Disclaimer: The article has mentions of death and violence.
South Carolina’s longest-serving condemned inmate spent a record-breaking 42 years on death row before dying of natural causes at age 81. It ended one of the state’s most haunting criminal sagas. Fred Singleton was convicted in 1983 on multiple charges — including r—, strangulation, and robbery of 73-year-old widow Elizabeth Lominick in Newberry County, a sentence reportedly longer than anyone else’s in South Carolina’s history.
His fate remained frozen for more than four decades, trapped in legal limbo because of questions over his mental competency. Court documents show Singleton was declared unfit for execution after the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that he did not understand what it meant to die in the electric chair. During questioning, he could answer only ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ showing little sign of comprehension.
The high court issued its decision in 1993, stating that his death sentence should remain in place in case future advances in psychology made him mentally fit for execution. However, the court also ruled that he could not be forced to take medication solely to make him eligible for execution.
Prosecutors said that in 1982, Singleton broke into Lominick’s home, strangled her with a bedsheet, and stole her car and jewelry. Her body was found by two of her sisters and a niece, a scene that left the Newberry County community in shock. Investigators later found Singleton’s fingerprints on the bathroom window screen and on Lominick’s car lock. He was also reportedly carrying gold and diamond rings in his pockets when police caught up with him in Georgetown County.
Besides the fact that this crime left a lasting scar among people, this particular case also became a disturbing example of the mental health dilemmas surrounding capital punishment. For decades, he sat in a cell, that too in a situation where he neither was executed nor freed, with lawyers and judges wrestling with questions of justice, mercy, as well as sanity.
Singleton’s death now leaves 24 men on South Carolina’s death row, a number apparently came down at a consistent rate in the recent years. At the end of 2014, there were 48 inmates awaiting execution. Since then, six men have been executed — all within the last two years, in 2024 and 2025. On the contrary, other people either faced their sentences overturned or, like Singleton, died naturally while awaiting their fate.
And following all these, at present the title of longest-serving death row inmate has come to Jamie Wilson who has turned, 56, and also has been putting up a record in his time, by spending 34 years awaiting execution. Reports say Wilson was convicted for a 1988 elementary-school shooting in Greenwood County that left two 8-year-old girls dead and several teachers and students injured. He has remained in a similar legal deadlock — deemed mentally ill at trial and still waiting for a ruling on his competency after a hearing held back in 2011.
For Singleton, the gurney and the chair never came. After 42 years in the shadow of death, it was time itself — not the state — that finally caught up with him.
