Garrett began beating Dean with a hammer, and Tucker, who said she was disturbed by the "gurgling" sounds the wounded man made, found a 3-foot-long pickax and began hacking at his body. According to her own account, she began using heroin at age 10 and was a drug-addled prostitute when she and a friend, Daniel Garrett, entered the Houston apartment of Jerry Lynn Dean on June 13, 1983, to steal a motorcycle. No one disputed the fact that Tucker committed a nightmarish act. "May God bless Karla Faye Tucker and may God bless her victims and their families," Bush said after declining to grant the stay.
But here in Texas, the national leader in executions with one in every three that occurs, governors have seldom intervened in death-penalty cases and Bush was no exception. Bush (R), who, under the law, could grant her only one 30-day stay. Supreme Court, which turned down two appeals without comment this afternoon, and Gov. Tucker, who could have been eligible for parole in 2003 had the board agreed, had asked that she be given life in prison without the possibility of release, but there is no such sentence in Texas, and board members said they could not make a special case of Tucker.Īfter the board's ruling, Tucker's only hope was with the U.S. The state Board of Pardons and Paroles, which could have commuted her sentence to life in prison, voted 16 to 0, with two members abstaining, to deny her request. It had become increasingly clear on Monday that despite Tucker's efforts to show she was a changed person, notably in televised appearances on "60 Minutes," Robertson's "The 700 Club" and CNN, her quest to spare her life had failed. "The world's a better place," he was heard to say during the execution. Richard Thornton, the victim's husband, argued that he was sick of the depiction of Tucker as "Miss Saint."Īrenas said Thornton, who is in a wheelchair with severe diabetes and was a witness to the execution, muttered throughout the proceedings. Carlson, brother of Deborah Thornton, one of the two people Tucker was convicted of helping to kill, participated in rallies at the state Capitol in Austin asking that Tucker be spared. "Forget Injection, Use a Pickax," read another.īut many others here were sympathetic to Tucker's plight: "I'm Ashamed to be a Texan," one sign read, and another said: "Jesus Loves Karla Faye and So Do I."Ĭheers went up from the pro-execution crowd when her death was announced. Several hundred people on both sides of the issue crowded against yellow police lines, some still arguing over the value of the death penalty, others praying and singing "Amazing Grace" and other hymns. The scene was emotional outside the Department of Criminal Justice facility here called the death house in this east Texas town of 35,000 about 60 miles north of Houston, where a record 37 men were executed last year. "I never saw Karla Faye Tucker take the smile off her face," said Vicente Arenas, a Houston television reporter who was among the witnesses. Officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said that Tucker also could have requested a sedative but did not. Then a lethal dose of sodium thiopental began dripping into the veins of each arm, along with pancuronium bromide, which is a muscle relaxant, and potassium chloride, which stops the heartbeat. "I am going to be face-to-face with Jesus now."Īddressing her husband, she said, "Baby, I love you." "I love all of you very much," she said to the witnesses. Wearing a white prison uniform and white tennis shoes, Tucker lay strapped on her back on a gurney as she delivered her final statements to the gathered witnesses, who included her husband, Dana Brown, a prison ministry worker she married by proxy in 1995, and Ronald Carlson, a Houston machinist and brother of one of the victims. Although she and her attorneys had played down her gender in their many pleas for clemency, the fact that she was a woman helped arouse international interest in her cause and generate appeals for mercy from figures including Pope John Paul II and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson. local time, becoming the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War and only the second in the United States since the resumption of the death penalty in 1976. Tucker, 38, was pronounced dead at 6:45 p.m. Karla Faye Tucker, the Pickax Killer turned born-again Christian, died of a lethal injection tonight, closing a long fight for her life as a crowd outside the Texas death house prayed for her soul.
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