2 cases tagged “lethal injection”
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.
Convicted: Aileen Carol Wuornos (née Pittman)
Her last words from the execution chamber stopped the witnesses cold. "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back like Independence Day, with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I'll be back." Moments later, at 9:47 a.m. on October 9, 2002, Aileen Carol Wuornos was pronounced dead. She had declined her final meal. She accepted only a cup of coffee. Between November 1989 and November 1990, Wuornos shot and killed seven men along the highways of Florida, each of them a middle-aged motorist who had stopped for a woman working the roads. She took their money, their cars, and their lives. She was a highway prostitute operating under multiple aliases, a drifter with a .22 and a history that read less like a criminal file and more like an indictment of everyone who had ever failed her. She was raised by alcoholic grandparents after her mother abandoned her at age four. Her father, whom she never met, was serving a life sentence for raping a seven-year-old child when he hanged himself in his prison cell. She was pregnant and living on the streets by fourteen. She told police, and later the courts, that every man she killed had attacked her first. The jury in her first trial deliberated for less than two hours before convicting her. She received six death sentences in total. The tabloids called her America's first female serial killer. The more precise truth: she was the first woman formally profiled by the FBI as a serial killer. The distinction hardly seemed to matter by the end. What mattered was that seven men were dead, and Aileen Wuornos had spent a lifetime arriving at that outcome.
