Killer Karla
Can a coldblooded killer really change?
For her final meal, Karla Faye Tucker requested a banana and a fresh peach, as well as a simple garden salad with ranch dressing.
It was 1998, and 38-year-old Karla had been on death row for 14 years.
The committed Christian prayed, while a crowd outside protested her imminent death.
Others, including the families of her victims, waited to celebrate her execution.
Many, including the Pope at the time, didn’t believe that Karla deserved to die, and yet she had brutally bludgeoned two people to death.
So, was Karla a victim, or a cold-blooded killer?
One undeniable fact is that Karla had a difficult start growing up in Houston, Texas.
She looked different from her two sisters and soon found out that her mum, Carolyn, had cheated on her dad, and she was the result.
After the breakdown of her marriage, Carolyn took Karla under her wing, but she was a bad influence.
Carolyn had a drug problem and made money through prostitution. A groupie, she would follow rock bands around and took Karla with her.
By 14, Karla was also on drugs. She’d dropped out of school and was selling her body.
After a short, failed marriage to a mechanic at 16, Karla started hanging out with bikers.
When her mum died, Karla took even more drugs and then she met Danny Garrett. Together they partied hard. And they soon turned to crime. They had a mutual acquaintance, Jerry Dean.
Karla and Jerry had argued in the past – Jerry had once brought one of his motorbikes into her house and had dripped oil over her carpet.
On June 13, 1983, Karla, then 23, and Danny, 37, decided to steal a motorcycle that Jerry was restoring at his home. So, at 3am that morning, Karla and Danny crept into Jerry’s home.
When Jerry woke up in his bedroom, Karla held him down and things escalated fast.
Danny grabbed a hammer that was laying nearby and whacked Jerry several times over the head, before leaving him to bleed to death.
As they started to steal bike parts, Karla went back into the bedroom where Jerry was on the bed making ‘gurgling’ sounds.
She would later say she wanted to ‘stop him making that noise’ and picked up a three-foot pick axe. She
hit him repeatedly. Then Danny came in and delivered the final blow to Jerry’s chest.
As they continued to load the motorcycle parts into Danny’s truck, Karla suddenly noticed a
woman cowering under the bed covers in Jerry’s bedroom.
That woman was Deborah Thornton, 35.
She had crashed at Jerry’s house after a row with her husband at a party.
Karla attacked her with the pick axe – embedding it in her heart and killing her.
She would later be recorded saying that she experienced intense orgasms every time she sank the pick axe into her victims’ bodies.
Whether she was bragging or not, it was agony for the victims’
families to hear.
Leaving the weapon in Deborah’s body, Danny and Karla stole Jerry’s car and fled.
They would both be arrested five weeks later and charged with double murder.
Behind bars, Karla became clean from drugs and started reading a bible in the prison library.
‘Before I knew it, I was in the middle of my cell floor on my knees,’ she would recall. ‘I was just asking God to forgive me.’
In 1983, Karla and Danny were
tried separately for their crimes, but they were both found guilty and both sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Suddenly, the case became headline news. A woman hadn’t been put to death in Texas for over 100 years and it seemed that Karla had now turned her life around.
She became a Christian and even married her prison minister Rev Dana Lane Brown.
While Danny died of liver disease in 1993, Karla continued to appeal her sentence.
She said it was her lawyers who had made her plead not guilty – but now she wasn’t denying her crimes, she just wanted to be a force of good.
Karla said drugs had turned her into a monster, but now she was reformed and even wardens said she was a model prisoner, even helping others to get back on the right path.
‘When you change from being a part of the problem to being part of the solution, allow somebody that,’ she insisted.
For 14 years, she gained a huge amount of support from the community and those in government, too. Even the Pope at the time. It raised many questions about the death penalty.
Right up to the day of execution, protestors fought to save her life.
So much so, that the loved ones of the victims grew angry that her crimes had been glossed over.
After all, Karla had brutally killed two people. Yes, she’d been on drugs, but it had been her choice to take them.
On her final day, February 3,
1998, she had her simple last meal and made a statement.
‘I would like to say to all of you – the Thornton family and Jerry Dean’s family – that I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘I am going to be face to face with Jesus now.’ Karla died from lethal injection. She was the first woman to be executed in Texas for 135 years.
While Karla’s supporters and her husband mourned her death, the husband of victim Deborah said
justice had been served.
He didn’t believe Karla’s words or remorse.
Karla’s story will continue to inspire fierce debate.
If a killer is truly sorry, is that enough for redemption?
Karla certainly thought her life deserved to be saved, but for her victims, they didn’t have a choice in the matter.
She noticed a cowering woman