True crime Chronicles: Oklahoma City woman has been on Oklahoma's death row since 2004
- Dennis McCaslin
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
In Oklahoma, where the death penalty has long been a fixture, one name stands out: Brenda Evers Andrew.
Convicted in 2004 for the 2001 murder of her estranged husband, Rob Andrew, she’s spent the last two decades as the state’s only woman on death row.
Now 61, her story--a mix of suburban betrayal, a fatal shooting, and a high-stakes trial--is a sad discourse on failed marriage and excess greed.
It was November 20, 2001, when Rob Andrew, a 39-year-old ad exec, pulled up to the family home in Oklahoma City to pick up his kids for Thanksgiving.
He never made it out of the garage. Shot twice with a 16-gauge shotgun, Rob died on the spot.
Brenda, then 37, took a .22-caliber bullet to the arm and told police two masked men attacked them. Investigators weren’t convinced.
Suspicion soon fell on Brenda and her boyfriend, c, a church friend and insurance agent who’d sold Rob an $800,000 life insurance policy. The theory: Brenda lured Rob to the garage, Pavatt pulled the trigger, and they staged her injury to cover it up.
After the killing, the pair grabbed Brenda’s two kids and bolted to Mexico, only to be nabbed at the border in February 2002.
By 2004, Brenda faced a packed courtroom. Prosecutors called her the mastermind, pointing to the insurance payout and her affair with Pavatt as motive. They dug into her past--affairs, a wardrobe of thong underwear paraded before the jury--to argue she wasn’t the grieving widow she claimed. Pavatt had confessed to a friend he’d done the shooting with another man, insisting Brenda wasn’t involved, but the state dismissed it as a lover’s lie.
Her defense pushed back: no direct evidence tied her to the gun, and Pavatt’s story should’ve shifted the blame. The jury didn’t buy it. After six hours, they found her guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy. On September 22, 2004, she got death, just like Pavatt in his separate trial.
Born in 1963 in Yukon, Brenda grew up middle-class and earned a journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma. She worked in media briefly before settling down with Rob in 1984.
They had a son and daughter and were active at North Pointe Baptist Church. \\
By 2001, their marriage was crumbling--Rob had filed for divorce citing "irreconcilable differences"--and Brenda had started seeing Pavatt. To some, she was a charming mom; to prosecutors, a cold manipulator.
Rob was the steady one. A deacon at their church and a pro in Oklahoma City’s ad world, he crafted campaigns that boosted local businesses. Friends recall a quiet guy, devoted to his kids--11 and 7 when he died--and blindsided by the divorce.
His death left them with relatives and his colleagues without a creative anchor. At 39, his life ended in a garage, a victim of what the state called a calculated hit.
Today, Brenda sits in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, her appeals inching along. Pavatt was executed in 2016, but her fate’s still up in the air. Her case--filed under Oklahoma’s long list of capital convictions--sparks occasional debate about justice and gender in a state that’s no stranger to the gurney.
For Rob’s family, it’s a wound that never fully closed. For the rest of us, it’s a grim look at how a split family turned deadly, one shotgun blast at a time.
