’s sealed completely shut, wrapped in duct tape. He asks the man standing behind him what’s inside it. The man says comic books. Nobody in that room believes him. And when the officer takes one step toward that closet, something in the man completely breaks.

Go ahead and arrest me, he says. She’s in there. I’m going to burn in hell. A 10-year-old girl who had ridden her bike home from school just hours earlier. A child who had been inside this exact apartment the night before. A child who trusted this man completely. What investigators found inside that tub.

 And what this man then told them voluntarily on camera without a lawyer is something that still doesn’t feel real. This is the full story of Kevin Ray Underwood. Stay until the end because what Jaime said in her final moments is something that doesn’t leave you. Do not forget to subscribe, like, and share. December 19th, 1979. A baby boy is born in Pcell, Oklahoma.

His parents name him Kevin Ray Underwood. Nobody in that room could have imagined what that name would one day mean. By his mid20s, he was still in Purcell, living alone in apartment 115 at the Purscell Park Apartments. a quiet residential complex. The kind of place where you pass the same faces in the hallway every single day.

 He worked as a grocery store stalker at Grer’s Discount Foods in Oklahoma City. Not glamorous, not alarming, just a young man doing his shift and going home. He had a blog and what he posted on it was almost painfully ordinary. Complaints about work, pop culture opinions, nothing that would have made you look twice. His neighbor said the same thing every time.

Quiet, a loner. But his own aunt, who worked alongside him, once heard him say something she brushed off at the time. Sometimes you wouldn’t believe the weird things that go through my mind. Doctors had already diagnosed him with schizotypo personality disorder, OCD, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, PTSD, Asperger syndrome, and a range of deviant sexual disorders his own psychologist described as lifelong and overwhelming.

 Nobody around him fully understood what was building inside that apartment. And living just across the breezeway from him was a 10-year-old girl named Jamie Rose Bolan. Her name was Jamie Rose Bolan. Born August 7th, 1995 in Edmund, Oklahoma. She had bright red hair, freckles, and blue eyes behind a pair of glasses.

 Her family called her Copper Top. From the very beginning, Jaime fought to be here. As an infant, a problem with her left kidney sent her to Children’s Hospital. Airlifted in, fighting for her life before she could even walk. Her father, Curtis Bolan, quit his job to stay by her side for 3 months. She made it and she grew into exactly the kind of child you’d want to know.

 A fifth grader at PCEL Intermediate School. A good reader who won awards for it. She loved singing, sewing, riding four-wheelers, eating spaghetti, and beating her father at checkers. She rehearsed cheerleader dances in the living room. She had just joined the Girl Scouts 2 weeks before she disappeared, and their green sash was perfect because green was her favorite color.

 She had a best friend named Britney who shared her exact birthday. After school, the two of them would ride to the library and play a computer game called Balloons. She was that kind of kid. Curtis Bolan was a devoted father, an auto mechanic who worked long hours. Every morning, he dropped Jaime at school on his way to work.

 Every evening around 5:00, he came home, cooked dinner, helped her with homework, and got her ready for bed. Jaime was a latch key kid. She let herself in after school with her own key while her father finished his shift. She lived upstairs in the PCEL Park apartments. Directly below her in apartment 115 lived Kevin Ray Underwood. They were not strangers.

 She had been inside his apartment before. She knew his face. She knew his pet rat, Freya. He was just the quiet neighbor downstairs. And the night before she died, Jaime knocked on his door. She had forgotten her key and needed to use his phone. She called in a pizza order. Then she went back upstairs. That detail matters more than almost anything else in this case because it tells you exactly how he got her inside the very next day.

 What happened to Jaime Rosebolan was not a moment of rage. It was not impulsive. It was a plan. Prosecutors established that Kevin Ray Underwood had been gathering supplies for two full months before April 12th, 2006. Tarp, meat tenderizer, barbecue skewers, a hacksaw, a decorative dagger, rolls of duct tape, knives, swords. He had even collected a documentary about serial killers.

 He was not building toward a moment. He was building toward a victim. And prosecutors revealed something even more disturbing. Jaime may not have been his intended target at all. Investigators believe Underwood had initially been watching a woman and her 5-year-old son in the complex. Jaime showed up first. April 12th, 2006.

 A Wednesday afternoon. Jaime rode her bike home from a school event. Her father was still at work. She was alone. Underwood saw her coming. He offered her the simplest thing. come inside. See his pet rat, Freya. She had been there the night before. She had no reason to say no. He turned on Spongebob Squarepants.

