Dean Corll was a serial killer from Texas who was known as The Candy Man and the Pied Piper. Dead Corll would have two teenage accomplices Elmer Henley and David Brooks who would bring victims to him. In this article on My Crime Library we will take a closer look at Dean Corll the Candy Man.
Dean Corll Early Years
Dean Corll was born in Fort Wayne Indiana on December 24, 1939. His parents had an on and off again marriage which would ultimately lead to two divorces.
In the mid 1950’s Dean Corll and his family would move to Texas after his mother would begin a new relationship that would lead to marriage. Dean was known as a good student but as a loner.
Dean Corll family owned and operated a candy factory and he was known to give candy to children hence the nickname The Candy Man.
When Dean mother divorced yet again the family would open a new candy factory called the Corrll Candy Company and named Dean as Vice President with his younger brother acting Secretary Treasurer. Apparently a teen employee went to Dean mother and complained that her son was making sexual advances towards him, the mother reacted by firing the employee.
Dean Corll was drafted into the United States Army in 1964. A year later he was honorably discharged.
In 1967 Dean Corll would meet twelve year old David Brooks and within a couple of years the two would begin a sexual relationship.
Dean Corll Murders
In 1969 the Corll Candy Company would shut down and Dean would begin working as an electrician for the Houston Lighting And Power Company
Between 1970 and 1973 it is believed that Dean Corll murdered at least twenty eight victims aged thirteen to twenty years old. Most of the victims would be brought back to the home by Elmer Henly and David Brooks. Ironically Elmer Henly was suppose to be a victim however Dean Corll would give him the same deal he gave David Brooks which was $200 for bringing back a male teenager to the home.
Each of the victims who were brought to the home were sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered.
Dean Corll Death
On August 8, 1973 Dean Corll was upset with Elmer Henly as the then seventeen year old had brought a girl back to the house. Eventually he calmed down and would give the two teenagers alcohol and drugs. When Elmer woke up he was laying on his stomach and felt Dean Corll trying to handcuff him. His mouth was taped closed and he was bound by his ankles. A teenager who Elmer Henly had brought back to the home the night before and the teenage girl were all in the same state.
Dean Corll threatned to murder the three teenagers but Elmer Henly was able to talk himself free promising to help Corll murder the other two. Once Elmer was free he would get his hands on a gun and would fatally shoot Dean Corll, the Candy Man was dead
Elmer Henly would contact the police and soon after would make a full confession on the crimes of Dean Corll, David Brooks and himself.
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A onetime henchman of one of the Houston area’s most notorious serial killers has died of COVID-19, officials said Wednesday.
David Owen Brooks was 65 when he died in a Galveston prison hospital on May 28, two weeks after he had been hospitalized with symptoms consistent with the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice website. He also suffered from a number of preexisting conditions but did test positive for the virus, and preliminary results of an autopsy suggested it was a contributing cause of his death.
Brooks was serving six life sentences in prison for his part in the reign of terror by Dean Corll, who killed at least 28 teenage boys and young men in Houston in the 1970s. Corll, a Houston electric company worker and former candy store owner, used Brooks and fellow teen Elmer Wayne Henley to lure youngsters to his apartment, where they were handcuffed and shackled to a plywood torture board before being sexually assaulted and killed.
The cryptic nickname “Candy Man” conjures up all kinds of creepy depictions of candy-coated predators. There’s the 1992 slasher film “Candyman,” which dramatizes an urban legend about a slave owner’s son who is seeking out revenge. Then, there’s the real life horror story from the 1970s of a Texan who poisoned neighborhood kids, including two of his own, with Pixie Sticks on Halloween. One of the children died — the killer’s son — and the killer was executed a decade later. Of course there’s also “The Candy Man” song from the arguably creepy “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”
But have you heard of “Candy Man” Dean Corll, arguably the most deviant “Candy Man” who ever existed, real or fictional? He was actually believed to be the most prolific serial killer of his time, surpassing the infamous Boston Strangler.
Netflix’s “Mindhunter” is a fictionalized account of real-life FBI profiler John Douglas’ endeavors interviewing and investigating real life killers, mostly of the serial variety.
The second season focused primarily on the Atlanta Child Murders, but it also incorporated several storylines involving other real-life killers, including a prison interview with one of Corll’s victims, who ended up becoming his accomplice. That man, Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., ultimately ended up murdering Corll when he was just a teen.
Before interviewing Henley, the FBI team discussed Henley and Corll’s crimes. They noted that Corll was known around Houston as the “Candy Man” — he gave free candy (or drugs) to teenage boys to lure them into being kidnapped, raped, tortured and often killed. In all, he killed 28 victims. Henley was 14 when he met Corll. He could have been one of his many murder victims, but instead assisted in some of the murders.
