Sweet Woman of God
In 1998, Atlanta author Mark Beaver’s father asked him to write to the governor of Texas and call on him to stay the execution Karla Faye Tucker—a question that left him to ponder the tug of war between mercy and justice.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is excerpted and adapted from The Ballad of Karla Faye Tucker, Mark Beaver’s biography of the Texas murderer who famously found redemption in prison. In June, Beaver’s book won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Biography.
—Chuck Reece
I was closing in fast on thirty, and mired in a prolonged spell of what the Baptist folk I grew up among would call backsliding, when my father asked me to write a letter on his behalf to George W. Bush. It was early ’98, and Bush was then governor of Texas. A woman named Karla Faye Tucker had been sentenced to die in his state. Unless Bush granted clemency, Tucker would be the first female on Texas’s death row to be executed since the Civil War—and the first anywhere in the U.S. in more than a decade.
A new millennium was drawing nigh, or maybe the End Times, and all the gruesome details of Tucker’s crime were making national news. In a drug-induced haze in June 1983, when Tucker was twenty-three years old, she and her boyfriend broke into a Houston apartment at around three in the morning and slaughtered two people—one a sworn enemy, the other an utter stranger. By the time the pair fled the scene, they had punctured Jerry Lynn Dean just shy of thirty times with a pick ax, and embedded the weapon seven inches deep in Deborah Thornton’s chest. As if these grim facts weren’t sensational enough, many of the news reports specified that the pick ax pierced Thornton’s heart.
Though Dad was a veteran of the Korean War, a law-and-order Republican, and typically a staunch advocate of eye-for-an-eye retribution, he nevertheless wanted to see Karla Faye Tucker live. He was a Southern Baptist deacon, too, and Tucker had become a poster child of sorts within the evangelical community. Her face and story were cycling through the Christian media, including Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, where Dad first heard her personal testimony of how she found Jesus on death row. Tucker told him and the rest of Robertson’s washed-in-the-blood viewers she stole a Bible from the prison ministry program, and commenced skimming through the pages in her cell. “I didn’t know what I was reading,” she claimed in a gentle Texas drawl that sounded completely at odds with the brutality of her crime. “Before I knew it, I was in the middle of my cell floor on my knees. I was just asking God to forgive me.”
At the time Tucker was sentenced to die, your typical evangelical like my father opposed abortion and euthanasia but supported capital punishment. To them, the moral gymnastics required to arrive at such a conclusion weren’t all that complicated. The difference, in their view, was clear: God gives life and only God can take it away—unless the murderer forfeits her own right to life by taking away another’s. They invited you to consider Genesis 9:6: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.”
All the wrestling America had been doing over executions for decades seemed only to clear the way for the arrival of this woman who stood just five foot, three inches tall, sported a splotchy birthmark that looked as though she’d spilled chocolate milk on her forearm, and called herself “a really huggy, touchy-feely person.” In 1972, in a group of cases called Furman vs. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to strike down the death penalty, ruling it was “so wantonly and freakishly imposed” that it constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” and violated the Eighth Amendment. Newspaper headlines across the country proclaimed some version of “Capital Punishment Is Dead,” and death row lost over 600 inmates overnight. But the National Association of Evangelicals rebelled, rendering this official statement regarding the topic: “If no crime is considered serious enough to warrant capital punishment, then the gravity of the most atrocious crime is diminished accordingly. It follows then that the attitude of criminals will be affected. From the biblical perspective, if capital punishment is eliminated, the value of human life is reduced and the respect for life is correspondingly eroded.” As a result, when the death penalty was reinstated for the January 1977 execution of Gary Gilmore by a firing squad in Utah, evangelicals believed justice had been restored. The fact that Gilmore himself pleaded for death made it seem to them that the scales of the spiritual universe were returning to balance. Man’s law and God’s were again aligning.
But now, two decades after Utah obliged Gilmore’s choice between death by noose or by bullet—“I’d prefer to be shot,” he said—here came Karla Faye Tucker. She was no ordinary candidate for the needle. Evangelicals saw her as a prime example of what God can do for even the most depraved and unregenerate heart. Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell took to the media to declare that, though he’d always been an advocate for the death penalty, Tucker had convinced him to think otherwise about her. “I just knew instantly,” he said, “that girl had been touched by the Lord and ought to be spared.”
Texas was often considered the buckle of the Bible Belt, and you might expect them to side with these vocal Christian leaders. But the populace was still holding firm in its commitment to capital punishment. A year earlier, in 1997, the number of executions nationwide easily had surpassed the figure for any year since reinstatement of the penalty, and the Lone Star state led the charge. Texas executed thirty-seven people that year, equal to all other states combined. Polls showed that three-quarters of Texans supported the death penalty. The vast majority of them identified as Protestant Christians.
