quote:

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Originally posted by PHIL HALL:
So this is what it takes to get you to post.

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The same could be said for you, Agent 36.

I've been on before but had to re-enlist....lost my password. Glad to see GG has my back after a sniper shot from Big Phil.

ELIJAH PAGE EXECUTED
Death-row inmate Elijah Page showed no remorse or emotion as he was put to death by lethal injection Wednesday shortly after 10 p.m. CDT, witnesses said.

Page made no last statement. When asked by state penitentiary warden Doug Weber if he had any last words, Page responded with a calm but direct, "No."

This was the first execution in South Dakota in 60 years and the state's first by lethal injection. The last execution in the state was in April 1947, when George Sitts was executed in the electric chair for murdering a law-enforcement officer.

Killer executed in 1990 murder of 2 Harris County teens

By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press

HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS � Convicted murderer Lonnie Earl Johnson was executed this evening for the fatal shootings of two Harris County teenagers 17 years ago.

Johnson expressed love to a friend. ``It's been a joy and a blessing. Give everybody my regards. I love you and I'll see you in eternity,'' he said in a brief final statement. ``Father, take me home. I'm gone, baby. I'm ready to go.''

Johnson never looked at six relatives of the victims, including the mothers of Sean Fulk Schulz, 16, and his friend Leroy McCaffrey Jr., 17.

'Sadistic' murder still haunts Bay City nearly decade later
Kenneth Ray Parr is scheduled to die Wednesday for rape, killing

By PEGGY O'HARE
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Only the glow of the television lit the room where Suzie Malek dozed with her two children. As always, Malek had made sure to prop a dining room chair against the front door of the family's trailer home before retiring for the night. Huddled together in the same bed, she and her children slept soundly, along with the stray kitten they sometimes let into their home.

Then, terror struck.

The children awoke to their mother's screams and saw two strange men with bandanas covering their faces standing in the bedroom doorway. "Oh my God! Help me!" Malek cried.

The men, armed with a rifle, forced the family to the floor. They asked Malek for guns, jewelry and her purse. Malek told them she had no guns. She had no money, either. In desperation, she offered to write the intruders a check.

One of the men began raping Malek. Her children, ages 6 and 8, were lying face down on the floor next to her.

"Please don't while my kids are here," Malek begged. The intruders ignored her pleas. One pointed the gun at her 8-year-old daughter's back, warning he would shoot if Malek fought back.

"Boom!" he said. And laughed.

Malek squeezed her daughter's hand so hard it hurt.

The children heard two gunshots close together. Both shots struck Malek in the head, spattering her 6-year-old son's face and nightshirt with blood.

The tinkling music of Malek's open jewelry box filled the room as the men emptied its contents.

They left. Minutes later one of them reappeared, asking how to start the family's car. He made an ominous promise to return, then vanished, leaving the children, still clad in their pajamas, alone with their mother's body.

On Wednesday, one of those men, Kenneth Ray Parr, now 27, will be executed for his role in Malek's 1998 death.

And nearly 10 years later, the crime that put him on death row is still vividly remembered in the Matagorda County town of Bay City, a city of 18,000 people that records, on average, one or two homicides a year.

"It ranks right up there among the most brutal," said Bay City Police Detective Sgt. Tommy Lytle. "If you're a child, the only place you feel a bad guy can't get you is in your mama's bedroom. It was the children we felt such a deep, deep grievance for."

Parr, a school dropout with a juvenile record, had just turned 18 and was on parole from the Texas Youth Commission when he was arrested for Malek's slaying, along with his then-16-year-old brother, Michael Wayne Jimenez, who is serving a life sentence for the crime.

The brothers had been staying with friends at an apartment complex across the street from Malek's trailer and were arrested within hours of her death.


Jury foreman has no regrets

Parr has always maintained his innocence to authorities, but told his mother hours after the attack that he thought he had killed a woman. Malek's belongings were found in his girlfriend's apartment. And lab tests couldn't rule him out as the source of the DNA on Malek's body.
"I just thought he was a scumbag," said Barney Lowery, 64, of Sweeny, foreman of the Brazoria County jury that sentenced Parr to death after his trial was moved there because of publicity. "I don't regret, and I don't lose sleep over what we did."

Parr says he was the victim of a judicial system stacked against him. In a recent letter to the Chronicle, he shunned responsibility for Malek's death, alleging police and prosecutors influenced witnesses to make statements against him.