In the show, Henley’s character maintains that he yes, he helped lure other teens to Corll.
“He told me he was looking for white, good-looking and young,” Henley’s character recalled.
When asked what if it was like to kill Corll, if it was difficult to do so, his character replied, “Nah, it was cool.”
He claimed he only killed Corll, not anyone else, despite being convicted of killing six.
The real-life Henley received six life sentences in 1974 for killing Corll and for helping him in killing others, and he’s still incarcerated in Tennessee.
As for the real-life Corll, he’s obviously dead, after Henley killed him at age 17. That murder halted Corll’s horrific murder spree.
The nickname “Candy Man” isn’t just about the free candy and drugs he offered to children to lure them into abuse. His family also owned a candy factory, according to Houstonia. He became vice president of his family’s “Corll Candy Company” after being discharged from the army, according to the 1974 book “The Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders.” His profession allowed him to give out free candy to kids in the Houston Heights, where he lived. He also became known as the “Pied Piper,” referencing a legend from the Middle Ages about a man who lured over 100 children out of a town to avenge its mayor, who neglected to pay him what he was owed.
Corll is no legend, and he did indeed kill 28 people between 1970 and 1973 — along with the help of Henley and another teen accomplice, David Owen Brooks. The victims were males aged 13 to 20, and most of them were in their mid-teens.
Brooks met Corll when Brooks was in the sixth grade and soon Corll was sexually abusing him, according to an archived article. Brooks is currently also serving time for his role in the murders.
The murder victims were also sexually assaulted before being strangled or shot to death. Then, their bodies were tied in plastic sheeting. Many of the bodies were discovered in an isolated section of a beach, according to an archived Associated Press report. Others were found in a wooded area. Corll was known for keeping trophies of his victims, namely keys, according to the Houston Ledger.
His reign of terror was cut short when at 33, he was shot to death in his Pasadena home, a Houston suburb, by Henley, according to a 2011 Texas Monthly article which detailed how the horrors affected the area.
News of the murders shocked the country, as the death toll surpassed all serial killings at the time (serial killer was not yet an actual term). Reporters flocked to the area, including author Truman Capote, according to the Texas Monthly.
The report went on to note that, although two books were quickly published about the shocking case at the time, for some reason the case went on to become largely forgotten by media.
All in all, there is absolutely nothing sweet about this real life tale.
Frances Newton was executed by the State of Texas for the murders of her husband and children. Frances Newton would be executed by lethal injection on September 14, 2015.
Frances Newton was born on April 12, 1965
Three weeks before the murders Frances Newton would take out life insurance policies for her husband, her daughter and for herself. Newton would admit to forging her husband signature to prevent him from knowing that she had put money aside to pay for the premiums
Frances Newton would later tell police that her husband was a drug dealer and owed money to a number of suppliers.
On April 7, 1987 her husband, her seven year old son and fourteen month old daughter would be fatally shot. Frances Newton would deny having any role in the triple murders and she believed that a rival drug dealer was responsible.
Frances Newton would go on trial for the triple murder and would be found guilty and sentenced to death. Frances Newton would be executed by lethal injection on September 14, 2005
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Unless the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Rick Perry act to stop it, on Sept. 14 Frances Newton will become only the third woman executed by the state of Texas since 1982, and the first black woman executed since the Civil War.
Unique in that historical sense, in other ways the Frances Newton case is painfully unexceptional. For there is no incontrovertible evidence against Newton, and the paltry evidence that does exist has been completely compromised. Moreover, her story is one more in a long line of Texas death row cases in which the prosecutions were sloppy or dishonest, the defenses incompetent or negligent, and the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial was honored only in name.
As Harris Co. prosecutors tell the story, the now 40-year-old Frances Newton is a cold-blooded killer who murdered her husband and two young children inside the family’s apartment outside Houston on April 7, 1987, by shooting each of them, execution-style, in order to collect life insurance. Newton had the opportunity, they argued during her 1988 trial, and a motive – a troubled relationship with her husband, Adrian, and the promise of $100,000 in insurance money from policies she’d recently taken out on his life and on the life of their 21-month-old daughter Farrah. And she had the means, they say: a .25-caliber Raven Arms pistol she had allegedly stolen from a boyfriend’s house.
To the state, it is a simple, open-and-shut case, which requires no further review. “Her case has been reviewed by every possible court,” Harris Co. Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson told the Los Angeles Times in November. “She killed her two children and her husband. There is very, very strong evidence of that.”
