Spokesman was face of Texas prisons at height of executions
AUSTIN — Larry Fitzgerald, the straightspoken face of Texas’ prison system when it reigned as the nation’s busiest death chamber, died Monday after an extended illness. He was 79.
Fitzgerald, an Austin native and longtime Texas radio newsman before he joined the Texas Department of Criminal Justice at a time when it had tripled in size during the early 1990s, also worked as communications director for the State Bar of Texas from 1978 to 1991.
His tenure as spokesman for the prisons agency came at a time when the Texas corrections system gained international notoriety for its assembly line pace of justice for condemned criminals that drew celebrity protesters including Bianca Jagger, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and television personalities such as Geraldo Rivera.
He witnessed 219 executions during his tenure, and after his retirement in 2003 he became an expert witness for defense attorneys during the punishment phase in more than 30 capital murder cases.
“He was a consummate public relations professional who was always truthful and always worked for transparency about government,” said Larry Todd, who worked with Fitzgerald in the agency’s public information office. “He was a great guy.”
Broadcast career
Born Clyde Larry Fitzgerald in October 1937, the son of a government landman and a schoolteacher, Fitzgerald attended the University of Texas at Austin with eyes on becoming a broadcast journalist — a career that he launched, without ever graduating, at small radio stations in San Marcos, Taylor and Bryan.
At one job in Fort Worth, he followed Bob Schieffer, who later became a legendary newsman for CBS News, Fitzgerald once said. He also did news at stations in Cleburne, Dallas and Arlington.
In radio, he served in jobs ranging from disc jockey to news reporter to news director. Early in his career while working at an Austin TV station, Fitzgerald recalled that the station’s owner, Lyndon Baines Johnson, then a U.S. senator who would later become president, used to come around turning off the lights to save electricity.
Returning to Austin for the State Bar job, Fitzgerald worked in political campaigns for Democrats Bill Hobby, who was lieutenant governor, and for Ann Richards when she ran for governor.
During Richards’ tenure, Fitzgerald worked for a time as a location scout for the Texas Department of Commerce as part of the state’s initial efforts to expand the number of movies that were filmed in Texas.
Based in Huntsville
But the job that would make him a household name in Texas and beyond was for Republican Gov. George W. Bush, starting in January 1995 — a time when the state had expanded its prison system to more than 100 lockups as it ginned up the nation’s busiest death chamber.
Within months he was an on-air celebrity as the Texas system continually made headlines. Among them: the executions of Houston murderers Gary Graham and Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman in Texas since the Civil War to receive the ultimate sentence and the first since 1984 to be executed in America.
In addition to his wife of 57 years, Marianne, Fitzgerald is survived by a daughter, Kelly Anne Fitzgerald, and a son, Kevin Lane Fitzgerald, and daughter-in-law Lorraine. All live in Austin.
All Faiths Funeral Services in Austin is in charge of arrangements. No services had been announced as of Wednesday afternoon.