Karla Faye Tucker
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Karla Faye Tucker Brown (November 18, 1959 - February 3, 1998) was a convicted murderer executed in Texas. Born in Houston, she was executed by lethal injection, and was pronounced dead at 6:45 p.m. She gained international attention both for being the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War and the first in the United States since 1984, and also because she had claimed to have become a born-again Christian.
On June 13, 1983, she and her boyfriend, Danny Garrett, and a friend, James Leibrant, decided to steal the motorcycle of Jerry Dean. Garrett killed Dean by repeatedly hitting him with a hammer when he recognized Tucker, who had lived with him and his wife. Tucker then grabbed a pickaxe and hit him in the back four or five times. They then saw someone hiding under some covers by a wall, Deborah Thornton, and Tucker hit her with the axe, injuring her. Tucker later testified that she left the room and came back in to see that Garrett had killed Thornton.
During her trial, a tape recorded by Garrett's brother had Tucker saying she got sexual thrills while pickaxing Dean, but she said it was just big talk to impress her friends. She was convicted of two counts of capital murder and sentenced to death. Garrett also received the death penalty, but died in prison of liver disease while still on death row in 1993.
Before she was executed, she claimed to have come to understand the Bible, and apologized for her previous crimes. Pat Robertson, a leader of the Christian Right, interceded on her behalf. However, then-Governor George W. Bush signed her death warrant. In a Talk Magazine article, Tucker Carlson wrote that during a conversation he had with Bush after the execution, Bush had done a mocking imitation of Tucker's pleas for clemency: "'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'Don't kill me.'"[1] (http://www.nationalreview.com/daily/nr080999.html) Bush denied that he had intended to make light of the issue.
Known usually as Karla Faye Tucker, she married Dana Lane Brown in prison in 1995.
External links
- Crime Library (http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/women/tucker/1.html) - Karla Faye Tucker: Texas' Controversial Murderess
- "Death in Texas" (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17670) by Sister Helen Prejean
- Commentary (http://www.nationalreview.com/09mar98/gimlet030998.html) by Florence King