Karla Faye Tucker...was creating a showdown within the American evangelical community between supporters of a longstanding moral and political position in favor of the death penalty and their brethren who were lobbying for this rare exception.
Karla Faye Tucker, then, was creating a showdown within the American evangelical community between supporters of a longstanding moral and political position and their brethren who were lobbying for this rare exception. Add to the drama George W. Bush himself. A devout Methodist with a come-to-Jesus story of his own, the governor stood at the fulcrum of the divide. Like evangelicals in general, he too drew a stark contrast between abortion and capital punishment. He believed executions could serve as a deterrent and ultimately prevent violence, whereas abortion fails to protect innocent life. In his 1999 biography A Charge to Keep, that’s the way Bush distinguished between abortion and the death penalty: “it’s the difference between innocence and guilt,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, as her execution date drew closer, Tucker was leading Bible studies for other inmates. She decorated the prison’s day room with crocheted handiwork. She maintained a perfect disciplinary record behind bars. By all accounts, her life had been genuinely transformed by what she called the saving grace of Jesus Christ. In a televised interview from that same prison day room shortly before her scheduled execution, her cheery decor hung in the background. Her face aglow, Tucker said, “I’m not afraid of dying. I know where I’m going. I know Jesus has already gone to prepare a place for me. I know that if I have to go February 3 that he’s gonna come and he’s gonna escort me personally. I believe that.”
It was this woman that Dad wanted to see live—not the one who, during her trial fourteen years ago back in ’84, confessed she had bragged about experiencing orgasmic pleasure with every swing of her pick ax.
Which is where I came in.
I suspect my father had two reasons for asking me to write a letter to George W. Bush. The first likely had to do with the precarious state of my soul. I’d become a Christmas and Easter Christian at best—one who darkened the doors of the church only under absolute obligation. Worse, I’d become versed in books other than the Bible, many of which didn’t necessarily jibe with the notion that scripture came straight from the tongue of God and served as His inerrant Word and the final say on all matters of debate.
But Dad’s second reason for asking me to compose a letter to Bush was more practical. I’d been telling the world I was a writer. I was finishing up the prolonged adolescence of my twenties and, much to my father’s chagrin, in August I would be quitting a scrap heap of part-time jobs and delaying full adulthood yet again by vacating my apartment in the Atlanta suburbs and moving to North Carolina. There, I’d be entering an MFA program with a stockpile of pipe dreams, chief among them writing the classic Great American Novel. To this point, Dad had been indulging my literary ambitions with a kind of bewildered amusement—it was an unfortunate phase that would run its course as soon as I, to use his word, “matured.” The sooner the better, to be sure.
My charge was clear: Dad wanted me to use whatever ‘writerly’ talents I possessed to persuade Governor Bush to spare this woman that the twenty-four-hour news cycle was labeling “The Pick Ax Murderess.”
But Karla Faye Tucker’s predicament afforded Dad an opportunity. Though he was by nature a reticent man and generally suspicious of words unless they were God’s—divinely inspired and recorded in the Bible—he recognized I was a convenient resource, despite my backsliding ways. Owner of a high school diploma so tentative it practically seemed on loan, Dad understood his own verbal shortcomings. With a fellow Christian’s life hanging in the balance, he simply needed someone who might be trusted to make his subjects and verbs agree. If I was a writer, well, maybe I could string together a few lines that might make a difference in this fallen world. And maybe, too, this whole experience could bring me back home to the faith of my youth.
So, my charge was clear: Dad wanted me to use whatever ‘writerly’ talents I possessed to persuade Governor Bush to spare this woman that the twenty-four-hour news cycle was labeling “The Pick Ax Murderess.” He wanted me to save Karla Faye Tucker’s life with my words.
The Letter
Even as her date of execution drew nearer, Karla remained optimistic. In a televised interview with Larry King on CNN on January 14, 1998, about three weeks before she was set to die, she confessed to feeling “a little tired sometimes but not down.” As her case drew more and more national attention, she felt like she was playing a small but vital role in an event so spiritually revolutionary that it could leave thousands of redeemed souls in its wake. “It gets a little more exciting every day,” she said. “Just to see how God is unfolding everything. Every day something new comes up and it’s exciting to be part of it because there’s a lot going on, and it’s going to affect a lot of people. And it’s a blessing to be part of it, and it’s exciting to know that God has a plan for this.”
With such broad shifts taking place in the zeitgeist, Karla was hesitant to talk with King about the details of her crime, often offering only curt summaries (“bad choices, drugs”) or repeating King’s words (“bad boyfriend”). When he specifically asked her to recount what happened on “that terrible day,” Karla initially avoided the conversation altogether. “The details of what happened that night,” she said, “I don’t share. I mean, that’s the worst night of my life, and…with how I feel now, I don’t relive that night.”