Parr's attorneys also argue Malek's children weren't able to positively identify him because the intruders' faces were covered. Jimenez wrote a letter years later claiming he committed the crime with another, unnamed man and insisting Parr was not involved � allegations the Attorney General's Office dismissed as baseless.


'I don't care about dying'

Nevertheless, Parr apparently has resigned himself to die after fighting Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials for years and earning a stack of disciplinary infractions in lockup � including one for attacking a female officer and throwing her down a flight of stairs.
"I don't care about dying one way or the other. All I care about is my brother and the people that it will affect," Parr wrote to the Chronicle.

He said he'd done "a lot of things bad in my life" and added that he'll die in peace.

But not peacefully. Prison officials did not allow an interview with him in person because he has repeatedly threatened to sexually assault female prison employees before he is executed. He is too great a security risk, said TDCJ spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.

Parr may have been destined for a life of crime. His mother and all of his brothers have been in trouble with the law. As a child, he floated in and out of foster homes and juvenile detention. Never employed and never licensed to drive, he lived on his own from the age of 12.

"He just didn't even have a chance," said Merain Whalon of Hungerford, a former foster mother of Parr's who raised him for two years and remembers him as a boy who was good at sports and stealing.


Mother feels guilt

Malek was 28. She was a headstrong, feisty single mother with close ties to law enforcement. She was the longtime girlfriend of a former Matagorda County sheriff's deputy, the stepdaughter of the sheriff's office patrol captain. Her mother, Charlotte Brown, is a sergeant in the sheriff's criminal investigations division.
There are no indications Malek knew her killers. Parr said DNA matching his was found on Malek's body because he was having a consensual sexual relationship with her.

It's a claim that Malek's family finds preposterous. Matagorda County District Attorney Steven Reis says it is "galling and insulting."

What is certain is that Malek was in the brothers' line of sight on that January day in 1998. She lived directly across from the apartments where they stayed. She had been outside, washing her car on the day of her death, her mother said.

It wasn't hard for the intruders to kick in the door of Malek's trailer home at the corner of Avenue J and Ross. Because the door did not lock properly, her mother testified, "I shall carry the guilt of her living there to my grave."

The sheer brutality that occurred once the brothers were inside still haunts many law officers who worked on the case.

"It was such a violent, sadistic and evil act committed on a mother in front of her two children," said Texas Rangers Capt. Randy Prince.

Parr apparently acted alone in the rape, since DNA tests excluded his brother. Who exactly fired the shots from a rusty pump-action rifle owned by Parr and marked with the letters "GCG" for the Gulf Coast Gangsters, will never be known for sure. Parr once claimed allegiance to the gang.

Based on comments Jimenez later made to a witness, jurors learned the brothers intended to shoot Malek's children as well, but the gun jammed.

Witnesses told police they had seen one or both of the brothers outside at the apartments about the time Malek was killed. Later that day, they found her TV hidden under a blanket at the apartment rented by Parr's girlfriend. The rifle and more of Malek's belongings were found in the apartment's air conditioning vent. Traces of Malek's blood were found inside the gun barrel.

Malek's purse also was found in a trash bin at the apartment complex.

"We just couldn't imagine that the jury wouldn't agree to execute this person," Reis said. It was his first death penalty case as district attorney.

Malek's daughter, Ashley Thompson, was 10 when she recalled at both trials the harrowing events of that night in excruciating detail.

"That was terrifying, to get up in front of somebody who killed your mother," said Thompson, now 18, a recent Tidehaven High School graduate who wants to be a nurse.

"I felt like he needed to know what he took from me," she said in an interview. "He took away so much."

In court, Parr did little to help himself. He laughed with his attorneys during breaks in his trial. He sent a letter from jail to his girlfriend threatening her to keep quiet. He wrote a rap song about killing Malek. It said: "They tryna get us for tha murder of this white bitch ... I'm out tha door. I'm on a mission to kill all my ... foes."

Jurors found it upsetting.

"There wasn't any reaction from him," said Terrie Hudzietz, 46, of Lake Jackson, another of the jurors. "It was like he wasn't even human."


Damning testimony

Parr's behavior in court was understated compared to his brother's. Jimenez � a teen with a history of self-mutilation and chewing through straitjackets � gleefully declared he'd shot Malek. He escaped the death penalty because he was a juvenile at the time of the crime.
It was Parr's mother who provided some of the most damning testimony against him. Mary Jimenez Colonge told police Parr "started to shake" when he came to her home hours after the slaying.

She testified he told her, "Mama, I did something real bad ... I think I shot a lady."

