Location

Defendant(s)

Date of Alleged Crime

Robert Carroll Coney was convicted of robbing a Safeway supermarket of $2,000.  He was sentenced to life imprisonment.  Police tortured Coney into confessing by crushing his fingers between the bars of his holding cell.  Judge David Wilson wrote that the former Angelina County sheriff, Leon Jones, and his deputies “were known for obtaining confessions by physical force.” One of his tactics, he wrote, “was to get a prisoner's fingers on either side of a jail cell bar and squeeze those fingers until a prisoner confessed.”  The lawyer who was called in to oversee Coney's predetermined guilty plea stated, “That sheriff was the most terrible sheriff we ever had.”  Coney was imprisoned for 42 years before his conviction was vacated in Aug. 2004.  Four of his fingers are still deformed.  (NY Times) (Google)

Delma Banks was convicted of murdering 16-year-old Richard Wayne Whitehead and sentenced to death.  The U.S. Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution 10 minutes before his scheduled execution in 2003.  In 2004, the same court overturned his death sentence because of prosecutorial misconduct.  According to Banks' attorney, “The state allowed its key witnesses to repeatedly lie to the court and jury, and urged the jury to trust without question all the perjured testimony.”  Texas has doggedly defended the conviction on the Kafkaesque procedural ground that Banks' lawyers discovered the hidden illegalities of the prosecution too late to raise them in court.  (TruthInJustice) (TIJ2) (ODR)  [11/05]

Michael Blair was sentenced to death in 1994 for the molestation and murder of 7-year-old Ashley Estell.  Ashley was abducted from a playground in Plano's Carpenter Park while her parents, nearby, watched her brother play in a soccer tournament.  No witnesses had seen Blair and Ashley together even though Blair reportedly looked like an unpleasant troll and would have stood out in the crowded upper-middle-class park.  According to a forensic physician, Ashley was killed several hours after her abduction and her body was kept at room temperature until nightfall when it was dumped.  Blair drove a hatchback and lived with two roommates, so it seemed unlikely he could have stored a body for several hours.

Blair's conviction was based on hair evidence.  Blair was a previously convicted sex offender, and the assumption that he murdered Ashley inspired legislation called “Ashley's Laws,” which require sex offenders to register with local law enforcement when they are released from prison and which require public notification when offenders move into a community.  In 2006, Collin County reopened the case, assigning it to its cold case squad.  Investigation identified another man, identified as Suspect 4, who could have committed the crime.  Suspect 4 died in the late 1990s.  After DNA tests of the hair evidence showed that it belonged to neither Blair nor the victim, his conviction was overturned in 2008.  The County is expected to drop charges against Blair.  (DMN) (FJDB)  [9/08]

Victor Larue Thomas was convicted of the rape of an employee at a Waxahachie Tiger Mart.  The victim identified Thomas as her assailant.  DNA tests exonerated Thomas in 2001.  (IP)  [7/05]

Bobby Ray Hopkins was convicted of the murders of Jennifer Weston, 19, and Sandy Marbut, 18.  He was sentenced to death.  The murders occurred at the victims' apartment at 601-B South First St. in Grandview, TX.  On the night of the murders the victims threw a party at which 30 to 35 people attended.

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L. C. “Cooper” Johnson and Bennie Young were convicted of the murders of W. H. Barker, his wife, Loula Barker, and a boy named Homer Turk, aged about 13.  The murders occurred at the Barker home on Corsicana Rd., seven miles southeast of Waco.  Turk had gone over to the Barkers to play dominoes. Dominoes were found on the table drawn and separated into hands, as though the parties had been engaged in playing the game. The body of Mr. Barker was found in the back yard near a woodpile, shot through the head. The body of Mrs. Barker was found in the house, and her head was cut to pieces by blows from an axe; Turk was also killed by blows inflicted with an axe.

Johnson and Young, who were described as “boys,” were arrested for these murders and confessed to them while in police custody.  In Mar. 1923, another man, Roy Mitchell, was convicted of murdering five people in five different proceedings, all in the same month.  In a sixth proceeding, Mitchell was convicted of murdering Loula Barker.  The convictions were due, at least in part, to coerced confessions.  The authorities expressed pride that they helped prevent a lynching.

Johnson died in prison a few days before Mitchell's hanging.  In 1934 the Texas governor pardoned Young after being informed by the trial judge and the prosecuting attorney that they did not believe Young was guilty.  (ISI) (FWH)  [5/08]

David Wayne Spence was convicted of the murder of Jill Montgomery and sentenced to death.  Montgomery, 17, along with Raylene Rice, 17, and Montgomery's boyfriend, Kenneth Franks, 18, were found murdered in Speegleville Park at Lake Waco.  Three other individuals, Gilbert Melendez, Tony Melendez, and Muneer Deeb were also convicted in connection to the murders.  Truman Simons, a night jailer who had unsupervised contact with inmates, largely developed the cases against all four.  Simons operated his own perjury factory in that he was able to get numerous inmates to testify to any story he wanted them to.  His only problem was coming up with believable stories that fit the facts.

