Karla Faye Tucker
| Karla Faye Tucker | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Born |
November 18, 1959 Houston, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | February 3, 1998 (aged 38) Huntsville, Texas, U.S. |
| Criminal penalty | Death by lethal injection |
| Criminal status | Executed on February 3, 1998 |
| Spouse(s) | Reverend Dana Lane Brown Stephen Griffith (divorced) |
| Parent(s) | Larry and Carolyn Tucker |
| Conviction(s) | Murder |
| Killings | |
| Victims |
|
| Date | 13 June 1983 3:00 A.M. |
| Country | United States |
| State(s) | Texas |
| Location(s) | Houston |
| Weapons | Pickaxe |
Karla Faye Tucker (November 18, 1959 – February 3, 1998) was the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1984, and the first in Texas since 1863. She was convicted of murder in Texas in 1984 and put to death fourteen years later.
Because of her gender and widely publicized conversion to Christianity, she inspired an unusually large national and international movement that advocated the commutation of her sentence to life imprisonment, a movement that included a few foreign government officials.
Karla Tucker was born and raised in Houston, Texas, the youngest of three sisters. Her father Larry was a longshoreman. The marriage of her parents was very troubled, and Tucker started smoking cigarettes with her sisters when she was eight years old. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she learned during the divorce proceedings that she was born of an extramarital affair.
By age 12, she had begun taking drugs and having sex. She dropped out of school at age 14 and followed her mother Carolyn, a rock groupie, into prostitution and began traveling with the Allman Brothers Band, The Marshall Tucker Band, and the Eagles. At age 16, she was married briefly to a mechanic named Stephen Griffith. When she was in her early 20s, she began hanging out with bikers, and met a woman named Shawn Dean and her husband Jerry Lynn Dean. The couple introduced her in 1981 to a man named Daniel Ryan Garrett (Danny Garrett), 21-year-old, Tucker and 35-year-old Garrett started dating.
After spending the weekend using drugs with Garrett and their friends, Tucker and Garrett entered Jerry Dean's apartment around 3 a.m. on Monday, June 13, 1983, intending to steal a motorcycle that Dean was restoring in his apartment. James Liebrandt, a friend, went with them to Dean's apartment complex. Liebrandt reported that he went looking for Dean's El Camino while Tucker and Garrett entered the apartment with a set of keys that Tucker claimed Shawn Dean had lost and Tucker had found.
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