PORTLAND – One of triple murderer Steven Oken’s victims brought home abandoned kittens and nursed them to health.

That image of Lori Ward as helping the underdog – abandoned animals – is the image her family chooses to focus on, rather than images of her death when, at age 25, she was molested, robbed and shot in the head in 1987 while working the front desk at a Kittery motel.

Nonetheless, her sister, Suzanne Tsintolas, has attended nearly every court hearing as her sister’s killer, Steven Oken, 42, tries to avoid the death penalty in Maryland where he murdered two other women.

Oken was sentenced to death in 1991. On Tuesday, a federal judge granted an indefinite stay of execution for Oken while his lawyers challenge the way Maryland performs lethal injections as cruel and unusual punishment.

But the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday vacated a stay of execution for Oken upheld by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. The high court also denied the request from Oken that it grant a stay of execution and a petition in which he claimed the way Maryland performs lethal injection executions is unconstitutional.

The delays have added to the anguish of the victims’ families.

“Anyone who is a victim of a violent crime – and of course family members left behind are also victims – we all want the full extent of the law extended to the person responsible for that crime,” said Tsintolas.

Oken’s decision to plead guilty to killing Ward in Maine in 1989 was part of a strategy aimed at avoiding Maryland’s death penalty.

But an agreement between the governors of Maine and Maryland at the time allowed Oken to be transferred to face trial and sentencing for the first two murders after receiving a sentence of life without parole in Maine.

“If he had not been extradited, then the other family members would not have had … the opportunity to see the person who killed their loved one held responsible in a court of law,” said Tsintolas, who along with her parents lobbied for the extradition.

Oken’s 15-day killing spree began in Baltimore and took him to Maine, where he checked in at the Coachman Motor Inn on Route 1 in Kittery. Ward was working at the front desk. Police found her body in a room behind the check-in area. She had been shot once in the head.

Kittery police found a bloodstained shirt in Oken’s room, and state police issued a statewide public alert. Oken was found staying at the Freeport Inn and gave himself up to police, who had surrounded the building. The gun used in Ward’s killing was found in his car.

Tsintolas was living in Europe at the time and eventually moved back to the United States, coincidentally to the suburbs of Baltimore, where Oken’s trials, sentencing and legal maneuvers have taken place.

Ward was the baby of the family, five years younger than her sister and seven years younger than her brother, who now lives in Florida, Tsintolas said.

Unlike her siblings, Ward was shy, quiet, a graduate of Portsmouth High School who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian and was taking classes at the University of New Hampshire. Her father is dead, but her mother still lives in Portsmouth.

Ward’s legacy lives on in her love for animals, Tsintolas said.

“She always had this sense that animals were the underdogs, and she was bound and determined she was going to save the underdogs,” Tsintolas said.

Ward’s family established a memorial fund to assist the New Hampshire Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, money that still is used to train every fourth grader in the state’s Seacoast region about responsible pet ownership and how to behave around wild animals or animals a child doesn’t know.

“I think the important decision we made as a family was to celebrate Lori’s life and not to dwell on her death,” Tsintolas said.

Fred Warren Bennett, one of Oken’s lawyers, said he had previously filed a petition for clemency with Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich. “We will seek action from the governor. We will seek a partial commutation. We will seek that he spare the life of our client.”

Spokesmen for the governor’s office did not immediately return calls for comment late Wednesday. A spokesman for the attorney general’s office declined to comment.

Oken was sentenced to death for the 1987 rape and murder of Dawn Marie Garvin in White Marsh.