A white piece of paper painted with a red bulls-eye was pinned directly over the doomed man’s heart. 

Brad Sigmon, a double murderer aged 67, entered the brightly lit ‘death chamber’ at 6 pm on a Friday. He was wearing a black jumpsuit and black Crocs. This marked America’s first execution by firing squad in 15 years.

He glanced at the witness gallery – where tearful family members sat behind three-inch-thick bulletproof glass – before being strapped into the execution chair, arms tightly bound to his side, his ankles shackled and leather straps stretched over his chin and forehead.

A basin was placed underneath to catch his blood.

At 6.02pm, his lawyer read out his final words, which included the now God-fearing killer saying: ‘I want my closing statement to be one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty… Nowhere does God in the New Testament give man the authority to kill another man.’

As witnesses – including reporters and family members of his victims – watched silently, Sigmon mouthed ‘I’m OK’ to his lawyer before a black hood was pulled over his head at 6.03pm.

The prison worker who put on the hood then walked 15ft across the death chamber and, at 6.04pm, pulled up a black shade to reveal an oblong slit in a brick wall, behind which, shielded from view, stood three armed executioners who had volunteered for the job.

Each executioner – all prison guards – carried a rifle (of unknown make) loaded with .308 Winchester ‘Tap Urban’ bullets, which are used by police marksman because they cause ‘maximum damage’ when fired into a body – exploding inside the flesh and obliterating the heart on impact.

All three executioners had live rounds in their weapons.

Sigmon took several deep breaths. Witness Anna Dobbins, from a South Carolina TV station, said: ‘We could not see the guns. There was no countdown or anything to tell us when the shots would be fired.’

At 6.05pm, the shots rang out simultaneously.

Sigmon flinched. His chest rose and fell twice – and then nothing.

There was an audible gasp in the witness room. The bulls-eye target had disintegrated in the volley of bullets.

A stain of blood slowly spread out from a fist-sized hole in the dead man’s chest. A small piece of heart tissue could be seen next to the wound.

Ms Dobbins said of the rifle shots: ‘It was one sound. There was a slight echo but I perceived they [the three guns] were all fired at once.

‘His arms flexed. There was something in his midsection that moved. It was very fast.’

Fellow reporter Jeffrey Collins, from the Associated Press, added: ‘You did see a red stain on Sigmon’s chest. It was irregularly shaped but oval. His chest rose and fell about two times. 

‘You could see a tiny piece of tissue that was coming out of that (wound). His arm tensed up when he got shot, a brief moment of tensing. The doctor was in there fairly quickly.’

A doctor with a stethoscope entered the room at 6.06pm and listened to the prisoner’s heart for two minutes. At 6.08pm, Brad Sigmon was declared dead. 

A doctor told The Mail on Sunday that the bullets used are designed to break apart as soon as they hit flesh.

‘The bullets are designed to cause maximum damage on impact,’ he added. ‘In this case, the bullets would fragment when they hit the heart, disintegrating it on impact.

‘The prisoner would have lost consciousness almost immediately and likely would not have felt any pain.’

Bo King, Sigmon’s lawyer, described the execution in the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, as ‘a bloody spectacle’.

‘Brad’s death was horrifying and violent,’ he said. ‘It’s unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle.’

Sigmon’s last meal consisted of four pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken, green beans, mashed potato topped with gravy, biscuits (a scone-like savoury), cheesecake and sweet iced tea.

Sigmon was the first person to die by firing squad in the US since 2010 – and just the fourth since the death penalty resumed 49 years ago – after losing a last-minute appeal to the Governor of South Carolina and the US Supreme Court to spare his life.

Dozens of activists gathered outside the prison to protest against capital punishment, waving placards reading ‘This is inhumane!’ and ‘All life is precious. Thou shalt not kill’.

Sigmon was sentenced to death in 2002 after beating his ex- girlfriend’s parents David and Gladys Larke to death with a baseball bat.

He then kidnapped his estranged girlfriend Rebecca Barbare and shot her as she jumped out of his moving car.

Sigmon later gave a full confession, saying: ‘If I couldn’t have her, nobody could.’ Ms Barbare survived but chose not to attend the execution.

She said last week: ‘My parents showed us what unconditional love was all about. They loved helping people. That’s who they were.

‘I don’t think him being put to death is going to bring me closure.

