Danny Lee Siebert is dead.

The convicted serial killer, who confessed to murdering Rotterdam resident Beatrice McDougall in 1986, died Tuesday afternoon at W.C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. He was 53.

In the end, it wasn’t lethal injection that killed the killer. It was complications from pancreatic cancer.

Beth Guay, McDougall’s daughter, doesn’t like the way Siebert was allowed to make his exit. It’s a question of justice.

“I was disappointed,,” Guay said Friday morning from her Rotterdam Junction home. “I don’t feel justice was served. I think the system took way too long. I think 22 years was too long.”

Click HERE to see a photo of Beatrice McDougall, courtesy of Beth Guay.

Many local residents will remember Beatrice and the circumstances surrounding her death on March 8, 1986.

The 57-year-old was working part-time as a tour guide for Wade Tours of Rotterdam during that late winter. Her job was easy and fun — keep travelers occupied during rides to casinos or other destinations, and make sure they were on the bus for the ride home.

McDougall didn’t gamble. So while casino fans were investing chips and coins at Caesar’s Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., on a late winter weekend 22 years ago, McDougall watched television in the hospitality suite. That’s where police say Siebert found her alone.

McDougall was strangled and stabbed twice in the abdomen. The killer took money and some of her possessions. The following September, authorities arrested then 32-year-old Siebert in Tennessee. He was charged with five murders in Alabama and told police he had killed several others.

Siebert eventually was charged with McDougall’s murder, but never tried.

I wrote stories about the case in 1986, and talked to Beth Guay and other members of her family in 2006, the 20th anniversary of Beatrice’s murder.

They had been waiting a long time for Siebert’s execution, and almost saw the day.

Siebert, convicted of five murders in Alabama, was supposed to meet death last Oct. 24. He was granted a stay by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, pending the outcome of a Kentucky case regarding lethal injection then before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In that case, Kentucky inmates argued lethal injection was cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The discussions shut down death penalty cases until the injection question was decided.

It was decided last week, when the court upheld lethal injection in a ruling on the case.

Siebert had brought other legal challenges. He believed cancer medications he was taking could react poorly with drugs used for lethal injection, and causing him undue pain. The suit was still pending.

Beth Guay thinks none of these delays should have occurred.

“The other families and I talked,” she said, mentioning conversations with relatives of other Siebert victims. “Here he was tried and convicted in 1987, he confessed to five of the murders, what was he appealing?”

It’s not enough to know Siebert is dead.

“I don’t think I’ve gotten to that point yet,” Guay said. “I find it more frustrating right now, to the point where I feel like he did really get the last say.”

In my 2006 story, readers learned McDougall was born Beatrice May on April 16, 1928. She graduated from Scotia High School in 1945, where cheerleading and typing were among her skills.

Beatrice May studied to become a registered nurse, and worked in Ellis Hospital’s intensive care and natal delivery units. She married Richard Weise on Jan. 28, 1950, and began her family. Daughter Dawn was born in 1953. Son Kurt and Beth arrived in 1955 and 1957, respectively.

During the early 1960s, the family lived in Florida. Beatrice, who later divorced, was back in Scotia by 1962. She married Walter McDougall in 1976. She eventually began work with the state Department of Taxation and Finance, and was secretary to the director at the time of her death.

McDougall also performed with the Melo-Dears choral group. She played the organ at the First Reformed Church of Scotia.

Siebert, by comparison, lived a rotten life.

He was originally from Illinois. In 1979, he was convicted of manslaughter in Las Vegas. Police there said he was sentenced to 10 years for killing a man who had suffered 29 stab wounds.

The convict escaped from a Nevada prison in 1981 and later was arrested in San Francisco. While at large, police said, he abducted a woman who escaped from him by jumping out of a car traveling 55 mph over a San Francisco bridge.

Out of jail in 1986, Siebert surfaced in Alabama. Police said the drifter, in recorded statements, admitted to killing Linda Ann Jarman, a 33-year-old deaf woman; Sherrie Weathers, 24, and her children Chad, 5, and Joseph, 5; and a waitress, Linda Faye Odum, 32.

There were more.

“It’s going to be hard to build a defense when the man has told me he has killed 13 people,” Siebert’s attorney, George Sims, said in 1987.

Like other cons, Siebert became a jailhouse artist. His pencil drawings of naked or nearly naked women appeared on the Internet. In one graphic scene, a naked woman was shown in a cemetery.

Guay said she learned about the death through a victims advocacy group in Alabama.

“I’ve talked to Troy King (Alabama attorney general) Clay Crenshaw (assistant attorney general and prosecuting attorney in the Siebert case), all these people in Alabama have gone above and beyond what they’ve had to for us, as a family here. They didn’t have to tell us anything — it had nothing to do with us, that case down there.”

For Guay and her family, time has not healed any wounds.

“They say to begin to heal you need to voice your thoughts and feelings,” Beth said in a statement for her family. “But sadly, no matter what I say or think, my Mom is still no longer here, as it should be. The plans, the promises for our lives together as a family, have been lost.

“Our life as we’ve known it has changed forever, been taken away from us and lost forever. Instead, we are left with a sense of emptiness and such despair. We still live in a state of numbness and cannot concentrate for some periods at a time.

“Most of the time I fight with being disoriented, and feel my life is so disorganized. I am left with horrible images that replay over and over again as to what my Mom endured in the last minutes of her life. I find myself wondering other than greeting him, what did my Mom say to this person for him to do what he did and in the manner it was done?”

Guay was in Alabama in October for the execution. She would have traveled south again, for a chance to see Siebert die.

“I basically wanted my face to be the last face he saw,” she said. “Not that he would have known who I was.”