Byrd undergoes character change in prison

CINCINNATI - John Byrd Jr. has gone from a leering, bragging killer to a coward unwilling to face the ultimate punishment for murdering a family man, the victim's wife says.

Sharon Tewksbury said she remembers a 1986 letter Byrd wrote to her from prison in which he threatened to make life "a living hell" for her family. His execution Wednesday would erase the threat he poses, she said.

Richard Vickers, an Ohio assistant public defender, and Byrd's family have been trying to get the inmate's death sentence thrown out. They support Byrd's statement that he didn't kill clerk Monte Tewksbury in April 1983 at a suburban Cincinnati convenience store and that accomplice John Brewer was the one who stabbed Tewksbury during the store robbery.

Byrd, 37, has gone from someone who abused guards in the mid-1980s in the state's Lucasville prison and was punished by solitary confinement to being a model prisoner in recent years, Vickers said.