Spence was executed on April 3, 1997.  Marvin Horton, the police lieutenant who supervised the case, said, “I do not think David Spence committed this crime.”  Ramon Salinas, the homicide detective on the case, added, “My opinion is that David Spence was innocent.  Nothing from the investigation ever led us to any evidence that he was involved.”  One of the inmates who testified at Spence's trial, Robert Snelson, said, “We all fabricated our accounts of Spence confessing in order to try to get a break from the state on our cases.”  An “award-winning” pro-prosecution book, Careless Whispers by Dallas journalist Carlton Stowers was written about the murders.  It reportedly lionizes Simons who “brought Spence to justice.”  (DP News) (JD08 in Capital Punishment article) [1/07]

Muneer Deeb, a convenience store owner, had allegedly hired three men to kill a female employee on whom he had a $20,000 accident policy.  However, Deeb had such policies on all his employees as a hedge against worker compensation claims.  The prosecution alleged that the three men then mistakenly killed a woman who was not an employee.  The murdered woman did not seem to be the victim of a contractual killing as she was raped and tortured, as were two of her friends.  None of his three alleged co-conspirators testified against Deeb even though they were charged with capital murder like Deeb and were in a position to negotiate for a reduced sentence.  One trial witness testified that Deeb had acknowledged he would receive insurance money if one of his employees ever was murdered.  Deeb was convicted and sentenced to death.

Deeb's conviction was overturned because the judge allowed a jailhouse informant to give hearsay testimony about statements allegedly made by one of Deeb's alleged co-conspirators.  This informant described a murder for hire scheme in detail.  Deeb was acquitted at retrial in 1993.  (CWC)

Earl Shannon and H. A. Clements were convicted of the robbery of a Currie grocery store.  Two armed men had robbed the store, which was owned by two partners, Phipps and English.  English had been present during the robbery, but Phipps had not.  English identified one of the masked and hatted robbers as Clements.  Clements ran a shop about two miles away with his partner Shannon.  English later identified the robbers' lookout man as Shannon after Phipps found circumstantial evidence that implicated Shannon.

Just before Shannon's trial, Phipps told Shannon's attorney that English could not identify any of the persons who robbed the store except Clements.  The trial judge would not permit Shannon's attorney to testify to Phipps's statement.  Shannon's conviction was later overturned for that reason.  He was never retried.

While in prison, Clements met another inmate, Blackie Davis, who confessed to the grocery store robbery and signed a deposition to that effect.  The Governor was unconvinced by Davis's admission, and refused to pardon Clements.  However, a sixty-day furlough was granted, to enable Clements to locate the accomplices implicated by Davis's confession.  On his furlough, Clements found one of the accomplices.  Backed by an application endorsed by the district judge, the prosecutor, and all the jurors, the Texas Governor pardoned Clements in May 1929.  (CTI)  [11/07]

Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted of murdering his three daughters by setting his house on fire.  Under police interrogation, Willingham said that his wife, Stacy, had left the house around 9 a.m.  After she got out of the driveway, he heard his one-year-old twin daughters cry, so he got up and gave them a bottle.  The children’s room had a safety gate across the doorway which his two-year-old daughter, Amber, could climb over but not the twins.  He and Stacy often let the twins nap on the floor after they drank their bottles.  Since Amber was still in bed, he went back into his room to sleep.  Willingham's house was warmed by three space heaters, one of which was in the children's bedroom.  This heater had an internal flame.  Amber had been taught not to play with the heater though she reportedly got “whuppings every once in a while for messing with it.”

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Smith County, TX

Kerry Max Cook

June 10, 1977 (Tyler)

Kerry Max Cook was sentenced to death for the murder of Linda Jo Edwards, a 21-year-old secretary.  Edwards was a college student who was having an affair with her married professor.  Cook was arrested in a club where he worked as a bartender.  The club was chiefly known as a gay bar, and police theorized that Cook was a degenerate homosexual who hated women.

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Richard Wayne Jones was convicted of the abduction and murder of Tammy Livingston.  Around 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 19, 1986 witnesses Ruthie Amato and her two daughters watched as Livingston was abducted from a Michael's store parking lot in Hurst, Texas.  Between 9:20 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. the same night, a witness named Robert Speights heard screams coming from a field at 4600 Randol Mill Road in Fort Worth.  At 11:20 p.m. a fire was reported in the field.  When police responded they found Livingston's body.  She had been stabbed 19 times.

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Odell Barnes, Jr., was convicted of the murder of Helen Bass, his friend and lover.  He was sentenced to death.  Bass, 42, was beaten and stabbed with a kitchen knife, then killed with a gunshot to the head.  While driving by in a car, witness Robert Brooks claimed to have seen Barnes, wearing coveralls, hurdle a fence in Bass's backyard at 10:30 p.m.  Brooks allegedly witnessed this event under bad lighting conditions from 40 yards away while wearing tinted glasses.  He first made this statement before it was known that Bass did not arrive home from work until 11:30 p.m.  In addition, Brooks barely knew Barnes.  According to the prosecution theory, Barnes kicked in her back door at 10:30 p.m. and waited an hour for her to return home.  Such a theory seems dubious given Barnes's relationship with Bass and the fact that Barnes's mother was picking up Bass from work at 11:15 p.m.  A shoe print found on the back door and mentioned in a police report, was wiped clean.  Given Barnes's 14EEE shoe size, it easily could have been used to identify or exonerate him.

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