Colonge, 47, who still lives in Bay City, now says she isn't sure what her son actually said. But he severed their relationship after her testimony. They recently saw each other for the first time in many years after he invited her to visit him at the prison.

Malek's children will not attend Parr's execution in Huntsville. Malek's biological father, Mike Malek of Boling, and several relatives will. So will Brown.

"I fully expect him to use his last chance ... to say something very derogatory about my daughter," Brown said in an e-mail. "But I can take it, knowing that's the last thing he will ever say."

What would her daughter say?

"It's about damn time," Brown said.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, albeit by a smaller sword than you might imagine (the needle).

Texas inmate executed for rape-slaying
Home robbery a decade ago led to 20th execution this year.

By Michael Graczyk
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, August 16, 2007

HUNTSVILLE � A condemned prisoner whose threats toward corrections officers restricted his already limited movements on Texas death row was executed Wednesday evening for the rape and fatal shooting of a woman during a break-in at her home nearly 10 years ago.

In a brief final statement, a quiet Kenneth Parr expressed love to his family. He never looked at the relatives of his victim, including her parents. His mother and other relatives sobbed as they watched him die and didn't want to leave after Parr was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m.

Texas kills 400th person since executions resumed
Johnny Ray Conner convicted of killing clerk a decade ago.

By Michael Graczyk
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, August 23, 2007

HUNTSVILLE � Convicted killer Johnny Ray Conner was executed Wednesday evening for the slaying of a Houston convenience store clerk during a failed robbery 9� years ago.

The execution was the 400th in Texas, the state that executes the most inmates, since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976.

Texas resumed carrying out executions six years later.

Conner asked for forgiveness repeatedly and expressed love to his family and his victim's family, who watched him through windows in the death chamber. Before he began speaking, he asked the warden his name, for permission to speak longer than the usual two to three minutes allotted and to have his victim's daughter pointed out to him.

He specifically asked one of his victims' relatives to look at him, but she didn't and remained turned to the side with her hands clasped in prayer.

"This is destiny. This is life. This is something Allah wants me to do," he said in his lengthy statement.

"I want you to understand," he said. "I'm not mad at you. When I get to the gates of heaven, I'm going to be waiting for you. Please forgive me."

"What is happening to me is unjust, and the system is broken," Conner said.

quote:

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"What is happening to me is unjust, and the system is broken," Conner said.

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And how was it just for the convenience store clerk to die at a minimum wage job? Seems there never is much mention of the victims in these reports.

Aug. 28, 2007, 12:39AM
Inmate to die Tuesday for death of woman in Kilgore robbery

By MICHAEL GRACZYK Associated Press Writer
2007 The Associated Press

LIVINGSTON, Texas DaRoyce Mosley doesn't deny walking into a Kilgore bar intending to hold up the place with a partner but says he fled when his uncle fired a shot that crippled the woman bartender and wasn't responsible for the four other people who were gunned down execution-style.

"After the first shot, I ran," he said recently from Texas' death row. "I turned around and ran out."

Mosley, however, confessed to the slayings after he was picked up by police, and the confession he said he wrongly gave to officers after long intense questioning helped convince a jury in Gregg County in East Texas to convict him in the death of Patricia Colter, 54, and decide he should die.

"It was stupid, just silly," said Mosley, 32, set for execution Tuesday evening. "It's easy to look back now and realize the mistakes I made. That was mainly my downfall. You had that statement."

Aug. 28, 2007, 11:30PM
Former honors student executed for deadly Kilgore bar robbery

By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press

HUNTSVILLE, Texas � A former high school honors student was executed late Tuesday evening for the death of a woman who was one of four people gunned down in a holdup at an East Texas bar.

The lethal drugs were not administered to DaRoyce Mosley until the U.S. Supreme Court resolved a late appeal, about five hours after the scheduled time for the execution. He was executed about an hour before his death warrant would have expired.

In a brief final statement, Mosley said he appreciated the love and support he had received over the years.

"I will see you when you get here," he told witnesses, including his mother and sister. "Keep your heads up. To all the fellows on the row, the same thing. Keep your head up and continue to fight."

He expressed love again and as the lethal drugs began flowing, he remarked, "I can taste it." Nine minutes later, at 10:57 p.m. he was pronounced dead.

Man executed for 1994 robbery-murder

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, August 30, 2007

HUNTSVILLE � A man was executed Wednesday evening for the robbery-slaying of a San Antonio taxi driver 13 years ago.

