Killer Fred Singleton who raped and murdered pensioner dies in prison

Fred Singleton has spent 42 years on death row since his conviction of the rape and murder of vulnerable widow Elizabeth Lominick, crimes which happened in her own home

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A killer who raped and murdered an elderly widow in her own home has died in prison.

Fred Singleton passed away of natural causes in the prison hospital today having spent 42 years on death row since raping and strangling Elizabeth Lominick with a bedsheet. Singleton, 81, was South Carolina's longest-serving inmate on death row, a tag now given to Jamie Wilson who killed two little girls in a mass shooting at a school in the 1980s.

Singleton had been in legal limbo for decades because the state Supreme Court ruled he wasn't competent to be executed, as he didn't understand he could die in the electric chair and only answered questions from his attorneys with "yes" or "no."

But the justices also decided in 1993 that Singleton's death sentence should remain in case advances in psychology allowed him to get better and that he couldn't be forced to take medication to improve his mental state only so he could be executed.

Singleton was sentenced to die in 1983 as, aged 38 the year before, he broke into Ms Lominick's home, sexually assaulted and killed the 73-year-old woman who had not long become a widow. Two of her sisters and her niece found her body at the address in Georgetown County, South Carolina.

Police said Singleton stole Ms Lominick's diamond and gold rings, but these were later found in the thug's car and had his fingerprints on them. He was then arrested and faced trial.

The yob's death leaves 24 men on South Carolina's death row. The state had 48 inmates on death row at the end of 2014. South Carolina has executed six inmates since then, all in 2024 or 2025. The others off death row have either had convictions overturned and been resentenced or died of natural causes.

Wilson, now the longest-serving inmate on death row in the state on the US' east coast, killed two eight-year-old girls, injured several other teachers and students in the 1988 shooting at a Greenwood County elementary school. The inmate has been on death row for the three decades since then.

But Wilson is in a similar legal limbo to Singleton. Wilson was considered mentally ill at the time of his trial. He had a competency hearing in 2011, but the judge apparently has not issued a ruling in his case.

• A death row survivor who spent 17 years behind bars for a crime she didn't commit recently died in a house fire. Sonia ‘Sunny’ Jacobs was killed in Galway in the Republic of Ireland earlier this week, along with a man in his 30s understood to be her carer.