Yet despite Wilson’s insistence, Newton’s case isn’t simple at all – and such “evidence” as there is, is far from strong. “The State’s theory is simple, and it is superficially compelling,” attorney David Dow, head of the Texas Innocence Network at the University of Houston Law Center, argued in Newton’s clemency petition, currently pending before the Board of Pardons and Paroles. “As we will see, however, appearances can be misleading.”
From the beginning, Frances Newton has maintained her innocence. She has also offered a plausible alternative theory of the crime – a theory that neither police, prosecutors, nor Newton’s own trial attorney, the infamous and now suspended Ronald Mock, have ever investigated. Newton and her defenders contend that Adrian, Farrah, and 7-year-old Alton were likely murdered by someone connected to a drug dealer to whom Adrian owed $1,500. The alternative theory has much to say for it – among other things, it explains the lack of physical evidence connecting Newton to the bloody murders.
Lingering questions about the physical evidence against Frances Newton prompted the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend, and Gov. Rick Perry to grant, a 120-day reprieve for Newton on Dec. 1, 2004 – the day she was last scheduled for execution. Although Perry said he saw no “evidence of innocence” – legally, an oxymoron – he granted the four-month stay to allow for retesting of evidence contested by Newton’s defense, including nitrite residue on the hem of her skirt and gun ballistics evidence.
But testing on the skirt proved impossible, because the 1987 tests had destroyed the nitrite particles, and Harris Co. court officials had stored the skirt by sealing it inside a bag together with items of the victims’ bloody clothing – thereby rendering it worthless as evidence. The second round of ballistics testing, on the other hand, supposedly confirmed a match between the gun prosecutors say Newton used and the bullets that killed her family. However, that match may be fundamentally undermined – because there is no certain connection between the gun and Newton. According to Dow, it appears that police actually recovered at least two, and perhaps three, .25-caliber Raven Arms pistols during their investigation of the murders – conflicting evidence that neither the police nor the prosecutors ever revealed to Newton’s defense. Dow argues that it is virtually impossible to know whether prosecutors have been truthful in claiming that the gun that Frances Newton admits to hiding on April 7, 1987, was the murder weapon. “How many firearms were recovered and investigated in this case and who owned them?” Dow asks in a supplemental petition filed with the BPP on Aug. 25. “How many records have been withheld from Newton’s attorneys throughout this case?”
In short, there is now even more doubt about Newton’s guilt than there was when she was granted the stay – distressing Newton’s many defenders, among them Adrian’s parents, two former prison officials, and at least one of the jurors who heard Newton’s case. “We never wanted to see Frances get executed,” Adrian’s parents Tom and Virginia Louis wrote to the BPP on Aug. 25. “When the trial occurred, nobody from the [DA’s] Office ever asked … our opinion. We were willing to testify on Frances’ behalf, but Frances’ defense lawyer never approached us,” they continued. “We do not wish to suffer the loss of another family member.”
In the months before the murders, Frances and Adrian Newton were having marital problems. They were each involved in extramarital relationships, and Adrian was using drugs. In an Aug. 30 Gatesville prison interview, Newton told me that in addition to smoking marijuana, Adrian had developed a cocaine habit. “He had told me he was using cocaine, but I’d never seen that, but I saw the effects of it,” she recalled. “He was home later, he was irritable, less responsible.”
But she and Adrian had been together since she was a girl, and she was determined to work things out. That was on her mind on the afternoon of April 7, 1987, when she and Adrian sat down and talked. “We had decided that we were going to get through this together,” she said. Adrian insisted that he wasn’t using anymore, so when they were done talking and Adrian went into the living room “to watch TV … I decided to be nosy and see if he was being honest,” she recalled. Quietly, she opened the cabinet where he kept his stash.
“That’s when I found the gun,” she said. Newton said she immediately recalled a conversation she’d heard earlier that day, between Adrian and his brother, Sterling, who’d been staying with the family. “I couldn’t hear real close, but it sounded like they’d been in some trouble,” she said. “I thought I’d better take [the gun] out of there because I didn’t want it to be in the house … I didn’t want him to get into any trouble.” She removed the gun, placed it in a duffel bag and took it with her when she left the apartment around 6pm to run some errands, she says.
Newton says it was the last time she saw her family alive.
At 7pm, after a couple of errands, Frances Newton arrived at her cousin Sondra Nelms’ house, where the two chatted and decided to return to Newton’s apartment. As Newton backed out of the drive, she saw the duffel on the back seat and realized she needed to hide it. With Nelms watching, Newton retrieved the bag and walked next door into a burned and abandoned house owned by her parents, and there (as both women later confirmed), she left the bag.
