Thomas Hager was sentenced to death by the Federal Government for a murder that was committed twelve years before. According to court documents Thomas Hager was upset that a woman learned where he lived and he was worried she would tell others so he decided to kill her. Thomas Hager would go to the woman’s apartment in Virginia where she was bound up and placed in a bath tub where she was fatally stabbed. The crime went unsolved for over a decade. Thomas Hager was eventually convicted and sentenced to death. As of 2021 he mains on Federal Death Row

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The government adduced evidence of the following facts during the first phase of the trial: In November 1993, Hager was engaged in the sale and distribution of crack cocaine at Nelson Place, in the Southeast area of Washington, D.C. In October 1993, he shot and wounded Christopher Fletcher and Ric Pearson, two members of a drug gang from Ely Place, over a dispute about one of his guns. Ely Place is a few blocks from Nelson Place. After the shooting, Hager went into hiding, living with his then-girlfriend, Shenita King, in her apartment in Maryland.

After the shooting, sometime in mid-November, White stopped by King’s apartment. King did not allow White into the apartment, however, and did not tell her that Hager was there. Even so, Hager was very upset because no one was to know where he lived. White had previously dated and had a child with Williams Seals, a member of the Ely Place drug gang. Because Hager feared that White would tell others of his whereabouts, he decided that he would kill her.

On November 29, 1993, Hager, King, Arlington Johnson, and Lonnie Barnett went to White’s Alexandria, Virginia, apartment. When they arrived that evening, King knocked on White’s patio door. White, who was feeding her thirteen-month-old baby daughter Alexis, invited them in.

Shortly after they arrived, White showed King and Hager Alexis’s room. She then took a brief telephone call. Shortly after the call, Hager turned up the volume on the television, pulled out a gun, and hit White’s face with enough force to break her jaw and knock out a tooth. He and Barnett then took White, crying and bleeding, down the hallway to her bedroom. Hager told Johnson to run some water in bathtub. All the while, King stayed in the living room with Alexis. Throughout the ordeal, Hager repeatedly asked White whether she told her baby’s father, Seals, where Hager lived. White insisted that she had not.

Hager sat White on the bed and instructed Barnett to find something with which to gag her. After he gagged her, he and Barnett walked her to the bathroom. Hager told her to get in the bathtub and then grabbed some hot curlers, plugged them in, and threw them into the water, attempting unsuccessfully to electrocute White. Next, he told Johnson and Barnett to go to the kitchen and retrieve some knives with which to stab White. They followed his instructions. All told, the three stabbed her over eighty times in her legs, chest, neck, face, hands, buttocks, and back. After some of the knives broke or bent, Hager instructed Johnson and Barnett to retrieve more knives.

At some point, Hager put White face down into the water and stood on top of her to make sure that she was dead. When Barnett insisted that they go, Hager “said that he couldn’t leave because he could get the death penalty for it, and he wanted to make sure that she was dead.”

After Hager was convinced that White was dead, he, King, Johnson, and Barnett proceeded out the door, but not before taking the telephone off of the hook and locking the door behind them, leaving Alexis alone in the apartment with her dead mother.

On their way back to the District, Hager counseled the others not to tell anyone about the murder and teased Barnett for being scared. He also mocked White’s pleas for her life and her concern for Alexis. He later bragged that Johnson and Barnett “were soldiers now, and that [they] go hard.”

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-4th-circuit/1635550.html