A Texas woman convicted of the gruesome slaying and robbery of her neighbor, a retired 71-year-old psychology professor, is set tonight to be the first woman put to death in the U.S. since 2010, reports the Associated Press. A Dallas jury found former nursing home therapist Kimberly McCarthy guilty of the 1997 killing when evidence at the punishment phase of her trial tied her to two similar murders a decade earlier.

"Once the jury heard about those other two, we were certainly in a deep hole," said McCarthy's attorney, Doug Parks. The lst woman to be executed was Teresa Lewis of Virginia. Since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 allowed capital punishment to resume, 12 women and 1,309 men have been executed. Women were about 10 percent of homicide offenders between 1980 and 2008, says the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.