The women arrived at the apartment around 8pm, and didn’t immediately realize that anything was wrong. Newton thought Adrian was napping – until she saw the blood. “As Frances walked around the couch and saw his upper torso, she immediately screamed and bolted to the children’s bedroom,” Nelms said in an affidavit. “Frances began to frantically scream uncontrollably. I could not calm her down enough to elicit the apartment’s address.”
Frances Newton says she was shocked and dazed, but gave police as much information as possible – including the fact that she’d just removed a gun from the house. She told police about Adrian’s drug habit, and that he owed some money to a dealer – which Adrian’s brother, Terrence, corroborated, telling police he knew where the dealer lived. Police never pursued the lead. “To your knowledge, was the alleged drug dealer ever interviewed by anyone in connection with this case?” Newton’s attorney asked Sheriff’s Officer Frank Pratt at trial. “No,” Pratt replied.
A bullet remained lodged in Adrian’s head, meaning that the blood and brain matter would have blown back onto the gun and shooter – confirmed by a trail of blood found in the hallway. Police found no trace of residual nitrites (gunshot residue) on Newton’s hands, nor on the long sleeves of the sweater she was wearing. They collected the clothing she’d worn that day. There was no blood, nor any trace of blood, on any of the items.
The next day, April 8, according to trial records, police supposedly confirmed that the gun they had retrieved from Newton’s duffel bag in the abandoned building – at her direction –matched the murder bullets. Yet Newton was not arrested until more than two weeks later. Newton says that Harris Co. Sheriff’s Sgt. J.J. Freeze told her that police had actually recovered two guns; in a sworn affidavit, Newton’s father Bee Henry Nelms says Freeze told him the same thing and added that Newton would “eventually be released.” Nonetheless, Newton was arrested two weeks later – after she filed a claim on Adrian and Farrah’s life insurance policies – and charged with the capital murder of her 21-month-old daughter.
The state’s primary evidence against her was elementary: Newton had filed for insurance benefits, and the Department of Public Safety forensic technicians had detected nitrite traces near the hem of Newton’s long skirt – although they couldn’t say with certainty that the nitrites were not her father’s garden fertilizer transferred earlier that day from the hands of her toddler daughter. For physical evidence, the state relied primarily on the supposed ballistics match to the gun Frances Newton had hidden.
Yet in court Freeze was somewhat vague: “I believe we talked about two pistols,” he testified. “I know of one for sure, and there was mention of a second one that Ms. Newton had purchased earlier.”
There are serious questions about the prosecutors’ timeline, which would have required Newton somehow to murder her family, clean herself of any and all blood traces and gunshot residue, and drive to her cousin’s house – all in less than 30 minutes. And since her 1988 conviction, the question of a second gun has haunted Newton’s case. The ballistics evidence was increasingly suspect in any case because of the recent history of the Houston PD crime lab, which has been repeatedly charged with incompetent, shoddy work, resulting in a number of exonerations and the wholesale discrediting of the lab, which remains under investigation. The lab’s clouded reputation was one factor that prompted Gov. Perry to accept the BPP’s recommendation to grant Newton a reprieve last winter.
Although subsequent testing supposedly confirmed the ballistics match, the search for the second gun continued. And in June, Dow argued in Newton’s clemency petition, the truth finally began to leak out, and from the most unlikely place: the Harris Co. District Attorney’s Office. During a brief videotaped interview with a Dutch reporter, Assistant DA Roe Wilson inadvertently confirmed the existence of a second gun. “Police recovered a gun from the apartment that belonged to the husband,” Wilson acknowledged. “[It] had not been fired, it had not been involved in the offense, ” she continued. “It was simply a gun [Adrian] had there; so there is no second-gun theory.”
Wilson and her boss, DA Chuck Rosenthal, quickly retracted her admission. Wilson told the Houston Chronicle that she’d simply “misspoken,” and Rosenthal accused Dow of fabricating the idea of a second gun “out of whole cloth.” “I’m very clear,” Rosenthal told The New York Times. “One gun was recovered in the case.” On Aug. 24, the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed, dismissing Newton’s most recent appeal. “The evidence in this case was more than sufficient to establish [Newton’s] guilt,” Judge Cathy Cochran wrote. “The various details that [Newton] suggests her trial counsel should have investigated in greater detail do not detract … from the single crucial piece of evidence that concerns her: she disposed of the murder weapon immediately after the killing.”
