Time finally ran out on a master manipulator

Even the most ardent death penalty opponents surely found their convictions tested in the case of John Battaglia. He was a monster.

He wasn’t a pitiful monster. He wasn’t insane or abused, and he wasn’t a victim of circumstances or the product of a tragic past. He was a self-made monster: intelligent, educated, well-spoken, and supremely manipulative.

Many people may sincerely regret that on Thursday, the State of Texas once again took a life. But few will regret that it was this man in particular.

Battaglia fooled people. He charmed two women into marrying him, and both of them found out too late that he was a brutal, misogynistic narcissist.

When his first wife tried to leave him, he threatened: “I’ll cut you up and I’ll scar that face.” When she refused to drop domestic violence charges against him, he hunted her down and beat her unconscious, breaking her nose and jaw.

After his second wife, Mary Jean Pearle, sought a separation, he beat her savagely on Christmas Day, pounding her head and tearing out chunks of her hair. He received probation for that assault.

He fooled people into believing he was a devoted father. He ferried his two little girls, Liberty and Faith, to soccer games and pinned up their crayon drawings in his office—until the night he shot them both dead as the ultimate act of cruelty against their mother.

Threatened with jail for violating his probation in the Christmas attack, Battaglia was supposed to be taking his girls to dinner on the evening of May 2, 2001. Instead, he took them to his Deep Ellum apartment, and had 9-year-old Faith dial her mother up on the phone.

And while Mary Jean Pearle was on the line, he shot them both dead. Faith, and then 6-year-old Liberty. Then he yelled “Merry (expletive) Christmas!” over the line to his shrieking ex-wife. Then he went out and got two new tattoos.

After his capital murder conviction, he posed for photos and made intelligent conversation, yet he told journalists he was too mentally ill to know what happened to his daughters: “I don’t feel like I killed them,” he told The Dallas Morning News in a death row interview. “I am a little bit in the blank about what happened.”

He dodged execution twice, claiming mental incompetence. And some psychiatrists who examined him agreed. A 78-page majority opinion handed down last September by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals paints a picture of a man who shrewdly displayed signs of psychiatric illness during forensic interviews—after reading up on relevant case law he checked out of the prison library.

Battaglia convinced some court-appointed psychiatrists that he was genuinely mentally ill, that his reasoning was clouded by murky conspiracy theories involving his ex-wives, the attorneys and judges in his case, and mysterious “demons.”

Yet, the appeals court noted, during all his years in prison, he was never referred for psychiatric evaluation by detention authorities. The crazy, it seemed, only came over him when he needed it.

“There is support in the record that Battaglia is malingering,” the court said, citing the original trial court’s finding that “(H)e is a highly intelligent person who has had the time and motivation to begin creating a complex, paranoid story line that could have been practiced over the years”— and that described him as “vengeful, manipulative, cunning and deceitful.”

Liberty and Faith should have been young women now, with grown-up lives of their own. They should have had graduations, adventures, the excitement that comes with college acceptance or a job offer.

On Thursday, the clock finally ran out on their killer. You can be sorry for his execution, but it’s impossible to be sorry for him.