Tennesee's longest-serving death row inmate, David Earl Miller, is set to die by electric chair at 7pm on Thursday.
Miller, who has served a total of 36 years on death row, chose electrocution as his means of execution, and has selected a last meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits and coffee.
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According to the Daily Mail, Miller still has two last-minute petitions asking the US Supreme Court to halt his execution.
He was convicted of killing Lee Standifer, a 23-year-old woman with learning disabilities, in Knoxville in 1981.
"It was just a series of random events that led him here and to her and to her innocent life," Jim Winston, a retired Knoxville Police Department lieutenant who worked the case from the first night told Knox News.
"She was just starting a life on her own, and he took all that away from her. What she could have been or what her future might have been if she could have lived... we'll never know."
Winston also said that Standifer was 'naive and trusting, like an innocent child', adding: "He was a handsome guy. They were about the same age. She would have had no idea. A date to her was probably a walk around the mall, holding hands or him buying her a Coke - and probably buying it with her money."
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The Tennessee Department of Correction said David Earl Miller will be served the meal on Thursday afternoon, as he awaits his execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
His lawyers have argued that Miller's preferred method of execution - the midazolam-based lethal injection - is inhumane, as it could cause a prolonged and torturous death.
The 6th Circuit ruled Miller could not challenge electrocution because he had opted for the method.
Miller is the second Tennessee death row inmate in just over a month to choose the electric chair, after Edmund Zagorski was killed by the same method on 1 November.
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Zagorski, who was 63 at the time of his death, was convicted for the 1983 murders of John Dale Dotson and Jimmy Porter, with prosecutors saying he lured them into the woods in Robertson County promising to sell them marijuana, before shooting them, slitting their throats and stealing their money.
He chose a final meal of pigs tails and pig knuckles, after an appeal against his death sentence proved unsuccessful.
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