Olimpia Fisher was excited to become a grandma for the first time and wanted to leave her common-law husband, Carlos Cuenta-Rodriguez. He ended up killing her and is now set to be executed in Oklahoma
Oklahoma inmate denied clemency after remarks
Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez refused clemency; board voted 3-1 to deny it. He’s set for execution Aug. 13 for a 2003 murder.
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Olimpia Fisher knew she had to get her common-law husband out of her life and the couple’s Oklahoma City home.
Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez’s behavior was growing increasingly obsessive, controlling, and violent, according to family, prosecutors, and court records. He stalked the 43-year-old Fisher when she wasn’t home, placed a mirror in their bedroom that allowed him to watch her when she was in the other room, and was fixated on the idea that she was cheating on him with a co-worker.
The last straw came when Cuesta-Rodriguez wrapped a belt around Fisher’s neck and choked her. Fisher, who was looking forward to becoming a grandmother soon, and was done living in fear.
On the night of May 31, 2003, Fisher and her pregnant 18-year-old daughter had packed their bags and nearly left the Oklahoma City home they shared with Cuesta-Rodriguez, then 47. But he had drunk a bottle of tequila and was in bed sleeping, so they figured it was safe to stay the night, court records say.
Instead, a nightmare unfolded when Cuesta-Rodriguez woke up around 4:30 a.m. As her daughter watched in horror, he confronted Fisher with cheating allegations and shot her in the right eye. Eight minutes later as police tried to break in and a still-living Fisher fought to escape, Cuesta-Rodriguez and fatally shot her in the left eye.
Now 23 years later, Oklahoma is set to execute Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, by lethal injection on Thursday, Aug. 13.
“He was an extremely over-obsessive, selfish, calculated person,” Fisher’s daughter, Katya Wallace, said at a clemency hearing for Cuesta-Rodriguez in July. “Every trigger, every lost moment, every piece of joy that has turned into pain, was his deliberate choice . . . My family has been crushed by this.”
Cuesta-Rodriguez, whose attorneys strongly argued that he be spared from execution, shocked the room at the Oklahoma Board of Parole and Pardon when he said the last thing he deserved was mercy.
“You must believe that I deserve to suffer. And you’re right,” he said, addressing Fisher’s two daughters. “It’s time for me to pay for what I did.”
As Cuesta-Rodriguez’s execution approaches, here’s what to know about the crime, what else Cuesta-Rodriguez said during the hearing and more about who Fisher was.
What was Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez convicted of?
On the night of May 31, 2003, Fisher was sleeping in an extra bedroom when Cuesta-Rodriguez awoke from a drunken sleep and confronted her about his paranoid suspicious she was cheating on him. A fight ensued, awaking Fisher’s pregnant 18-year-old daughter Katya.
Katya went and got her mother and brought her to her own bedroom in hopes of breaking up the fight. Fisher tried to use the phone in her daughter’s room to call for help, and that’s when Cuesta-Rodriguez shot her in the right eye, court records say.
Katya futilely tried to protect her mother by using a baseball bat to hit Cuesta-Rodriguez before she ran for help. Police arrived within two minutes and could hear Fisher “screaming and banging on a bedroom window as if she was trying to escape,” court records say.
Officers tried to kick in the front door and get in through windows but they were hampered by metal burglar bars. As they continued trying to get in, they heard a gunshot, which they later learned was Cuesta-Rodriguez shooting Fisher in the left eye.
After a hostage negotiator failed to convinced Cuesta-Rodriguez to come outside, a tactical team forced their way in with a battering ram. They arrested Cuesta-Rodriguez and found Olimpia Fisher dead.
Defense attorneys told jurors at trial that Cuesta-Rodriguez was drunk and never meant to hurt Fisher, and that he had been struggling with depression because he missed his family back home in Cuba. Cuesta-Rodriguez was among more than 120,000 Cuban refugees who sailed from Cuba to Florida during a six-month period in 1980 known as the Mariel boatlift.
Jurors found Cuesta-Rodriguez guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death.
At his hearing in front of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board last month, Cuesta-Rodriguez’s current attorneys described how he never should have been sentenced to death, saying he had survived a “singularly bleak and impoverished” childhood in Cuba and suffered brain damage in a bus accident when he was around 7 years old, after which his behavior changed so significantly that state psychiatrists subjected him to electroshock therapy.
The board also heard from Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who said that Cuesta-Rodriguez had multiple opportunities to show mercy to Fisher the night he killed her.
“Police were outside the home. Help was only feet away. He could have let her leave,” Drummond said. “He made her suffer because she dared to live beyond his control. But try as he might, he could not extinguish the courage that burned inside Olimpia − only her life.”
The board voted 3-1 denying clemency to Cuesta-Rodriguez.
Olimpia Fisher was ‘the light’ in her family
An immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, Olimpia Fisher arrived to the U.S. at the age of 29 with her husband, two daughters and her eyes on the American dream.
Determined to succeed, she mastered English by recording songs from the radio and playing them repeatedly, her daughters said at the clemency hearing. After she divorced their father, she worked six days a week for years to support her girls, they said.
The lessons and love she gave along the way remain within them.
“She taught us how to be humble, how to love life, how to love people,” Fisher’s oldest daughter, Cynthia Allen, said. “She would tell us, ‘I love you like the sun loves the Earth.'”
Fisher said that so often to the girls that they had it etched on their mother’s tombstone, where they now take their own children to visit their grandmother.
“When my babies were born, I would take them to meet her,” Allen said. “My daughters have done their gymnastics moves in front of her tombstone … When holidays come, we go and spend time with her. We tell her all of the good stuff when we go visit.”
Had she lived, Fisher would have been a grandmother of six.
Katya Wallace said that she remembers how Cuesta-Rodriguez initially turned on the charm to win over her mother before he later became controlling and violent.
“He took a great person who did not deserve to die,” she said. “He took a mother, a grandmother, a friend, the light in our family.”
Carlos-Cuesta Rodriguez: ‘It’s time for me to pay’
At his hearing in front of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board last month, Cuesta-Rodriguez said he didn’t want clemency and told Wallace and Allen how much he regrets what he did.
“It was a very horrible thing and I have been living with this remorse for 23 years,” he said in Spanish. “I cannot imagine the pain, the grief and the sorrow you have had to endure in your lives because of what I did and how the absence of your mother has impacted your lives.”
He said he is “broken man” who has long been suffering physically and spiritually, and that he deserves it.
“I know that nothing I can say will be enough to erase your pain or offer some kind of comfort or bring your mother back,” he said. “But I do want to tell you that I regret it and I am truly remorseful from the bottom of my heart.”
He ended his remarks by saying that he is ready to leave the world, hopefully in peace. “It’s time for me to pay for what I did.”
When is the execution?
Cuesta-Rodriguez is set to be executed at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester at 10 a.m. CT on Thursday, Aug. 13. If the execution moves forward, he’ll be the third inmate executed in Oklahoma this year and the 21st in the U.S.
Cuesta-Rodriguez also is among three men set to be executed on the same day in the U.S. About three hours before his execution, Tennessee is set to put Anthony Hines to death for the 1985 robbery and murder of a motel maid named Catherine Jean Jenkins, though there are growing calls for Gov. Bill Lee to call it off in the wake of a botched execution in the state in May.
Later in the day on Aug. 13, Alabama plans to execute Jeremy Williams for the rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl in 2021.
Contributing: Nolan Clay, The Oklahoman
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers cold case investigations and the death penalty for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.