11/5/2022
RawNews1st – Tami Engstrom was a 22-year-old wife and mother who was brutally murdered and dismembered in rural northeastern Ohio on February 7, 1991.
Kenneth Biros confessed to her murder and received the death penalty. His was the first state execution in history in which Sodium Pentothal was used as the form of lethal injection.
On February 7, 1991, at approximately 5:30 p.m., Tami Engstrom dropped off her son with a friend who was babysitting. She then reported to work at around 6:30 p.m.
At approximately 9:30 p.m., Tami left work due to illness. She had intended to go home but drove to the Nickelodeon Lounge in Masbury, Ohio, where she met with her uncle, Daniel Hivner.
After becoming too intoxicated to drive, Biros offered to drive Tami home. He would sexually assault, kill, and dismember Tami.
When Tami did not return home, her husband found out that Biros was supposed to drive her home. He asked Biros what happened, and he stated that Tami ran from his car after waking up scared. Not believing the story, her husband went to the police.
Police interviewed Biros, who eventually confessed to murdering Tami. Investigators searched the area where Biros had stated the crime had taken place.
They discovered the crime scene with blood, organs, and other physical matter (including the intestine) present.
Investigators also found some of Tami’s belongings, including clothing, in a shallow grave near the train rail. A search of Biros’s truck yielded blood and a piece of Tami’s liver.
Police found Tami’s dismembered remains in several locations over several weeks. The first location was a remote wooded area in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
The second location was found in a remote wooded area in Venango County, Pennsylvania, approximately thirty miles north of the Butler County site. Sources stated that Tami’s head and right breast had been removed from her torso.
Her right leg had been severed above her knee. Black stockings had been rolled around her left ankle, which was the only article of clothing found with her remains.
Her stomach area had been cut open and almost all of her organs were missing. Her anus, rectum and almost all of her sex organs had been removed. They would never be recovered by investigators.
During the trial, Biros explained that after he had killed Tami, he had buried her in a shallow grave near his property. When he attempted to place her into the hole he had dug, she wouldn’t fit, so he dismembered her.
After receiving the threats from her family members during their initial missing person search, he exhumed her body from the shallow grave.
He then drove over the state line into Pennsylvania to dispose of her remains in several locations.
In the case of Tami Engstrom, Kenneth Biros was found guilty of aggravated murder, felonious sexual penetration, aggravated robbery, and attempted rape. On October 29, 1991, the court sentenced Biros to death by lethal injection.
His death sentence was carried out on December 8, 2009, at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, OH. The Biros execution was the first case of lethal injection in which a single drug, Sodium Pentothal, was used to carry out an execution.
Prior to the Biros execution, a concoction of three drugs had been used to carry out a death sentence.
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