Dow and his University of Houston law students persisted, and late last month may have succeeded. In August, Harris Co. investigators provided testimony that police may have recovered at least two identical .25-caliber Raven Arms pistols. In separate affidavits, two police investigators recall tracing firearms recovered in connection with the murders. Officer Frank Pratt told one of Dow’s students that he was assigned a gun found in the abandoned house, which he traced to a purchase by Newton’s boyfriend’s cousin at a local Montgomery Ward. He also discovered, he told student Frances Zeon, that the purchaser had also bought a “second, identical gun”; but he didn’t follow up on the second gun, because “he felt there was no need to do so.” Pratt said he’d written up a report on the gun – a report Newton’s attorneys have never seen.
However, Newton’s attorneys do have a police report written by Detective M. Parinello, who reported he had traced yet another firearm recovered in connection with the case to a purchase from Rebel Distributors in Humble, Texas, which he said also ended up with Newton’s boyfriend. “The question arises: what recovered firearm was … Pratt investigating?” asks the clemency petition. “Counsel does not have access to the Harris Co. Sheriff’s Department’s records in this case. A request made directly to that institution for all records in connection to its investigation of this offense was rejected.”
From all this conflicting yet incomplete gun evidence, it seems reasonable to surmise that there is no way to know which gun was in fact the murder weapon, or which gun was delivered for ballistics tests in 1987 or this year. Since the prosecution relied so heavily on a weapon that Frances Newton herself had delivered to them, the new evidence discovered by her attorneys completely undermines her conviction.
At press time, Harris Co. Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lt. John Martin was not able to reach Parinello or Pratt for comment but said that a captain who worked the Frances Newton case had said there was only one gun recovered during the investigation. Harris Co. DA Chuck Rosenthal reiterated that, “as far as I know” there was only one gun recovered in the case. However, he said that even if investigators had recovered multiple firearms, and even if each were the same brand and caliber, the fact remains that the weapon investigators recovered from the abandoned house, which was immediately “tagged” and “tested,” matched the bullets recovered from the victims. “Let’s say, for conjecture’s sake, that you ran down 50 or 100 guns, all associated with the case,” he said. “The fact [is] that only one fired the bullets and that we know where that gun came from.”
As in many Texas capital cases, a large part of the problem with Newton’s appeals is that her court-appointed trial attorney, Ron Mock, never actually investigated her case. If he had, perhaps he would’ve followed up the drug dealer lead or Freeze’s reported comments about a second gun. Newton and her parents implored the trial judge to allow her to change attorneys, and Mock admitted to the judge that he hadn’t talked to any prosecution witnesses, nor had he subpoenaed any defense witness. The judge granted the motion to remove Mock but he declined a continuance, leaving Newton little choice but to go to trial with Mock. “It was stunning,” she told me. “[Mock gets on the stand and] says, ‘I don’t know anything,’ and for the judge to just dismiss it … it was stunning.” (Mock has since been brought before the State Bar’s disciplinary board at least five times on various charges of professional misconduct, for which he has been fined and sometimes suspended; he is currently suspended from practicing law until late 2007.)
The Harris Co. prosecutors’ defense of the conviction has also worn thin, especially given Roe Wilson’s supposed “misstatement” about the second gun. To Newton’s mother, Jewel Nelms, Wilson’s admission is no mistake. “I’ve known all the time that there was a second gun,” she told Houston’s KPFT radio last month. “So I want to say again, to Roe Wilson, I thank you … very much for letting us know, indeed, that there’s somebody down there that knows about the second gun and was willing to talk about it – even though I know it wasn’t her intention to do it.”
Kimberly McCarthy was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of her elderly neighbor. Kimberly McCarthy would be executed by lethal injection on June 26, 2013 she was the 500th prisoner to be executed by the State of Texas by this method.
Kimberly McCarthy was born on May 11, 1961 in Greenville Texas. She was married for a short time and had one son. Kimberly McCarthy would work as a occupational therapist for a time until a crack addiction took over her life. McCarthy would spend time in prison for an assortment of charges including prostitution and theft
On July 21, 1997 Kimberly McCarthy would phone her elderly neighbor to ask to borrow some sugar. When McCarthy arrived at the home she would stab the victim multiple times, beat her with a candle holder and cut off a finger to steal a diamond ring. McCarthy would steal the victims car and a variety of objects from the home. McCarthy would be arrested the next day and charged with capital murder.
Kimberly McCarthy lawyers would put up a defense that their client was being set up and was not guilty of the brutal murder. However the jury felt differently and convicted her and sentenced her to death.
Kimberly McCarthy would be executed by lethal injection on June 26, 2013
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Kimberly McCarthy on Wednesday evening became the 500th prisoner executed in Texas since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated in the state, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
McCarthy was pronounced deadat 7:37 p.m. ET at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, said department spokesman John Hurt.