But knowing his viewers’ craving for gruesome specifics, King persisted. “For the facts, for the benefit of the audience…two people were murdered that night…by you and your boyfriend?”
Karla acknowledged she was “very excited about doing different crazy, violent things,” but quickly she sidestepped King’s queries and soon was talking about Parole Pals, those dolls she and her fellow female inmates on death row made for sale.
As the interview came to a close, King brought the conversation around to what folks could do to support Karla. “If people want to write you, they can write you, right?”
Karla said yes.
“Mountain View Unit, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Gatesville, Texas. And can average citizens, ordinary citizens, write to the governor?”
Karla told him they could.
“I guess they can and to the parole board, right? Supporting you or not supporting you?
“Yes,” Karla said.
“It would be interesting to hear their opinion.”
“Uh-huh.”
So when my father asked me to write to Bush on his behalf, I did some homework: I read up on the murders and glimpsed TV footage of Karla. I got sufficiently disturbed by the heinous acts she and Danny Garrett committed in that Houston apartment and cringed at the details. My stomach soured at the mere contemplation of what Deborah Thornton must have heard as she cowered under the bed sheet. The thud of the hammer against Jerry Lynn Dean’s head. The gurgling. The caving flesh and splitting bone when the pick ax fell. It seemed worse than any nightmare my subconscious could have conjured. And then there was the fear that must have shot through Deborah Thornton when the sheet came off her head and she bore witness to the visuals. And what about her two children, who were now grown adults—saddled with a lifetime of loss?
But there was no question I’d write this letter to Bush. I viewed it as a personal challenge—as though Dad were tacitly telling me, Okay, you’ve been calling yourself a writer for years now, I’ve got an assignment for you. Let’s see you write something that makes a difference. “You put down the words,” he told me, “and I’ll sign my name.”
At the time Dad made this request, he was seventy years old. He was on the verge of retiring from the post office after thirty-eight years of service. What none of us knew was that right now a cancer had developed in his prostate. If we had known, he could have been getting treatment to contain it. But we didn’t know, so sometime soon, maybe in the next few months, the cancer spread, and by the time Dad learned he had it, it was already in his lymph nodes.
The letter would be easy to write. Though I had cast my first ever vote for Bush’s father in 1988, over the last few years I had adopted a series of beliefs that caused Dad to characterize me as a liberal, which ranked even lower than novelist in his taxonomy. I had vague beliefs and untested ideals, which occasionally triggered enough personal outrage to spike my blood pressure before subsiding into general malaise and lingering cynicism. Among my present dubious notions was the conviction that capital punishment was wrong. I wasn’t what anybody would call political about it—I didn’t participate in marches or sit-ins or refuse to pay my taxes until the death penalty was overturned. I hadn’t been mobilized, in any discernible way, to action.
If there was a single event that contributed more than anything else to my opposition to the death penalty, it was probably seeing the movie Dead Man Walking and reading Helen Prejean’s book upon which it was based. Susan Sarandon’s portrayal of Prejean so flummoxed me that I felt directly confronted by the sheer authenticity of the character’s Christianity. I felt personally indicted by her brand of faith and how feeble and convenient mine felt by comparison. I suppose film critic Roger Ebert captures my response in his review: “It is so rare to find a movie character who truly does try to live according to the teachings of Jesus…that it’s a little disorienting: [Sarandon’s] character will behave according to what she thinks is right, not according to the needs of a plot, the requirements of a formula, or the pieties of those for whom religion, good grooming, polite manners and prosperity are all more or less the same thing.”
I told Bush I believed Karla was remorseful. Knowing that he, like my father, was an evangelical Christian, I reminded him of our moral obligation to forgive. I said I believed Karla when she claimed God had already forgiven her.
But what my letter came down to, really, had little to do with politics or religious faith. Simply put, my letter would result from a desire ancient in its impulse: I wanted to make my old man proud. I wanted to show him that writing wasn’t just a hobby or a pastime or diversion from the important matters at hand. My words could make a concrete, verifiable difference in the world.
During a visit to my parents’ house, I sequestered myself in my old bedroom and composed the handwritten letter on a couple sheets of college-ruled notebook paper. For a feverish hour, I labored over two or three paragraphs. I told Bush I believed Karla was remorseful. Knowing that he, like my father, was an evangelical Christian, I reminded him of our moral obligation to forgive. I said I believed Karla when she claimed God had already forgiven her. By the time I finished the letter, I had convinced myself I’d made a pretty compelling argument, and felt invested in the outcome.