 Then he picked up a wooden cutting board and struck her over the head. When that did not kill her, he wrapped his hands around her throat. Prosecutors said it took 15 to 20 minutes. Jaime fought back. She pleaded for her life. And the district attorney revealed in open court that the very first words out of her mouth after he struck her were these.

I’m sorry. A 10-year-old child apologizing. Afterward, he sexually assaulted her, dragged her to the bathroom, and attempted to behead her. The autopsy confirmed blunt force trauma, asphyxiation, and injuries consistent with decapitation attempts. Her dismantled purple bicycle was found inside the apartment.

 Her body was concealed in a plastic storage tub in the bedroom closet, sealed shut with duct tape. In his confession, Underwood said the obsession started with cannibalism, but kept evolving. He had not had sex in 4 years. He wanted to rape, kill, behead, and consume a victim. The only reason he did not go further was that he was caught first.

 2 days after Jaime disappeared, Kevin Ray Underwood sat down inside the Purscell Police Department. Across from him, FBI special agents Craig Overby and Martin Moog. He did not ask for a lawyer. He did not construct an alibi. He did not claim a blackout. He just talked. At the start of the tape, he said he felt nauseated. He spoke softly.

 He had to be prompted with questions. But as he moved deeper into the details, something shifted. He became more animated, more detailed. He told them about the pornography, years of it. He said it desensitized him slowly until normal content no longer had any effect on him. He kept going further, darker, until it reached something he described in his own words.

 It started off as cannibalism. I wanted to know what it tasted like. Just the thought of eating someone was appealing to me. But then it kept kind of evolving from there because I am sexually frustrated. I haven’t had sex in four years. He told them he had specifically chosen a child. I had pretty much planned all along to probably get a kid just mainly because they’d be easier to grab, easier to get rid of afterwards, smaller, and put up less of a fight.

 He described his original plan in full. Drape the victim over the bathtub. cut off their head, hang the body and let it drain. Set the head on his desk, his exact words, so it could like watch me. Keep the corpse in his bed for a day or two. Then butcher it, cook it, and eat it. He bought barbecue skewers, meat tenderizer, and a hacksaw specifically to cut open the skull and access the brain.

 He also admitted mid confession that he took a break from mutilating Jaime<unk>’s body to chat with a girl online. He said he regretted hitting Jaime the moment he did it. I was sick to my stomach, he told the agents. I was literally physically sick. Then he described what he did next. Anyway, at the very end of the tape, Underwood became tired and then he vomited loudly, repeatedly.

 The confession tape was played in full at trial. Underwood sat in the courtroom and watched himself on that screen without a single visible emotion. His attorneys looked at the floor. His parents were not in the room. Jaime<unk>’s family had already left. The jury did not look away. When a man confesses to something like this, in his own words, on camera, fully aware of what he was doing, there is genuinely not much left for a jury to decide.

 The trial opened February 19th, 2008. Not in Purcell, not in Mlan County. The court granted Underwood’s own request for a change of venue, transferring the case to Cleveland County. The pre-trial publicity had been so total, so saturating that finding 12 impartial people in that small town was simply not possible.

 A jury of seven men and five women took their seats in Norman, Oklahoma. Defense council said something almost no attorney ever says in a capital case. He told the jury it would probably find his client guilty. He asked them only one thing. Spare his life. The prosecution presented everything. Forensic evidence, physical evidence from apartment 115.

 Neighbors who testified Underwood would sit and watch people from his window. And then the tape. The confession played in full. The jury did not look away. February 29th, 2008. Alap day guilty. Deliberation time 23 minutes. The punishment phase was different. Jurors were split 10 to two. Eight full hours of deliberation followed.

 One aggravating circumstance stood. The murder of Jaime Rose Bolan was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel. Death recommended. March 7th, 2008. Formal sentencing April 3rd. Judge Candace Bllelock made it official. Kevin Ray Underwood was 28 years old and then began one of the longest legal battles in Oklahoma death row history. 18 years.

That is how long Kevin Ray Underwood sat on death row in Mallister. His legal team pursued every avenue. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. Federal habius petitions. The 10th Circuit. In 2019, the US Supreme Court denied yet another appeal. The argument was always the same.

 mental illness, bullied as a child, emotionally abused, conditions controllable with medication. Every court rejected it. Then in December 2023, his first execution date arrived and was postponed. Agentner Drummond requested 60 days between executions to relieve pressure on correction staff. Underwood survived his first death warrant.

