Michael Ryan, Cult Murderer Who Spent Three Decades On Death Row, Dies in Prison

Michael Ryan, a convicted murderer who spent three decades on Nebraska’s death row for two 1985 murders — a 26-year-old man and a 5-year-old boy — has died in prison, MSN is reporting.

Ironically, Ryan’s death came just a few days after Nebraska repealed its death penalty.

Prison officials say Ryan, 66, died at about 5:45 p.m. Sunday at Nebraska’s Tecumseh State Correctional Institution. Prison spokeswoman Jessica Houseman did not specify Ryan’s official cause of death, according to Huffington Post, but did confirm that he had been receiving treatment for an unspecified medical condition.

Michael Ryan was convicted of two counts of murder in 1985, and has been on Nebraska’s death row since. Prosecutors at the time said that Ryan was the self-appointed ruler of an anti-government, anti-Semitic, sexually depraved cult that operated on a hog farm near Rulo, Nebraska, in the state’s southeastern corner, according to the Chicago Tribune.

For several years, Ryan and other cult members would steal cattle and farm equipment from nearby farms. They also stole, and hoarded, arsenals of weapons and ammunition, which Ryan preached they would someday need for a final battle against good and evil.

In March 1985, two men — a man named Rick Stice, and 26-year-old James Thimm — somehow ran afoul of Ryan. Ryan punished Stice by forcing him to sodomize his son, 5-year-old Luke Stice. Ryan and other cult members also repeatedly drenched the boy in ice water and threw him out into the cold. Ryan killed the boy by dangling him from a dog leash and letting him suffocate to death, as cult members watched.

Thimm, meanwhile, was tied up in a barn on the property and repeatedly tortured and sodomized over the course of four days. At one point, cult members even peeled the man’s skin from his body while he was alive. Ryan finally killed him by repeatedly stomping on his chest.

The bodies of Thimm and Luke were thrown into shallow graves. They were discovered after police raided the compound, acting on information given to them by Rick Stice, who fled the cult after his son’s murder. Ryan was sentenced to death for the murders at a trial later that year.

Michael Ryan would spend the next thirty years on death row as his appeals worked their way through the courts. At one point, Nebraska was without a means to execute him, having run out of the three-drug cocktail used to execute condemned prisoners through lethal injection.

Prison officials will conduct an autopsy on Michael Ryan and reveal his official cause of death later this week.