Overview

• Fred Singleton died of natural causes at a state prison hospital after four decades on South Carolina’s death row, officials said.
• He was sentenced to death in 1983 for the 1982 rape and strangulation of 73-year-old Elizabeth Lominick in Newberry County.
• Evidence cited by authorities included Lominick’s diamond and gold rings found in Singleton’s pockets and his fingerprints on her car and a bathroom window screen.
• A 1993 South Carolina Supreme Court decision kept his death sentence in place but found him not competent for execution and prohibited medicating him solely to carry out the sentence.
• His death reduces the state’s death row to 24 men, and Jamie Wilson, on death row for 34 years in a separate case, is now the longest-serving inmate with his competency still unresolved.