John Joe Amador, who was on parole for his involvement in the fatal stabbing of his stepfather in California when he the taxi driver was killed, said in a brief statement from the gurney: "God, forgive me. God, forgive them for they know not what they do. After all these years, our people are still lost in hatred and anger. Give them peace, God, for people seeking revenge toward me."

Amador also expressed love to his wife and several friends who watched through a window.

Perry commutes sentences of man scheduled to die Thursday
By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press Writer
HUNTSVILLE, Texas � Gov. Rick Perry accepted a recommendation from the state parole board and said Thursday he would spare condemned prisoner Kenneth Foster from execution and commute his sentence to life.

Foster had been scheduled to die Thursday evening.

"After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster's sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment," Perry said in a statement.

"I am concerned about Texas law that allowed capital murder defendants to be tried simultaneously and it is an issue I think the legislature should examine."

The seven-member parole board had voted 6-1 to recommend the commutation.

...

Nico LaHood, whose brother was killed, said Wednesday he was frustrated that people were willing to believe only Foster's story, which he called "ridiculous and not true."

"I don't know what dynamics are going on that allow us to make the person who is the wrongdoer to become the victim in this case," LaHood said. His brother, he said, was being "lost in the whole thing."

[Wouldn't it be amazing if reporters, who of course are quite unbiased in these matters, would show the same interest in superlatives ("nation's busiest capital punishment state") and statistics (24 executions this year) when they list the names and stories of the victims who die each year at the hands of killers?

Execution Wednesday is first of 5 scheduled this month

By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press Writer
HUNTSVILLE, Texas � A drifter set to die this week for killing an Amarillo woman is the first of five convicted killers scheduled for lethal injection this month in the nation's busiest capital punishment state.

Tony Roach, 30, from Greenville, S.C., faces execution Wednesday for strangling 37-year-old Ronnie Dawn Hewitt after breaking in her apartment nine years ago. His punishment would bring to 24 the number of executions in Texas this year, equalling the total for all of last year.

Four men were executed last month, including two last week. A third set to die last week, Kenneth Foster, received a commutation from Gov. Rick Perry. Foster's supporters and death penalty opponents waged an intense campaign pointing out Foster was not the triggerman in the fatal shooting case in San Antonio that resulted in his death sentence. Perry's unusual commutation sent Foster to a life prison term.

No similar campaign has surfaced for Roach or the four other men headed to the death chamber in September.

Roach's lawyer, Joe Marr Wilson, said last-minute appeals weren't likely and he had no fodder for a commutation request.

"Commutation facts aren't really there," Wilson said. "It's a bad deal, but he's just kind of the middle of the road and kind of hard to do anything with."

According to the TDC web site on death row information there were 377 killers on death row as of August 28, 2007. It seems as if we are not "busy" enough having that backlog.

South Carolina parolee facing execution for Texas slaying
9/5/2007

Newsroom

A South Carolina drifter remains on the path to the Texas death chamber in Huntsville tonight for strangling, robbing and raping an Amarillo woman nine years ago.

Tony Roach is to die for the 1998 murder of Ronnie Dawn Hewitt at her Amarillo apartment just a few months after he was paroled from prison.

quote:

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Originally posted by JB:
[Wouldn't it be amazing if reporters, who of course are quite unbiased in these matters, would show the same interest in superlatives ("nation's busiest capital punishment state") and statistics (24 executions this year) when they list the names and stories of the victims who die each year at the hands of killers?

Execution Wednesday is first of 5 scheduled this month

By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press Writer
HUNTSVILLE, Texas - ...

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While I yield to no one in my criticism of today's media and its lackluster coverage of the criminal justice system, I've always found Michael Graczyk's articles to be well-researched. He's one of the few reporters who routinely takes the time to at least detail the inmate's crime(s) and identify the victim(s) by name. I think some local papers edit his AP article for space reasons and those important details end up on the cutting room floor, unfortunately.

Convicted child killer Daryl Holton dies in Tenn. electric chair

David Keith Holton

A Gulf War veteran was executed early Wednesday for murdering four children, three of them his own, after telling them they were going Christmas shopping.

Daryl Holton was put to death in the electric chair at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. He was pronounced dead at 1:25 CDT Wednesday morning.

He became the first Tennessee inmate to die by electrocution since 1960.

The 45-year-old Holton had confessed to shooting his three young sons and their half-sister execution-style in 1997 in Shelbyville. Instead of taking them shopping as promised, he took them to an auto repair garage and shot them.

Witnesses said he appeared almost sedated as the execution began. Asked if he had any final words, he said "Two words, I do" and nothing else.