‘It bothers me and gives me anxiety, especially him picking the firing squad.’

Sigmon was strapped into a chair that gave witnesses a side-on view of him. A metal ‘catch dish’ was placed under the seat to catch any blood but witnesses did not see any spill into the bowl.

In the witness chamber sat three family members of the victims. Also present were Sigmon’s lawyer, his spiritual adviser, a member of the prosecuting team who convicted him, a sheriff and the three members of the media.

Tiffany Tan, of the South Carolina Post and Courier newspaper, said that the witnesses were given ear protectors.

‘Before the hood was placed on him, he turned to the area the witnesses were in,’ she added.

‘I’m not sure who he was looking at. He turned his head a little bit. After the hood was placed, they lifted the black shades on the wall and you could see this rectangular opening. There were three smaller squares in that big rectangle.

‘There was one shot that was followed by that echoey noise.

‘He was perpendicular to us and I could see his chest-stomach area lift after the shots were fired two times. Right under where the hood was, we saw something red coming out of his chest and the target was no longer there.’

AP reporter Mr Collins, who has witnessed ten executions, said: ‘When the shots were fired it was very loud, very jarring. I heard what sounded like a gasp but everyone involuntarily flinched.

‘The target itself blew off. It was about the size of my fist; a red stain where the target was. Based on the size of the wound above his heart, the three bullets had to be pretty close to the same area.

‘There was only one place I could see any damage. I reckon they must have been clustered.’

Asked how the firing squad execution compared with those he had witnessed by lethal injection and electric chair, Mr Collins replied: ‘This was much quicker. Lethal injections take about 20 minutes.

‘Electrocution give one big jolt for several seconds but there’s another jolt for a minute or two.

‘This was instantaneous. The time from the shots being fired to the time death was declared was a little over two minutes. It’s just a much quicker method.’

Sigmon had requested the firing squad over the other two state-approved methods of execution – the electric chair and lethal injection – because he was frightened by reports of those methods causing agonising, lingering deaths.

There have also been multiple cases of electric chairs setting fire to prisoners. In 1983, in Alabama, an execution was botched when, after the first jolt of electricity, sparks and flames erupted from the electrode attached to the prisoner’s leg.

Smoke and sparks also came out from under his black hood. Doctors found a heartbeat, so another jolt of electricity was shot through his body. He still failed to die so a third shot was ordered.

The execution took 14 minutes and left the man’s body charred and smouldering.

In 1988, in Texas, a Death Row prisoner was pronounced dead 24 minutes after lethal injection drugs were pumped into his arm.

But the syringe came out of his arm, spraying a cocktail of deadly drugs towards witnesses sitting in a gallery 20ft away without any protection in front of them.

The man groaned and was alive for a further 14 minutes while the execution team struggled to reinsert the needle into his veins.

Other botched executions include prisoners screaming and crashing to the floor.

Matt Wells, US deputy director of Reprieve, a Britain-based human rights organisation, said a prisoner choosing to be shot ‘tells you all you need to know about lethal injection’.

He added: ‘While the firing squad lays bare the extreme violence of the state taking a human life, in lethal injections the violence is done on the inside, deliberately hidden, to maintain the comforting lie that people can be executed humanely.’

Sigmon found God inside jail and apologised to his victims’ family.

His spiritual adviser, the Reverend Hillary Taylor, who watched him die, said: ‘He never tried to shy away from the harm he caused and used his time in prison to develop his faith, becoming an unofficial chaplain for South Carolina’s death row prisons.

‘He even shared his last meal –three buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken – with his fellow prisoners.’

She said Sigmon ate just four pieces, ordering the rest to be given to inmates on Death Row.

She added: ‘He’s someone who is a different person than the person who caused violence 20 years ago.’

Sigmon’s younger brother Mike told DailyMail.com: ‘Brad is at peace with everything.

‘I don’t understand it personally, but he’s at peace with it, and that’s all that matters.

‘He’s been in jail for more than 20 years, and what he’s been through in there ain’t no life, being locked up in a cage, treated like a dog, and eating slop for dinner.

‘He’s fixing to live on the other side now. He doesn’t want to live in jail no more.’

A prison spokesman said mental health counsellors were on hand to ‘offer guidance and help’ to the three executioners, whose names will be forever protected by a ‘shield law’.

Additional reporting by Daniel Bates