I carried it with pomp and circumstance into the den where Dad was watching TV. He turned down the volume and listened attentively as I read it aloud to him. As I reached the end, Dad fell quiet for a few moments. “That’s a real nice job you did,” he finally said. He nodded appreciatively. Then: “Add one more thing. Write ‘P.S. Jesus loves Karla Faye Tucker.’“ When I put this final addendum at the bottom of the page, I handed my letter over. Dad scrawled Governor Bush’s address on an envelope and tucked the papers inside. He fastened a stamp. He said he would carry it with him to work at the post office tomorrow morning, and say a prayer over it when he dropped it in the bucket of outgoing mail.
I Will Wait for You
On the courthouse square in Huntsville, between Rogers Shoe Store and Ernst Jewelers, the Texas Prison Museum maintained a display case full of contraband weapons. There was a knife concealed in a shower sandal; memorabilia from John Wesley Hardin and Bonnie and Clyde; and a replica execution chamber featuring Old Sparky, the electric chair in whose lap 361 prisoners died between 1924 and 1964. This macabre tourism industry is what you get when your town contains the state’s death house. The economy depends on the prison system, which employs over 7,000 people. “If Texas felons suddenly reformed or went elsewhere to rob banks or shoot their wives,” claims Virginia Stem Owens, “the Walmart superstore out by the Interstate would have to shut its automatic doors.”
According to Owens, a writer with Christianity Today who hails from Huntsville, the town had been anticipating Karla Faye Tucker’s execution with an excitement bordering on delirium. “A week before her sentence was scheduled to be carried out,” Owens wrote, “camera crews, international news teams, Amnesty International representatives, and victims’-rights advocates crowded our town to chronicle the event. Every motel room was booked, the town’s restaurants packed, the Enterprise car rental office overwhelmed. Even the stylist who did Bianca Jagger’s hair for the occasion got interviewed by the press.”
Despite the circus atmosphere, however, there was concern among the townsfolk over how Huntsville would be portrayed nationwide. Owens continued, “Everyone knew that rowdy fraternity boys, drinking beer and waving Rebel flags, would treat the execution like a human fox hunt. Yet even diehard death-penalty advocates shuddered at the bad impression of our town these unseemly shenanigans would make. We expected that the world’s media, camped on our small doorstep, would portray Huntsvillians as uniformly sanctioning and collectively responsible for killing this repentant woman.”
On Monday, February 2, Karla was flown from her prison in Gatesville to Huntsville, 80 miles north of Houston, where state executions are conducted. That night, her final one before her scheduled execution, she got little sleep. She thought much, no doubt, about her savior’s final hours. She had told Larry King, “When I think about what Jesus asked, before he went to the cross, he asked God for the cup to be removed, and if he can ask it, I don’t have to feel ashamed to ask that either. I would love to be able to live on.”
And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane: and he saith to his disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray. And he taketh with him Peter and James and John, and began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy; And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch. And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.
—Mark 14:32-36, King James Version
The next morning, February 3, three thousand calls reached the governor’s office, eighty percent of which asked Bush to commute the sentence. The last of 2,369 total letters—most of them from out of state, one of them mine—poured in. Over 2,000 of them pled for clemency. Pat Robertson called. Pope John Paul II sent a note.
Even Karla’s ex-husband, Stephen Griffith, spoke publicly about their marriage in hopes of saving her life. He praised her willingness to clean the house, cook his meals, get him to work on time. “I hate to see [her execution] happen,” he said. “We spent quite a bit of our lives together. I loved her dearly.” He wanted to see her live, but if things turned out otherwise, well, he would still go to work tomorrow. “I have carpentry work to do. I just can’t sit and watch. In all due honesty, it would break my heart.”
Karla woke at dawn and was able to stomach only a few crackers and a soft drink. Throughout the day, she met with family members and friends—a screen separating her from those who’d come to say farewell. She cried after saying a prayer with her husband of two and a half years, Dana Brown. She was not permitted a kiss goodbye.
A couple of hours before they would escort her into the death chamber, Karla handed the chairman of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice three pieces of paper serving as her evaluation of the prison system she had lived within these last fourteen years. On them she had handwritten what she titled “A Rehabilitation Plan for Inmates.” Her most distinct proposal was that prisoners should be paid for their work with money that they would in turn give back to the state in exchange for their food, clothing, housing, and medical care. ‘‘When a person enters,” Karla wrote in the letter she handed to Allan Polunsky, who typically met with condemned inmates prior to their executions, “they are fed three square meals a day, have a roof over their head, are given clothes to wear, schooling, medical and many other things FREE…. Having everything given to us free and told how to do everything has a big tendency to condition a person to be irrisponsible [sic] and become very dependant [sic] upon the people in care of them.’’ Apparently, she anticipated pushback, because she added, ‘‘I believe Texas needs to pay the inmates a wage for working. But wait! Every bit of money you pay us will go right back into your system or to actions for restitution. Basically, you won’t be paying us at all. It would be sort of a self-sufficient, full-circle thing.’’