Holton told police he killed the children because his ex-wife would not let him see them. He also said he intended to kill his ex-wife and himself, but instead decided to turn himself in.

His lawyer, David Raybin, said Holton is now free from the demons that haunted him.

Convicted killer in San Antonio triple slaying to die Thursday

Brian Chasnoff
Express-News Staff Writer

Staking out a Northwest Side apartment for nearly five hours one morning, Clifford Kimmel and another man hoarded some ominous supplies � a bottle of cleaning fluid, a syringe, some nylon rope and a hunting knife.

They would use them all. Three days later, police found inside a ransacked apartment the bodies of two women and a man so badly butchered that a judge later ruled photographs of their injuries too prejudicial for a jury to see, according to a prosecutor in the case.

Kimmel eventually confessed to his role in the 1999 slayings of Rachel White and Susan Halverstadt, both 22, and Brett Roe, 29. He pleaded guilty to capital murder, and a jury sentenced him to death four days later.

Kimmel, 32, is set to die Thursday evening. He would be the 25th Texas inmate executed this year. His appeals have been exhausted, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously this week not to commute his sentence to life.

"Nothing left to do," said Kimmel's attorney, Michael Gross.

The lawyer had argued to the board that Kimmel's co-defendant, Derrick Murphy, received a less severe penalty of three life sentences in the slayings. A jury chose not to sentence him to death after finding evidence of mitigating circumstances.

Murphy "had just an awful childhood," said U.S. District Judge Juanita Vasquez-Gardner, who prosecuted Kimmel in 2000. "Whereas Kimmel, his parents were actually real decent."

Kimmel's confession, detailed in court documents, was explicit.

He told police that he and Murphy decided one night to burglarize the apartment of White, an acquaintance. They waited until several people left before knocking on the door around 4 a.m. on April 9, 1999.

White answered the door, and Murphy asked her for a glass of water. As White turned around to get it, Murphy pulled out a revolver, walked inside and told everyone to get on the couch.

The invading duo made sure everyone's hands were bound with rope. Murphy then dragged White into a bathroom and demanded to know where she kept her money. White asked them why they were doing this.

"I told her everything was going to be all right," Kimmel said in the confession, "that we were just going to give everybody a sedative and take what we want and then we would leave."

The "sedative" was the cleaning fluid. White struggled but couldn't stop Kimmel from injecting the fluid into her arm. Murphy then smothered her with a pillow and stabbed her in the throat.

In a bedroom, Kimmel injected Roe with the fluid. Roe ran for the front door, but his attackers lunged at him. Kimmel plunged the knife into his chest. When Roe continued to struggle, Murphy took the knife and stabbed him repeatedly in the throat.

Kimmel told police he didn't see the slaying of Halverstadt. She also would die from multiple stab wounds.

In the bathroom, White still was alive. As Murphy and Kimmel carried her into a bedroom, she asked Kimmel once again, in a hoarse whisper � why?

"I don't know why," Kimmel told her. "I don't know what to tell you, because I don't know why."

Murphy then sat on White's stomach and stabbed her in the chest and throat.

Among other belongings, Murphy and Kimmel took from the apartment a stereo and a VCR, which they sold for $200. They used one of White's credit cards to buy beer and had a party in a motel room the next night, according to court records.

Murphy and Kimmel had been using methamphetamine, commonly known as speed, for days without sleeping when the murders occurred, Vasquez-Gardner said. Police arrested them more than a month later after tracing receipts from White's credit card.

Melissa White, Rachel White's sister, said she plans to attend Kimmel's execution but predicted his death will change little.

"I'll never go to (my sister's) wedding," she said, �or get to hold her hand during labor."

Convicted killer in San Antonio triple slaying executed
By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press Writer

HUNTSVILLE, Texas � Unlike the chaos at a San Antonio apartment eight years ago when he took part in the torture and fatal stabbings of three people, convicted killer Clifford Kimmel quietly went to his death.

Kimmel, 32, declined an offer from a warden to issue a final statement Thursday evening after he was strapped to the gurney in the Texas death chamber for lethal injection.

"No sir," he replied to the warden as his wife and parents watched through one window a few feet from him. A mother and three sisters of two of his victims were among those watching through another window in an adjacent room. People in both rooms cried.

Nine minutes later, Kimmel was pronounced dead, making him the 25th prisoner executed this year in the nation's most active death penalty state.

Kimmel had no 11th-hour appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court in April refused to review his case. This week, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously against his commutation request.

"There isn't anything left I can do courtwise," Kimmel's appeals lawyer, Michael Gross, said in frustration.