ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 16, 1996 TAG: 9601160036
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CREST HILL, ILL.
SOURCE: MATT KELLEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Guinevere Garcia was orphaned and sexually abused by age 6, an alcoholic at 11, and pregnant at 16 with a daughter whom she later suffocated with a plastic bag.
An abuse-scarred marriage to a man she met on a prostitution ``trick'' ended when she shot her husband to death. She later said he ``deserved to die.''
Now Garcia says she, too, deserves to die.
Barring a last-minute clemency decision from Gov. Jim Edgar, Garcia, 36, will die by lethal injection shortly after midnight tonight. She would be the second woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
The execution will be a triumph of sorts for Garcia, who has angrily told death penalty opponents trying to block her execution to ``stay out of my life.''
``This is not a suicide. I am not taking my own life. I committed these crimes. I am responsible for these crimes,'' Garcia said in a tape played Thursday for the state Prisoner Review Board.
Garcia's determination to embrace the death sentence perplexes death penalty opponents, who say they respect her decision but want to fight for her life anyway. Her decision last summer to drop all appeals in the 1991 slaying brought Garcia more tranquillity than she has ever had in her troubled life, said Sister Miriam Wilson, a Cook County Jail chaplain who has frequently visited her.
``There's a great peace about her,'' said Sister Wilson, a Roman Catholic nun. ``I think that she made a decision and feels that it was the right decision, and that does give her a sense of peace. I think she really believes that her life is in God's hands.''
Garcia's life has been anything but blessed.
By age 16, Garcia had been sexually abused and an alcoholic for years. She became a prostitute, married an Iranian student to keep him in the United States and conceived a daughter. Eleven months after Sarah Swan was born, Garcia suffocated the baby with a plastic bag.
The girl's death was treated as an accident for years until an arson investigator got Garcia to admit she killed her daughter and set fires near the anniversaries of Sarah Swan's birth and death.
She and her first husband divorced before she went to prison.
While serving 10 years for the baby's murder, she married and divorced George Garcia, one of her prostitution customers, then married him again shortly after her March 1991 parole. Court records indicate Garcia physically and sexually abused his wife, and the couple separated a few weeks after the second wedding.
Garcia said she and her 60-year-old husband argued in the parking lot of his suburban Bensenville apartment. She said she shot him in a rage when he told her he gave her money and attention only in return for sex.
Death penalty opponents - among them Bianca Jagger, now a spokeswoman for the human rights group Amnesty International, which opposes capital punishment - say Garcia should be spared, despite her wishes.
``She's not a heinous criminal,'' said Janet Kittlaus of the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. ``She's a person who was a victim herself, and some of these forces she probably couldn't control.''
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Guinevere Garcia/``I am responsible ...''by CNB