She was worried about the high rate of recidivism throughout the prison system. ‘‘Show them that one must work to eat in here just like one must work to eat out in the normal world,’’ she wrote. Then she recommended an appropriate punishment: a food loaf. A food loaf is a meal generally served to prisoners in solitary confinement. It consists of whatever items are on a given day’s menu, which are mixed together and served as a kind of meatloaf that inmates find, for all intents and purposes, inedible. ‘‘If an inmate refuses to work,” she wrote, “I say put them in segregation and put them immediately on a food loaf! No TV, no recreation, just a food loaf and showers.’’
The time drew closer and people began congregating outside—approximately 1,200 people and 200 reporters from around the world. People held signs stating AXE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE Texas 2:3 and FORGET INJECTION USE A PICK AX and YOU PICKED YOUR DEATH and DIE LIKE A MAN. Others held a sign reading, JESUS WAS A VICTIM OF THE DEATH PENALTY. A group chanted, “She sliced, she diced, and now she’s got to pay the price!” while another sang “Amazing Grace.” A man dressed as the Grim Reaper circulated through the crowd, accompanied by a woman in witch attire. A pizza delivery man navigated his way among the glut of bodies. A giant TV screen showcased video footage of Karla dancing and using sign language to communicate the lyrics of a gospel song proclaiming, “When the time comes I want to be ready, I want to be ready when Jesus comes to take me away, when my precious Savior comes to take me away...” A music store in downtown Huntsville featured an ad that read, KARLA FAYE TUCKER SALE—KILLER PRICES—DEALS TO DIE FOR! Deborah Thornton’s husband, Richard Thornton, reveled in the sensation that vengeance was nigh. “Make no mistake,” he said. “This is not Karla Faye Tucker’s day. This is Deborah Ruth Davis Thornton’s day.”
Every major news source in the U.S. was covering the event live. Hovering helicopters showed overhead views of police corralling crowds behind yellow tape lines. Commentators debated back and forth about the significance of Karla’s gender and her white skin, her “petite, photogenic, rosy-lipped” appearance and her “flowing brown curls.” CNN legal analyst Greta Van Susteren shared her reaction to a prior execution she had attended. Fox News anchor Jon Scott cautioned viewers that the network was about to display “extremely graphic” pictures and that parents might want to escort children away from the television. They then aired several photos from the crime scene, including one showing the pick ax lodged in Deborah Thornton’s chest.
Meanwhile, Karla remained upbeat. “She prayed and said she was right with the Lord,” said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Glen Castlebury. “She was calm and composed.”
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected two eleventh-hour appeals to halt the execution. The Court offered no comment.
At 4 p.m., prison guards served Karla her final meal. She had been given the privilege of ordering anything she wanted from the food available in the prison pantry, but she barely touched the peaches, a banana, or tossed salad with ranch dressing she’d requested. She was offered a sedative but declined.
At 5:30, members of Saint Stephen’s parish met at the church to pray—not in demonstration for or against capital punishment, but for everyone who had played a role in bringing about this whole scene: the attorneys, the judges, the jury, the board of pardons and paroles, the governor, the executioner, and yes, this woman who was about to die.
And then the news came minutes before her scheduled execution, at about 6:20, that Governor Bush was making an announcement.
In the video footage, he trudges wearily into the room where the press is gathered to hear his decision. As everyone is seated and the room grows quiet, he expels a long, pent-up sigh. “When I was sworn in as the governor of Texas,” his statement begins, “I took an oath of office to uphold the laws of our state, including the death penalty. My responsibility is to ensure our laws are enforced fairly and evenly without preference or special treatment.”
Bush stands at the podium looking a little frumpy, his face gaunt and hair unkempt, his eyes maybe a bit swollen from sleeplessness or tears, as though this arduous decision has taxed him both physically and spiritually. His whole demeanor suggests he has made this momentous decision in the past five minutes and with his mind now made up, he has come straight to us without delay to deliver his position. Cameramen jockey for position; bulbs flash across the room like heat lightning. “Many people have contacted my office about this execution,” he says. “I respect the strong convictions which have prompted some to call for mercy and others to emphasize accountability and consequences.
Bush refuses to answer any questions from the press. His final words: “May God bless Karla Faye Tucker and may God bless her victims and their families.”
“Like many touched by this case, I have sought guidance through prayer. I have concluded judgment about the heart and soul of an individual on death row are best left to a higher authority.”
