1 case tagged “first woman executed in Texas since 1863”
Convicted: Karla Faye Tucker
When Houston homicide detectives arrived at Jerry Lynn Dean's apartment in the predawn hours of June 13, 1983, they found a pickaxe still lodged in Deborah Thornton's chest. Both victims had been hacked to death in what investigators later described as one of the most savage double homicides they had encountered. The woman who swung that pickaxe was twenty-three years old and weighed barely over a hundred pounds. Her name was Karla Faye Tucker. Fourteen years later, she would become the first woman executed in Texas since 1863, and only the second woman executed in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment. By then, Pope John Paul II had pleaded for her life. So had Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, and the brother of one of her victims. Governor George W. Bush said no anyway. The story of Karla Faye Tucker is many things at once: a portrait of catastrophic childhood neglect, a chronicle of breathtaking violence, and one of the most polarizing death penalty cases in American history. It is a story about who we decide deserves to die, and whether a person can become someone genuinely new behind bars. It has no clean ending and no comfortable moral. But it begins, as these stories so often do, with a girl nobody saved in time.