The 52-year-old former occupational therapist was convicted in 1997 of murdering her 71-year-old neighbor, Dorothy Booth, a retired college professor.
Booth was found beaten and stabbed to death, and one of her fingers was severed, indicating a ring was forcibly removed, the Department of Criminal Justice said.
Evidence later showed McCarthy had pawned the stolen diamond ring the day of the crime. When she was arrested, McCarthy was found with Booth’s credit cards and a large knife stained with her neighbor’s blood, the department said.
In her last statement, McCarthy thanked her supporters, including her ex-husband, attorney and spiritual adviser.
“Thank you everybody. This is not a loss, this is a win. You know where I am going. I am going home to be with Jesus. Keep the faith. I love y’all,” McCarthy said, according to Jason Clark, another department spokesman.
Outside the prison, nicknamed the “Walls Unit,” a small crowd of demonstrators gathered Wednesday afternoon to protest the execution. They held signs that read, “Don’t kill for me” and “End executions in Texas.”
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Monday denied McCarthy’s appeal of her sentence and declined on Tuesday to reconsider it, saying her claims should have been raised previously, CNN affiliate KPRC reported.
Texas has led the nation in the number of executions since 1976, but the number of states carrying out capital punishment continues to drop.
Last year, Texas executed more people than it sentenced to death for the eighth straight year.
Four states – Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Arizona – accounted for three quarters of all U.S. executions in 2012.
The most-prolific death penalty state in the US executed its 500th inmate on Wednesday as protesters gathered outside the penitentiary walls to rally against a grim landmark in America’s capital punishment history.
About 70 people waited outside the prison in central Huntsville, Texas, where Kimberly McCarthy was put to death by lethal injection. After the scheduled execution time of 6pm local time (1am Thursday BST), some chanted “murderers!” as a dozen guards stood behind yellow tape and blocked the road leading to the execution chamber.
Kimberly McCarthy, 52, was declared dead at 6.37pm. In her final statement, she said: “This is not a loss. This is a win. You know where I’m going. I’m going home to Jesus. I love you all … God is great,” Associated Press reported.
Prison officials administered a single dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate.
Typically about 10 people gather in Huntsville to protest against each execution. Peter Johnson, 68, stood holding a sign bearing the slogan “Execute justice not people”. He said he had travelled from Dallas, three hours away, and this was the fourth or fifth time he had come to express his disgust in front of the red-brick walls of the Huntsville unit.
“Not only is it a tragedy for this particular person, it’s a disgrace for our nation and our state,” he said. “I feel the way the death penalty is dispensed in the state of Texas is tied to the colour of the killer and the colour of the victim.”
Critics of the death penalty have long argued that it disproportionately affects poor people and ethnic minorities. Black people make up 12% of the state’s population, but nearly 40% of the 281 inmates on death row.
McCarthy’s lawyer, Maurie Levin, had filed a last-ditch appeal alleging that her client’s state-appointed legal representation at trial was inadequate and that the composition of the Dallas County jury was unfair because the prosecution used peremptory strikes to remove prospective non-white jurors, with the result that all but one of the 13-person jury was white.
But on Tuesday the Texas court of criminal appeals refused to hear the appeal for the second time in two days. McCarthy’s execution had already been stayed twice this year, once only hours before she was due to die.
Since it resumed capital punishment in 1982, Texas has executed more prisoners than the next six states combined. Virginia, the second-most prolific state, has put to death 110 people. With its 26 million people Texas is the second-largest state in the US by population.
Some outside the prison held posters declaring “Wanted – Serial Killer, Gov. Rick Perry.” Like his predecessor, George W. Bush, the Texas governor is a firm believer in capital punishment. In 2011 he said he lost no sleep over the possibility that his state had executed an innocent person.
His spokesman told the Guardian last year that Perry had introduced reforms allowing for greater use of DNA testing, imposing minimum qualifications for court-appointed defence lawyers and making it easier for prosecutors to seek life without parole for offenders. Perry has presided over 261 executions, more than any other governor in modern US history, but the rate of executions has declined from a high of 40 in 2000, Bush’s last year.
In 2012, Texas executed 15 prisoners. Kimberly McCarthy is the eighth inmate given a lethal injection in Texas this year. Another seven executions are scheduled between now and January, including two next month.
Kimberly McCarthy was a former care-home therapist and a cocaine addict. According to court records, she entered the home of her white neighbour, Dorothy Booth, on the pretext of wanting to borrow some sugar. McCarthy then stabbed the retired 71-year-old five times, beat her, cut off a finger to steal her diamond ring and fled with her purse. She was found guilty and sentenced to death in 2002, five years after the murder in a Dallas suburb.
