McALESTER, Okla. -- Jerald Wayne Harjo is scheduled to die Tuesday night for the 1988 death of Ruth Porter, a 64-year-old elementary school secretary and grandmother.

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Harjo was convicted of waiting in Porter's van for her to come home, then climbing through a window to look for the van's keys and smothering Porter with her own pillow. Investigators also believe that she was raped.

The execution is scheduled for 9 p.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. He will become the 14th person executed in Oklahoma this year and the 44th since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.

Mary Branscum found her mother dead in bed when she came to check on her early the next day. She can't forget that final image.

Branscum remembers dialing the telephone and struggling to tell the rest of the family they never would see Porter again. It was hardest telling her father, who was in a Memphis, Tenn., hospital after being paralyzed in an auto accident years earlier.

"Never in his wildest dreams did he believe he would outlive her," Branscum wrote recently in a letter to the state attorney general's office. "My father did not have the same light in his eyes and joy in his heart after his wife was murdered."

Branscum's dad died in 1993, five years after his wife was murdered.

"He asked that my husband and I see the process through for him," she said.

After the crime, a Wewoka, Okla., police officer who knew Harjo was on a suspended sentence for stealing a car drove by Harjo's brother's home on a hunch and found the woman's van.

Harjo eventually confessed to the crime on audiotape after investigators found his muddy tennis shoe prints on Porter's floor.

Harjo is allowed to visit with his relatives in the hours before his death, but his family has asked not to come. He has requested a last meal of two hamburgers, one cheeseburger, two orders of fries and a vanilla malt.