A Texas man convicted of killing a pastor in his own church during a robbery, days after being released from a court-order anger-management program, is slated to be executed Wednesday. 

Steven Lawayne Nelson was sentenced to death for the 2011 murder of Rev. Clint Dobson, 28, who was beaten, strangled and suffocated with a plastic bag inside NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington. Nelson allegedly suffocated Dobson by putting a plastic bag over his head as he was sitting in his office writing a sermon. 

He was captured after going on a shopping spree using the victims’ stolen credit cards, Fox Dallas reported.

The execution bed sits empty on Death Row April 25, 1997 at Texas Death Row in Huntsville, Texas. (Getty Images)

He also regularly unshackled his handcuffs and ankle restraints by using a key he was hiding in his genitals.

In addition, while awaiting trial, he was indicted for allegedly killing another inmate. He was never charged after receiving the death sentence for the Dobson murder. 

During his murder trial, Nelson testified that he waited outside the church for about 25 minutes before going in and seeing that Dobson and Judy Elliott had been beaten. He insisted Dobson was still alive. 

Nelson said he took Dobson’s laptop and that one of the other two men who participated in the robbery gave him Elliott’s car keys and credit cards.

The victims were later found by Elliott’s husband, the church’s part-time music minister, who didn’t immediately recognize her because she had been so severely beaten.

Despite his insistence that he merely acted as lookout, prosecutors presented evidence of Nelson’s fingerprints and pieces of his broken belt at the crime scene and drops of the victims’ blood on his sneakers.

Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville (Google Maps)

His attorneys appealed the conviction, claiming he had bad legal representation at his trial, saying they failed to challenge the alibis of the two other men and didn’t present mitigating evidence of a troubled childhood in Oklahoma and Texas.