Kimberly McCarthy is the first woman executed in the US since 2010 and only the 13th since capital punishment was reinstated in the US in 1976. The US has executed 1,338 people since then, the Death Penalty Information Center says.
Polls suggest most Americans still support capital punishment. McCarthy’s was the second US execution this week. Brian Davis was put to death for the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s mother in Oklahoma on Tuesday after Governor Mary Fallin rejected a recommendation from the state’s parole board that the sentence be reduced to life without parole, reports said.
Suzanne Basso was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of a mentally disabled man. Suzanne Basso would be executed by lethal injection on February 5, 2014
Suzanne Basso was born May 15, 1954 in New York State. Her maiden name was Suzanne Burns
Suzanne Basso was married in the early 1970’s to a former Marine who would later be arrested for molesting their daughter
Suzanne Basso would move and be romantically involved with a man named Carmen Basso. Suzanne who did not divorce her first husband would take his last name. Carmen would die in 1997 from natural causes.
Suzanne would meet Buddy Musso who was living in an assisted living home and the two would start a long distance relationship. Soon after Buddy would move to Houston to be with Basso.
Suzanne along with her son James O’Malley, Bernice Ahrens Miller and her children, Craig and Hope Ahrens, and Hope’s fiancé, Terence Singleton all lived in the residence when Buddy Musso moved in. Reports indicate from the moment he moved in he was treated like a slave and abused by the people in the home. Two weeks after his arrival Buddy Musso would be brutally tortured and murdered.
Suzanne Basso would be convicted and sentenced to death. As the alleged ringleader she received the most severe sentence. Suzanne Basso would be executed by lethal injection on February 5, 2014
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Suzanne Basso became the fourteenth woman to be executed in the US in the modern era after a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court failed on Wednesday.
The 59-year-old former seamstress was put to death by lethal injection at the Texas state penitentiary in Huntsville, near Houston.
She is the 510th person to be executed in Texas, the nation’s most-active death penalty state, since America restored the death penalty in 1976. Of those, 505 were men.
Basso was the first female inmate executed in the US since Kimberly McCarthy was put to death in Texas last June. Only four women have been executed nationwide since 2002 – three in Texas, which accounts for more than a third of the total number of prisoners executed in the US.
Basso declined to make a final statement and was pronounced dead at 6.26pm local time, eleven minutes after the lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered, Associated Press reported.
Basso’s lawyer, Winston Cochran, asked the Supreme Court to review Texas’s criteria for assessing the mental health of prisoners sentenced to death.
In earlier appeals to state and federal courts, Cochran argued that Basso was delusional and did not meet the standard of mental competency required for an execution to proceed.
However, last month a judge in Houston ruled that Basso was competent enough to be executed. Cochran also contended that she had not received a fair trial. He said that no mitigating evidence was presented, the testimony of a medical examiner was questionable and no testimony or evidence showed that she personally killed Musso or proves exactly how he died.
Originally from New York, Basso was found guilty of the 1998 murder of 59-year-old Louis “Buddy” Musso.
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, she lured the mentally-disabled man from New Jersey to Texas under the pretence that she would marry him. But she the ringleader of a group who tortured and killed him by kicking and beating him with belts, baseball bats and steel-toed boots. He was found by a road in a Houston suburb with extensive injuries.
Basso’s five co-defendants, including her son, were convicted of involvement in Musso’s killing but not sentenced to death. At the trial in 1999 it was suggested that Basso hoped to cash in on his life insurance payout.
Women account for about 10% of murder arrests but only represent 2.1% of death sentences imposed at trial and less than 1% of completed executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
There are now eight women on Texas’ death row, including Linda Carty, a British citizen born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts.
Lisa Coleman was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of a nine year old boy. Lisa Coleman was executed by lethal injection on September 17, 2014.
Lisa Coleman was born in 1975 in Texas her family life was horrid where she was abused by her uncle and sent to live in a foster home. Unfortunately the foster home was no better as she was sexually assault by her foster parents.
By the time she was in her teens Lisa had been stabbed by a cousin and given drugs and alcohol by family members. At the age of sixteen Coleman had given birth to a child and had been to prison twice for selling drugs and burglary.
Lisa partner Marcella Williams would give birth to Davontae in 1995 who was born with developmental disabilities. Marcella would lose custody of her children briefly when Child Protective Services believed they were being abused by Lisa Coleman. Somehow the children would later be returned to the home after Marcella agreed that Coleman would have no contact with the children.
In 2002 CPS were again notified that the children were being abused, however when CPS arrived at the home the children denied being abused. It should be noted at this time Lisa Coleman and Marcella Williams were hiding Davontae from authorities and stopped sending the child to school.