He reminds us that Karla knows she is guilty. He reminds us that everything about this case has proceeded according to the rule of law. “The courts,” he says, “including the United States Supreme Court, have reviewed the legal issues in this case, and therefore I will not grant a thirty-day stay.”
He refuses to answer any questions from the press.
His final words: “May God bless Karla Faye Tucker and may God bless her victims and their families.”
Just before 6 p.m., she showered and changed into a fresh white prison uniform with white shoes—the only attire she’d worn for the past fourteen years. Her hair still damp, she was escorted from her holding cell behind the execution chamber and led twenty feet to the place they called the death house. Karla had seen its door but never the other side, until this moment. The space was Spartan, about the size of a hospital room, with blue-green cinder-block walls. In the middle was a slim gurney with a pillow, stark white sheets, five leather straps, and arms containing one strap each. A microphone extended from the ceiling toward the gurney. It was separated from an observation area by large, clear windows.
According to Fred Allen, captain of the death house team, Karla expressed gratitude for his kindness. “Thank you, Captain Allen, for everything you’ve done,” she told him.
“You’re welcome,” he said. (“You know, that’s all I could say,” he later reported. “What else I’m gonna say?”)
The warden took off his glasses, signaling for the process to begin. Those assigned such duties strapped her to the gurney, restraining her at the feet, legs, waist, chest, and arms. She lay face-up, her arms spread wide—and I guess it must be said—as though for a crucifixion.
They swabbed her arms with alcohol. Karla reportedly worried over whether they would be able to find a vein in which to insert the IV drips, one in each arm. And with good reason—all those years of heroin needles had compromised her veins such that it was quite possible they would have trouble finding ones that would not collapse. But the prison employees found suitable veins and hooked up the IVs—one to administer the drugs, the other to serve as a backup in case the first failed. The IV line ran from the gurney to a room next door, separated from Karla by a curtain.
Once she was on the gurney with the IVs ready, the witnesses were escorted into the observation area. Karla had selected five people to bear witness, the maximum allowed. Her ex-husband, Stephen Griffith, did not attend, but her current one, Dana Brown, was present. So was her sister, Kari Weeks; her friend, Jackie Oncken; her lead attorney, George “Mac” Secrest; and Deborah Thornton’s brother, Ronald Carlson, who had spoken out against Karla’s execution due to her religious conversion.
Also in attendance, on the other side of a dividing wall, was Deborah Thornton’s husband, Richard Thornton. When he took his seat, he availed himself of the opportunity to ridicule Karla’s husband for what he perceived as his ulterior motives. “So now Dana Brown gets to write his book,” he said. His daughter, Katheryn Thornton, and Deborah Thornton’s son from a previous marriage, William “Bucky” Davis, joined him in the witness room to the execution chamber. No witnesses representing Jerry Lynn Dean were present; no relatives had contacted state prison officials requesting admittance.
Four members of the media were allowed to observe.
Moments before the procedure began, the warden asked if Karla had a final statement. Still strapped to the gurney with the IVs hooked up, she spoke into the microphone. “I would like to say to all of you—the Thornton family and Jerry Dean’s family—that I am so sorry. I hope God will give you peace with this.” Then she addressed the side of the witness room where her witnesses sat watching. To her husband: “Baby, I love you.” To Deborah Thornton’s brother, who had offered forgiveness: “Ron, give [Dean’s sister] Peggy a hug for me.” To all gathered: “Everybody has been so good to me. I love all of you very much.”
Then, these last words: “I am going to be face to face with Jesus now.… I love all of you very much. I will see you all when you get there. I will wait for you.”
As Karla lay on the gurney, Richard Thornton, who was disabled with diabetes and confined to a wheelchair, was at eye level with her. Thornton uttered words to his dead wife. “Here she comes, baby doll,” he said. “She’s all yours. The world’s a better place.”
From behind a plate glass window, the executioner pushed a button. Saline flushed through her veins.
If ministering angels bundled Karla to their breasts and escorted her to the place where God awaited his child, no one testified of their arrival. But then again, maybe all these things happened. That’s the thing about the death penalty. You have to be the one lying on that gurney to know precisely what happens in that moment when you pass from life to death.
“I love you, Karla,” her sister, Kari Tucker Weeks, called out.
Karla mouthed a silent prayer as the three-drug cocktail began. She gasped. She coughed twice.
First came the sodium thiopental, a powerful anesthetic that rendered her unconscious in less than a minute and paralyzed her lungs; then came pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant that triggered complete paralysis of all muscles, including the diaphragm, and prevented breathing; then the final drug, potassium chloride, stopped Karla’s heart.
