The attack led to a 12-hour gun battle between law enforcement officers and Bixby and his father, Arthur. Bixby has always maintained that he was justified in the shooting because of his right to defend his property.

For more than 20 years, Steven Bixby has been confined to South Carolina’s death row. After the state resumed executions last fall, his execution appeared to be just months away. But last Friday, lawyers for Bixby won a rare stay of execution from the South Carolina Supreme Court.

In their filings, the lawyers argued that Bixby’s sovereign citizen beliefs, fanatical devotion to his parents and clinically narcissistic belief that he had done nothing wrong made it impossible for him to engage rationally with his legal representation.

As a result, the attorneys argued, he does not meet South Carolina’s standard of being mentally competent to be executed for his crimes.

The order, signed by three of the court’s five justices (including Chief Justice John Kittredge), put a pause on the execution and ordered that in the next 30 days, 10th Circuit Court Judge R. Scott Sprouse set a hearing date on the attorneys’ claims.

The order gave no information about the judges’ reasoning behind granting the stay. The hearing, which is to take place before Sept. 1, 2025, is to examine whether Bixby is considered competent under the South Carolina standard.

The benchmark for mental competence in South Carolina was established in a 1993 case called Singleton v. State. It enshrined a “two pronged” test for mental competence.

Convicted defendants must be able to understand what they are being tried for and its connection to and the nature of the punishment as well as being able to rationally communicate with their lawyers.

In contrast, the federal standard only requires that a defendant be able to understand the proceedings and the nature of the punishment.

Central to the question of whether Bixby can be found competent is his seemingly unwavering devotion to a loose set of beliefs known as sovereign citizenship. While there are many variations of the belief system, the core principle is that by declaring themselves sovereign citizens, believers are exempt from paying taxes, are outside of the jurisdictions of courts and retain an absolute right to their personal property.

Believers in the sovereign citizen movement are considered a domestic terror threat by the FBI because many of their beliefs lead to criminal actions and confrontations with law enforcement officers. Sovereign citizens are known to refuse to carry driver’s licenses or display license plates and sometimes even impersonate law enforcement officers. They regularly engage in tax and mortgage fraud as well as so-called “paper terrorism,” the filing of frivolous lawsuits and false liens against public officials.

While sovereign citizens are distinct from more organized militia movements, there is considerable overlap, and some sovereign citizens are known to stockpile weapons. Sovereign citizens have also been involved in other high profile standoffs with law enforcement, including the nearly six week-long takeover of Malheur Wildlife Refuge in 2016 by the Bundy family and their supporters to protest the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Believers in sovereign citizen ideas represent a “difficult set of circumstances” for psychologists to evaluate for competence, said Dr. George Parker, professor of clinical psychiatry at Indiana University, who has studied sovereign citizens in the court system.

While some individuals emerge as leaders in the sovereign citizen movement, no central organization exists. Unlike a cult, there is no charismatic leader or enforced isolation from society, Parker said.

“The definition of a delusion is a fixed false belief, and that’s what sovereign citizens have,” Parker said. “But the issue that psychiatrists and psychologists have is when these beliefs are held by more than one person, it’s actually a shared cultural belief not a unique set of delusions, which we see as characteristic of a mental disorder.”

At the state Supreme Court, a dissent from Justices John Few and George James Jr. argued that Bixby met South Carolina’s standard of mental competence, in part because a clinical psychologist hired by his own defense team found that Bixby met the federal standard for competence. No defendant in South Carolina had ever been found competent by the federal standard and incompetent by the South Carolina standard, according to Few.

“This caution is squarely inconsistent with the principles of law it is our solemn duty to apply, even in this admittedly difficult situation,” Few wrote.

A schedule of executions released by the state Supreme Court last year placed Bixby sixth in line. Before his stay, he was set to be executed after the death sentence for Mikal Mahdi, another cop killer, is carried out. Mahdi is scheduled to be executed on April 11.

If he were found incompetent to be executed, Bixby would be the third person on South Carolina’s current death row to have been found legally incompetent for execution.

Who is Steven Bixby?

Steven Bixby was born in 1967. The day of the murders, Bixby, who was obsessed with looking for signs in patterns of numbers, said that he knew what he was doing was blessed by God because the price of gold was $1,967.

Growing up, Bixby’s family was largely on the edge of society in Warren, New Hampshire, according to a forensic interview and review of records conducted by psychologist Richart DeMier. His parents had both been previously married, and Rita was known to hold extreme beliefs.

