David Martin was executed by the State of Louisiana for a quadruple murders. According to court documents David Martin would find out his wife was cheating on him and would go to the man’s home where he would open fire killing Bobby Todd, Terry Hebert, Anne Tierney, and Sandra Brake. David Martin would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. David Martin would be executed by way of the electric chair on January 4 1985
David Martin More News
David Dene Martin, a former youth conselor who said stress and drugs led him to murder his wife’s lover and three other people, was executed early today after the State Pardon Board refused a last-minute plea to spare him from the electric chair.
He was pronounced dead at 12:16 A.M. central standard time, said C. Paul Phelps, secretary of the state Department of Corrections.
Mr. Martin’s execution, the 33rd in the nation since the 1976 Supreme Court decision that allowed states to impose the death penalty, was the second in Louisiana in eight days. All court appeals were long ago exhausted.
Slayings in 1977
Mr. Martin, 32 years old, was executed for the Aug. 14, 1977, slayings of Bobby Todd, a bar owner with whom Mr. Martin’s wife, Gloria, said she was having an affair, and three other people who happened to be at Mr. Todd’s mobile home in Bayou Blue when Mr. Martin walked in and started shooting.
Mr. Martin’s attorney, Richard Shapiro, maintained that Mr. Martin was driven to murder after his wife’s affair and after his daughter was born with birth defects. Mr. Shapiro said Mr. Martin was under the influence of alcohol and the drug phencyclidine, also known as PCP or angel dust, at the time of the slayings.
Spent Evening With Minister
Mr. Martin spent Thursday evening at Louisiana State Penitentiary with the Rev. Ray Winders of Paris, Tex., a Seventh-day Adventist and Mr. Martin’s spiritual adviser.
”They were talking and reading the Bible,” said Frank Blackburn, the prison warden. ”I asked if there was anything special he wanted to report to the news media and he said, ‘No.’ ”
”He had a last meal of Sloppy Joes and french fries,” the warden said. ”He didn’t want anything special. That’s what was on fare for everybody tonight.”
”He seemed to be in very good spirits,” Mr. Blackburn said.
His mother, three sisters and half- brother attended the five-hour hearing of the pardon board, and wept after the board announced its 5-0 decision without comment.
One sister, Luvena Farinala of Wheeling, W.Va., testified tearfully: ”I don’t want to see him die. He has touched the lives of many people spiritually, intellectually and personally.”
Mr. Martin’s mother and another sister also testified.
Calm at Pardon Hearing
Mr. Martin showed little emotion, nodding only to acknowledge that he understood. He then turned to Mr. Shapiro, shook his hand and said, ”You’ve been a good friend.”
A native of Keene, Tex., Mr. Martin married soon after moving to Houma in southeast Louisiana in 1973. In Houma, he led many social programs for the Seventh-day Adventists through the church’s Way-Out Help Clinic.
In those programs, he monitored a hotline for troubled teen-agers, counseled young people and played folk songs on his guitar. He supported himself as a carpenter, maintenance man and door-to-door salesman.
The United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit noted that a divided Louisiana Supreme Court had affirmed David Martin’s death penalty by a 4-3 vote, with the three dissenters saying death was too harsh a penalty in this case.
Evidence in the case showed that Mr. Martin reloaded his revolver twice, pulled the trigger 15 times and confessed the crime to five people. While Mr. Shapiro stressed the influence of drugs and alcohol, the judges of the appeals court said the evidence indicated Mr. Martin had planned the murders in advance.