There is always the fear that something will go wrong with the anesthesiology. The person will be conscious, to whatever degree, of her inability to breathe but unable even to blink an eyelid, essentially screaming on the inside but apparently tranquil on the outside. Or the person will be aware of her skin burning as the potassium chloride takes effect. But the monitor alerted the attending physician, Daryl Wells, that this time the procedure seemed to unfold as planned and now was complete.
If Jesus spoke Karla’s name, nobody heard his voice. If heaven opened and spilled light onto Karla’s face, none of the mortals gathered in the room saw its glow. If ministering angels bundled Karla to their breasts and escorted her to the place where God awaited his child, no one testified of their arrival. But then again, maybe all these things happened. That’s the thing about the death penalty. You have to be the one lying on that gurney to know precisely what happens in that moment when you pass from life to death.
Through the steel door, the doctor entered the chamber. He shone a light into Karla’s eyes. He checked for a pulse with his fingers. Using his stethoscope, he listened for a heartbeat. He searched for any sign that this woman who claimed she had eternal life was still alive.
Eight minutes after it began, at 6:45 p.m., Dr. Wells pronounced Karla Faye Tucker dead. The warden repeated the time. The curtain was pulled over the observation window, separating the onlookers from their view of the gurney.
The door opened. A guard gestured toward it. “Family members first,” he said.
The State of Texas, Office of the Governor, Austin
The website for Forest Lawndale cemetery, which occupies three hundred acres on the banks of Brays Bayou in Houston’s East End, says this: “Over the years, [the cemetery] has become the final resting place for hundreds of local dignitaries and notable people. This includes our founder, J.D. Eubanks; J. Robert Neal, founder of Maxwell House coffee; Walter Fondren, founder of Humble Oil Company, now Exxon Oil Company; Senator Lloyd Bentsen; Robert E. “Bob” Onstead, founder of Randall’s Food Markets; and others.” These “others,” these “notable people,” include Karla Faye Tucker. Her grave is marked by a flat slab, with her name, dates of birth and death, and a cross and flowers carved in the granite.
Indeed, Karla is in the grave now, and so is my father, and, as I write this, it was a month ago that my mother joined them both. After Mom’s funeral, I sorted through some of my parents’ belongings in their brick ranch house in suburban Atlanta. In one of the bedrooms, I came across a drawer full of Dad’s stuff—items I hadn’t seen in years or, in some cases, ever. There was a copy of his birth certificate and his military discharge papers. The bill of sale for five acres he bought in the North Georgia mountains. A pocketknife and a milestone pin he received from the post office for accruing sick leave. And Mom’s handwritten record charting his decline after his cancer diagnosis. Important things he and my mother kept out of necessity, nostalgia, or both.
Buried near the bottom of the drawer, I found an envelope from the State of Texas, Office of the Governor, Austin. It was stamped March 12, 1998—a little over a month after Karla Faye Tucker was executed. When I glimpsed the envelope, my pulse quickened, because I never knew Dad received any official response to the letter I had written on his behalf. I hadn’t asked about it, and he didn’t say anything more about it either. Once we heard the outcome, we simply dropped the conversation, our shared disappointment too much to dredge up.
But when I took the envelope in hand and slid my finger inside where it had been knifed opened twenty years ago, I found, curiously, nothing. It was empty.
I rummaged through every item in that drawer, thumbing through all manner of paperwork—Dad’s Baptist deacon ordination, his retirement compensation, and a dozen copies of a poem a friend had written to memorialize him at his funeral.
The correspondence had been a form letter, no doubt, a single sheet of office stationery offering thanks to my father for expressing his views, explaining how it was a difficult decision indeed, but informing him that Karla Faye Tucker had received due process and the courts had spoken. It had probably noted God’s ultimate jurisdiction in matters of this kind. Surely it had merely repeated what Bush stated when he told the world he would not be commuting her sentence.
But I’ll have to settle for conjecture. Whatever that envelope once held now was gone.
The Son’s Execution DAte
I suppose it was during those few weeks leading up to Karla Faye Tucker’s execution that I broke ties once and for all with the faith of my youth. I was still calling myself a Christian, but I had a hard time reconciling how easily my Bible Belt brethren navigated their own belief systems, picking and choosing according to what seemed like convenience, making an exception when they came upon a killer in whom they unexpectedly saw themselves. When I watched interviews with Karla, I indeed saw a changed woman, perhaps even—as Falwell called her—a woman of God, but for me this change confirmed more about the vagaries of the death penalty than it did the redemptive power of Jesus. And when the state of Texas finally put the needle in her vein, I grew ever more frustrated with the Pat Robertsons, George Bushes, and all of their ilk who spoke constantly of compassion but typically acted with an utter absence of it. I felt a bone-deep embarrassment that I’d ever gotten caught up in their agenda in the first place. I felt foolish that I had written a letter. Had I really believed it could make a difference? I remembered the words of Pat Robertson three weeks before Karla was executed, when he appeared on Larry King Live, trying to drum up support for her. King asked Robertson if it would help for people to write the governor. “Well, it never hurts to write,” Robertson answered. “But I think the parole board is going to make up its own mind.… It’s going to take a miracle to get this sentence commuted and I don’t think it’s going to be done by writing letters.” Did I need Robertson to tell me that? Hadn’t I known what the outcome would be before I ever composed a word? At the time, it seemed as though I had never written anything.
