POKIN AROUND: 17 years later, mother waits for murderer's execution
Carol Angelbeck, 74, thinks of her daughter Mindy when she gets up in the morning and when she goes to bed at night. She doesn't think about Michael Shane Worthington very much any more.
She thought of him often during the first five years after he raped and murdered Mindy on Sept. 30, 1995. He used a razor to cut a screen in the kitchen window of Mindy's first-floor condo in Lake Saint Louis.
He strangled Mindy until she passed out. But she came to while he was raping her. She screamed, put up a fight and he strangled again, until death.
Mindy was 24. She was about to receive a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She was working two hostess jobs and loved Clydesdale horses.
Worthington was 24, too. He'd had a troubled life. After his arrest, he told authorities that when he was a boy he set fire to his own home twice and at age 8 burglarized houses with his father. He had a job bagging groceries. He loved drugs.