 A second was issued October 1st, 2024. The clemency process then descended into chaos. December 4th hearing cancelled. Two board members resigned. One of them, Calvin Prince, was under active OSBI investigation for allegedly exchanging sexual favors for pardons. Rescheduled for December 9th, cancelled again. The 10th Circuit issued a temporary stay after Underwood’s team argued a partial board violated his constitutional rights.

 December 13th, the hearing finally went forward. Underwood appeared via video. Tearfully, he said, “I recognize I deserve to die for what I did.” His mother, Connie, wept before the board. Jaime<unk>’s sister, Lorie Pate, did not weep. She said, “You do not deserve clemency. We deserve closure. The monster that ended a precious life will suffer in the eternal fires. 3 to zero. No clemency.

” Drummond called him a deeply evil monster. Underwood’s team filed an emergency appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court denied the stay. The execution would proceed December 18th, 2024. The evening before at 5:40 in the afternoon, Kevin Ray Underwood received his last meal. chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, pinto beans, a hot roll, a cheeseburger with French fries and ketchup, and a cola from the prison canteen.

 Heavy comfort food, the kind of meal that tastes like Oklahoma on a cold December morning. That night, correction staff offered him a sedative, Xanax. They offer it to every inmate facing execution. It is rarely taken. Kevin Ray Underwood took it. And then the following morning he took it again twice. December 19th, 2024, his 45th birthday, 6 days before Christmas.

Outside the governor’s mansion that morning, demonstrators gathered in the cold. Inside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in Mallister, witnesses filed quietly into their seats. Jaime’s family was there. her sister Lorie Pate. Her father Curtis Bolan, the same man who had come home from work 18 years ago to find his daughter gone.

 District Attorney Greg Mashburn was there too. The man who had prosecuted Kevin Ray Underwood back in 2008 and carried this case for 18 years. The day before he had announced his retirement effective March 1st. He had one last thing to see through. Earlier that morning, the United States Supreme Court had rejected Underwood’s final emergency request for a stay.

 Every door was closed, every appeal exhausted, every argument heard and rejected. Mashburn said afterward, “The death penalty in Oklahoma is reserved for the worst of the worst.” This case was exactly that. The clock kept moving and Kevin Ray Underwood was strapped to the gurnie. At 10:04 in the morning, Kevin Ray Underwood was strapped to the gurnie inside the execution chamber.

 Oklahoma uses a three drug lethal injection process. Medazzylam first, a sedative, then a drug that paralyzes the body, then a third that stops the heart. Before the drugs were administered, he was given the opportunity to speak. He looked around the room. He apologized to Jaime<unk>’s family and to his own family for all the terrible things he did.

 Then he said this, “The decision to execute me on my birthday and 6 days before Christmas was a needlessly cruel thing to do to my family, but I’m very sorry for what I did, and I wish I could take it back.” He blinked rapidly after finishing his last words. A tear rolled down his face. As the execution began, he looked over more than once at his mother, Connie, sitting in the witness area.

 His breathing hitched slightly, his eyes closed. At 10:09 a.m., doctor entered the chamber, shook him several times, and declared him unconscious. 5 minutes passed. At 10:14 in the morning, Kevin Ray Underwood was pronounced dead. On his 45th birthday, the 25th and final execution in the United States in 2024. He was the 210th inmate executed at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary since December 1915.

 Outside the chamber, Lorie Pates stood before cameras. She took time to personally thank District Attorney Greg Mashburn for carrying this case for 18 years. Then she delivered the only statement that mattered. This doesn’t bring our Jaime back, but it does allow the space in our hearts to focus on her and allow the healing process to begin.

 Jaime Rose Bolan was 10 years old. She rode her bike home from school on an ordinary spring afternoon. She knocked on a neighbor’s door she had knocked on the night before and she never came back out. She would have been 29 years old in 2024. There are cases where you can follow a thread. Trauma, poverty, desperation. Cases where you don’t excuse what happened, but you can construct some kind of human narrative around it.

 And then there are cases like this one where you keep reaching for an explanation that satisfies and never find one. If you made it this far, thank you. These cases are heavy and I don’t take them lightly. If this kind of storytelling matters to you, subscribe. Every case I cover, I try to make sure the victim is more than just a name in a headline.

Jaime Rose Bowlan deserves that. They all do.