The ex-wife of executed Jamaican, Edward Nathaniel Bell, says she has no proof of his guilt or innocence, but is a staunch supporter of the death penalty.

“If he was guilty, then the punishment was just,” she told the Sunday Observer on Friday, a day after Virginia state authorities used lethal injection to put Bell to death. “I believe in the death penalty because my brother was killed by a gunman who got away on appeal. Our family knows what it is to lose somebody. For us, life is not the same.”

However, the woman, who asked not to be identified, had her doubts about Bell’s guilt.

“I went to a court session in Washington and there were a lot of discrepancies in the case,” she said without pointing to anything specific.

Bell was pronounced dead at 9:11 pm last Thursday at the Greensville Correctional Centre in the town of Jarratt in Virginia, USA. He was sentenced to death in 2001 for the gun murder of 32-year-old police sergeant Ricky Timbrook, a member of the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team, in October 1999.

Prosecutors argued that Bell shot Timbrook at point-blank range in the face after the cop chased him down a dark alley. He was found guilty by a 12-member jury which included nine women. Three separate dates were set for Bell’s execution but he fought the system tooth and nail with a series of appeals which fatigued the US justice system.

After his appeals were rejected by the Supreme Court of Virginia, the Federal District Court and the US Supreme Court, Bell’s only hope lay with Democratic Governor Timothy Kaine, who had the option of granting him clemency and reducing his sentence to life in prison. But Kaine refused to intervene despite appeals for mercy from human rights organisations and the European Union.

On Friday, Bell’s ex-wife told the Sunday Observer that she had his first child, a daughter, who still resides in Portland, the parish of Bell’s birth. The woman said she spent four years in the marriage before divorcing Bell, who is reported to have fathered four other children who live in the United States.

During Bell’s trial, evidence was tendered in the US courts that he was an abusive spouse. But according to his ex-wife, she had no such experience.

“He never treated me violently or abused me. I can’t say that about him,” said the woman, who was clearly embarrassed by news of Bell’s demise.

She said her former spouse was a good father who sent his earnings from prison to assist her with taking care of his first-born child.

“He was a barber,” she said. “Even while he was in prison he would send the money he made from cutting hair to his daughter in Jamaica.”

According to the woman, her daughter cried uncontrollably when news broke that her father was executed.

“She was eating her dinner when the news flash came and she just started crying, but after I consoled her she regained her composure. She is coping well because it is not like Nicodemus crept on her in the night, it has been there for eight years. I have to shield her because she is doing very well in school and has her CXC exams soon,” the woman said.

Virginia authorities will conduct an autopsy and hand over Bell’s remains to his loved ones in about a week.

Bell left Jamaica for the US in 1992 and was granted residency. He was born and raised in the district of Drapers, a few miles east of the parish capital, Port Antonio. He attended Drapers All-Age School and worshipped at the Faith Bible Baptist Church.

He was a mason and barber by trade and was convicted in 1985 of malicious destruction of property and unlawful wounding and was fined a total of $90 in the Port Antonio Resident Magistrate’s Court.

When the Sunday Observer went to the district last week, a small gathering of persons at the square were unwilling to speak. One woman was openly aggressive.

“The man done dead already, what else you want to write?” she asked, all the time denying that she knew Bell.

After persistent prodding, the Sunday Observer was led to the home of Bell’s 82-year-old aunt, Lorna Davis. The woman said she knew Bell as a good child who never displayed any propensity for violence.

“I helped to raise him when his parents went away,” she said. “He was an obedient child who gave normal trouble that little boys would. Nobody never know that this would happen to him,” the woman said meekly.

Davis said news of her nephew’s execution was a hard pill to swallow.

“I cry all night. I can’t take no more,” she moaned.