Rebecca Machetti, sentenced to death for 1974 Macon murder plot, dies of COVID-19
A woman convicted and at one point sentenced to die in Georgia’s electric chair for conspiring with two Florida men to have her ex-husband murdered in Macon in 1974 died Monday.
Rebecca Akins Machetti, raised in Athens before moving to Macon with husband Ronald Akins, died of complications caused by COVID-19, her daughter, Val Akins, confirmed to The Telegraph.
Machetti, who was 81, was released on parole in 2010 after serving 36 years in prison. She had originally been sentenced to death, but after winning a new trial on appeal, a second jury found her guilty but opted instead for life imprisonment in the murders of Ronald Akins and his newlywed wife, Juanita, in August 1974.
‘I feel relief’
Machetti had been living in Athens at what had been her late mother’s home before being admitted to a nursing home and later a hospital in the city of Lavonia near the South Carolina border.
Val Akins, who is one of Machetti’s three daughters with Ronald Akins, has had little contact with her mother in the decades after the case went to trial.
“I feel relief,” Val Akins said of her mother’s death, “but sadness at the fact that she ruined so many lives.”
Murder plot
The shotgun slayings of Ronald and Juanita made headlines across the South.
Machetti, along with one of her co-conspirators, her second husband, John Eldon Smith, changed their last names to Machetti because Rebecca Machetti thought it had a mafia ring to it.
She was said to have aspired for John Smith to become a hit man, with her at his side, living the Miami highlife, frequenting horse tracks and nightclubs.
The mafia lifestyle seemed to fascinate her after she and Ronald Akins divorced and she moved with her then-young children to the Miami area in the months before the murders.
Convicted and sentenced
John Smith, who changed his name to Tony Machetti, was convicted of killing Ronald and Juanita Akins in a subdivision off Forsyth Road in northwest Bibb County. Smith and another man, John Maree, also convicted in the plot, were both sent to prison.
Smith was sent to death row, where in December 1983, he became the first person to die in Georgia’s electric chair after the reinstatement of the death penalty.
Maree has long since been paroled and was believed to be living in Lumberton, North Carolina.
Rebecca Machetti, had in recent decades taken the last name Lorusso, that of her common-law husband, her daughter said.
This story was originally published September 14, 2020 at 12:46 PM.