Which turned out to be as appropriate a segue to the next stage of my writing life as any I could have received. That experience of saying something, only to hear in response the echo of your own voice—well, I was learning that every writer has to get used to that.
That August, six months after the execution, I crammed all my earthly belongings into my car and drove six hours from Atlanta to the piedmont of North Carolina, where I started grad school in hopes of writing another novel. There, I began believing I’d found a new transparency to lay over the story of my life—who I was Before and After announcing to the world, and to myself, I was a writer. I hadn’t been able to save Karla’s life with my words. Maybe I could save my own.
But even now, as I look back at that time from a distance of two decades, I keep coming back to moments that transpired during that window of time when Karla was heading to the death chamber and I was figuring out if I still belonged among the Born Againers. In those days, my father and I didn’t know that a cancer was growing inside him, that it had begun in his prostate but by this time was spreading to other parts of his body. We didn’t know that this woman the newspapers were calling the Pick Ax Murderess would turn out to be one last cause we could unite behind.
I certainly didn’t know that she would snag in my consciousness precisely because she seemed to embody questions I would spend the rest of my life trying to find satisfactory answers to. What is the nature of forgiveness? When have we atoned for our sins? Who can be redeemed? How far can God’s love reach?
I certainly didn’t know that she would snag in my consciousness precisely because she seemed to embody questions I would spend the rest of my life trying to find satisfactory answers to. What is the nature of forgiveness? When have we atoned for our sins? Who can be redeemed? How far can God’s love reach? Even now, one moment in particular still haunts me. Maybe because it answers some of the questions. Or maybe because it only deepens the mystery.
January 1998: it was mere days before Karla’s execution. Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club sent a correspondent named Terry Meeuwsen to Gatesville, Texas, to interview Karla. They conducted the whole of their conversation through a glass partition, but when you watch the video, there’s an unmistakable intimacy between these two women that no wall can separate. They lean toward each other, make deep eye contact. As though communicating via telepathy, they finish each other’s sentences—versed in the same evangelical rhetoric, they speak a common language. When Karla claims that if she has to go on February 3, Jesus is going to come and “escort” her to heaven, Meeuwsen smiles and nods her head and tilts her chin as though she understands precisely what Karla is talking about. Meeuwsen admits we don’t know what God’s plan is in all this, but—and here her voice drops to a hoarse whisper filled with compassion—“Well, there’s just a lot of us praying for you.” The camera zooms in on Meeuwsen and you can see how glassy her eyes have gotten and how her lower lip is trembling when she fixes Karla in her gaze and says, “In truth, it’s not even about you—it’s all about Him.”
They’re still holding out hope, all right, but they seem resigned to Karla’s fate. Much of their talk is about how thankful they are to have experienced this ordeal together, and how much they look forward to becoming reunited in heaven. They seem to be seizing this opportunity to celebrate the significance of Karla’s life because they know that, yes, she is going to be executed. Meeuwsen even goes as far—and I have to say, this comes across as rather curious—to draw comparisons between Karla’s impending death and Jesus’s crucifixion. Jesus, too, did not want to die, but he knew it was going to happen. “I think of how God the father knew the son’s execution date,” Meeuwsen says, “and how perfect that son of God was…I know I wouldn’t be thinking that way if I wasn’t here with you today, so I thank you for the honor of walking with you.” The two women close with a prayer, Meeuwsen on one side of the glass, Karla on the other.
Then comes the moment I can’t shake.
When the prayer concludes, Karla lifts her head, breaks into a buoyant smile, and stares toward the camera—toward you and me. “I love you guys—bye!” she says. “We’ll see you when you get there!”
About the author
Mark Beaver is the author of The Ballad of Karla Faye Tucker, winner of the 2024 Georgia Author of the Year Award for Biography, and Suburban Gospel. His work has also appeared in numerous publications and has been short-listed for Best American Essays and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives near Atlanta with his wife and daughters.
- Mark Beaverhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/mark-beaver/
Thanks, Salvation South, for publishing this powerful piece. Thanks, Mark Beaver, for this moving and honest work. My compliments. CMc