In 2004 Marcella Williams would call 911 and report that Davontae was not breathing. When the ambulance arrived at the home they would find the nine year old child who weighed less than 40 pounds. Lisa Coleman would tell authorities that Davontae had just stopped breathing however doctors would later report that this was not true and the child died hours before the 911 call was made. Doctors would also found a score of old injuries and evidence that Davontae had been bound at his wrists and ankles.
Lisa Coleman and Marcella Williams were arrested and charged with the murder of Davontae Williams. The official cause of death was listed as malnutrition. Marcella Williams took a plea deal and Lisa Coleman would go to trial where she was convicted and sentenced to death.
Lisa Coleman would be executed on September 17, 2014 by lethal injection
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Texas death row inmate Lisa Ann Coleman was executed Wednesday night, the sixth woman put to death since the death penalty was reinstated in Texas.
Coleman, 38, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2004 starvation death of her girlfriend’s son, Davontae Marcel Williams.
Before the lethal drug pentobarbital was injected into her inside the execution chamber at the state’s Huntsville Unit, Coleman expressed love for her family and thanked her lawyers.
“I just want to tell my family I love them, my son, I love him,” Coleman said, according to a statement released by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “God is good … I’m done.”
She died 12 minutes after the drug was administered. Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Robert Hurst said Coleman’s time of death was 6:24 p.m.
Coleman was the 517th person to be executed in the state since 1982, the year Texas reinstated the death penalty following a 1976 Supreme Court decision that allowed states to resume capital punishment. She is the ninth person executed in Texas this year.
She was living with her girlfriend, Marcella Williams, in an Arlington apartment complex when paramedics discovered the starved corpse of a 9-year-old boy on July 26, 2004. He had been beaten, bore 250 scars and weighed 35 pounds at the time of his death, about half the typical weight for a child his age.
At the time of his death, Davontae was suffering from pneumonia. His cause of death was malnutrition with pneumonia as a contributing factor, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Both Coleman and the boy’s mother were charged with capital murder. But Williams pleaded guilty in 2006 to avoid facing the death penalty at trial. Child Protective Services records showed Williams and her son had been the subject of at least six child abuse investigations.
Coleman’s attorney, John Stickels of Arlington, appealed her death sentence based on how his client was initially charged.
In Texas, there has to be an underlying felony or second crime committed for a defendant to be charged with capital murder. Before 2011, those underlying crimes were murder, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, obstruction or terroristic threat. But in 2011, lawmakers added the killing of a child under the age of 10 to those underlying crimes.
In the Davontae Williams case, prosecutors used kidnapping as the underlying crime. Prosecutors presented evidence that Davontae had been locked in a pantry and kept from leaving his own home.
But Stickels says there was no kidnapping, at least not according to Texas law. His appeal to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans based on that claim was rejected late Tuesday, and the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to intervene.
“It is wrong, it is child abuse, but it’s not kidnapping,” Stickels said. “I’m not saying she’s innocent and did not do something wrong. But it’s just not kidnapping.”
At Coleman’s 2006 trial, it was revealed that the two women bound Davontae’s wrists and sometimes locked him in a pantry. Stickels said that even though the law defines kidnapping as placing someone in an area with the intention of hiding them, it is not kidnapping if a parent places a child in a room to punish him.
“Lisa is absolutely innocent of capital murder,” Stickels insisted. “And if they execute her, they will be executing someone who is innocent of capital murder.”
Reports from those prior CPS investigations detailed how Davontae was found to be hungry. In 1999, he and his sister, Destinee, were placed into foster care after Davontae was found to have been beaten with an extension cord. Coleman denied beating him with a cord, and Williams told CPS that they had bound him with one. Davontae, born four months premature, had developmental disabilities, according to a clinical psychologist who examined the boy after he was placed in foster care.
The two children were eventually returned when Williams promised to stay away from Coleman.
In 2004, Davontae’s case was part of a state review of 1,103 child abuse cases in North Texas that was ordered by Gov. Rick Perry. The state’s Health and Human Services Commission Office of Inspector General found that CPS caseworkers failed 70 percent of the time to act quickly to protect a child in danger.
“It appears that CPS Region 3 [Dallas/Fort Worth] was performing at a minimum standard and often below standards,” Brian Flood, the commission’s inspector general at the time, said in his report to the governor. “When abuse or neglect was indicated in the file, only 30 percent of the time did CPS caseworkers implement the appropriate safety steps for the short term protection of the child.
Lisa Coleman was executed for the murder of a 9 year old boy
When Was Lisa Coleman Executed
Lisa Coleman was executed on September 17, 2014
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