In DeMier’s report, Steven’s siblings described sometimes going without food and described their house as being so cold in winter that they would find frost on their sheets. Steven said he was sexually abused by his older half sister, which his mother was slow to accept, according to DeMier’s report. Arthur Bixby was described as an alcoholic who beat his children and once made the children from his first marriage watch him shoot the family dog.

But in his interview with DeMier, Steven denied these accounts. He explained them away by saying that his siblings were “jealous” of him, which DeMier characterized as proof of his narcissistic personality disorder and the extent of his unhealthy “enmeshment” with his parents.

Any discussion of his parents’ role in his life led Bixby to grow so angry that he would stop cooperating with his lawyers, DeMier wrote. After dropping out of school in seventh grade, Bixby said, he was educated by his parents. The resulting education was superior to the schooling most people received, Bixby claimed.

In reality, he assisted his dad’s work as a manual laborer and accompanied his mother to court, where she was known as a serial civil litigant. Frequent frivolous litigation is a hallmark of sovereign citizen movements, which have a long history in New Hampshire.

While it’s unclear if his parents were affiliated with any of the loosely organized sovereign citizen groups, they came to espouse many of their ideas and had frequent run-ins with the justice system.

In 1981, future New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice Linda Dalianis, then a superior court judge, ordered Arthur Bixby jailed for failing to pay a judgment on a three-year-old lawsuit stemming from an unpaid $850 bill. The Bixbys reportedly grew so threatening that Dalianis was given around-the-clock protection, according to the Boston Globe.

Abbeville’s darkest day

Steven Bixby moved to the Abbeville area after his marriage ended, and he suffered severe nerve damage from a bad case of frostbite that left him in extreme pain in the cold.

His parents soon followed.

The “catalyst” for the violence was Rita moving to Abbeville said Representative Craig Gagnon, R-Abbeville. Gagnon is a chiropractor who treated both Arthur and Steven and who was present at the scene the day of the standoff.

While Gagnon remembers that Bixby appeared to be full of bluster, like the guy everyone knew was making up stories, Rita was “a little different. A very intense person, very serious . When they all got together it just added fuel to the fire to their interesting and kind of radical beliefs.”

Gagnon had previously described the family as a “deadly cocktail of personalities,” and said that Rita once said of Israelis, “they are not people of Zion. They are from Eastern Europe, they are mud people,” Gagnon recalled her saying.

Many sovereign citizens espouse beliefs related to the Christian Identity movement, which holds that Anglo-Saxon whites are true descendants of the tribes of Israel and therefore God’s chosen people.

In the lead-up to the deadly shootout, the state Department of Transportation attempted to mediate a settlement with the Bixbys. While the department had an easement giving them access to the land next to S.C. Highway 72, they offered to compensate the Bixbys by letting them buy more land for a nominal payment of $1.

But the family rejected all offers.

Rita reportedly told officials that documents showing the easement were fake. The family sent letters to state offices quoting Patrick Henry’s famous saying, “Give me liberty or give me death,” fortified their home and placed “No Trespassing” signs around the property.

On Dec. 8, 2003, Steven and Arthur confronted a worker laying out stakes for the highway, and law enforcement officers were called. When Wilson, the sheriff’s department deputy, knocked on the Bixbys’ door, Steven shot him. The father and son dragged Wilson’s body inside, handcuffed him and read him his rights. He told DeMier, the psychologist, that he was performing a citizen’s arrest.

Gagnon said that he got a call from Rita telling him that Steven had shot a sheriff’s deputy. He remembered thinking to himself, “this is bizarre. I’m thinking he might have shot the deputy in the foot because she said the deputy stuck his foot in the door and Steve shot him.”

Ouzts was shot while responding to reports of an officer down. Bixby told DeMier that the constable was killed by “friendly fire.”

Bixby also maintained that the blood of Jesus Christ was found on his clothes after the shootout. The fact that his father was struck by bullets that missed him was also proof of “divine intervention,” and an angel could be seen in the crime scene photographs, Bixby told DeMier.

Arthur was diagnosed with schizophrenia and found not competent to stand trial. He died in 2008 after developing dementia.

While Rita was not present during the shootout, prosecutors say that she planned the ambushed. She was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy and two counts of accessory to murder. Rita died in 2011.

During Steven’s trial, she testified that she was proud of her son for standing up for himself.

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