Virginia executes twice-condemned serial killer Prieto

A twice-condemned serial killer who claimed he was intellectually disabled has been executed in Virginia after a series of last-minute appeals failed.

The life of Alfredo Prieto, 49, was taken at the Greensville Correctional Centre in Jarrat. He was injected with a lethal three-drug combination, including a sedative which Virginia received from Texas. Prieto, wearing jeans and a light blue shirt, showed no emotion as he was strapped to the gurney.

“I would like to say thanks to all my lawyers, all my supporters and all my family members,” he said, before mumbling: “Get this over with.”

The El Salvador native was sentenced to death in Virginia in 2010 for the murder of a young couple more than two decades earlier. Rachael Raver and her boyfriend, Warren Fulton III, both 22, were found shot dead in a wooded area a few days after being seen at a Washington DC, nightspot.

Prieto was on death row in California at the time for raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl and was linked to the Virginia killings through DNA evidence. California officials agreed to send him to Virginia on the rationale that it was more likely to carry out the execution.

He has been connected to six other killings in California and Virginia, authorities have said, but he was never prosecuted as he had already been sentenced to death.

Prieto is the first inmate to be executed in Virginia in nearly three years. The last took place in January 2013, when Robert Gleason was put to death in the state’s electric chair. He had been serving life in prison for a 2007 murder when he killed his cellmate in 2009.