Woman set to be 1st in U.S. executed since '05

RICHMOND, Va. - A Virginia woman who used sex and money to persuade two men to kill her husband and stepson to collect a $250,000 life-insurance policy was scheduled Thursday to be executed in two months, in what would be the first U.S. execution of a woman in five years.

A judge set a Sept. 23 execution date for Teresa Lewis, 41, the only woman on Virginia's death row. She would be the first woman executed in the state since 1912.

Lewis offered herself and her 16-year-old daughter for sex to two men who committed the killings. She provided money to buy the murder weapons and stood by while they shot her husband, Julian Clifton Lewis Jr., 51, and stepson, Charles J. Lewis, 25, in 2002 in Pittsylvania County in south-central Virginia.

The gunmen, Rodney Fuller and Matthew Shallenberger, were sentenced to life in prison. Shallenberger committed suicide in prison in 2006.

Lewis' daughter, Christie Lynn Bean, served five years because she knew about the plan but remained silent.

Lewis would be the first woman executed in this country since Frances Newton died by injection in Texas. Newton shot her husband and two young children to death to collect insurance money.

Women commit about 12 percent of the murders in the United States annually, and few ever reach the execution chamber.

Of more than 1,200 people executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, only 11 were women. Of more than 3,200 inmates on death row nationwide, 53 are women.

Women usually don't commit torture murders, they aren't serial killers, and they often don't have a history of other violent crimes compared with men who get sentenced to death, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. They also typically kill someone they know.