Terry Douglas Clark (May 17, 1956 – November 6, 2001) was an American murderer convicted of the murder of nine-year-old Dena Lynn Gore. He was executed by the state of New Mexico by means of lethal injection. He was the first and only person to be executed in New Mexico between the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 and its subsequent abolition within New Mexico in 2009. The previous execution in New Mexico had been the gas chamber death of David Cooper Nelson on January 8, 1960. Early life Clark was born on May 17, 1956, in Roswell, New Mexico. His childhood was described as ordinary, until his junior year in high school, when he began drinking and smoking marijuana. He was suspended from Roswell High School for truancy, before dropping out altogether. Around that same time, he began taking methamphetamine, LSD, heroin, and cocaine. He later earned a GED and went to work for a bus building company, but was fired from the job within a year. He then went to work for a construction company before joining the Navy at the age of twenty. Crimes Terry Clark was convicted of kidnapping and raping a six-year-old girl from Roswell, New Mexico in 1986. Pending appeals in that case, he was released on bond. While he was out on bond in that case, nine-year-old Dena Lynn Gore of Artesia, New Mexico was raped and killed on July 17, 1986. Gore's bound and decomposing body was found partially buried on a nearby ranch on July 22, 1986. Gore had been shot three times in the back of her head. A few days later, Clark was taken into custody and he confessed to a minister while in jail. Trial and appeals In 1986, public defenders Sheila Lewis and Steve Aarons were assigned to represent Clark. In a rare legal maneuver, Clark pleaded guilty to first degree murder in hopes of being sentenced before Governor Toney Anaya completed his term of office. However, District Judge Stanley F. Frost refused to hold a sentence hearing before Anaya's last day in office. As a result, Clark was not among the five men on death row whose death sentences were commuted by Anaya to life in prison. The following year, a jury in Tucumcari, New Mexico returned with a death sentence against Clark. In 1994, the New Mexico Supreme Court overturned that sentence, found reversible