Karla Faye Tucker

Karla Faye Tucker (November 18, 1959 – February 3, 1998) was an American woman sentenced to death for killing two people with a pickaxe during a burglary.

The couple introduced her in 1981 to a man named Daniel Ryan Garrett (Danny Garrett).

Then 21 years old, Tucker started dating 35-year-old Garrett.

After spending the weekend using drugs with Garrett and his friends, Tucker and Garrett entered Jerry Dean's apartment in Houston, Texas around 3 a.m. on Monday, June 13, 1983, intending to steal a motorcycle that Dean was restoring there.

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.

During the burglary, Tucker and Garrett entered Dean's bedroom, where Tucker sat on him.

In an effort to protect himself, Dean grabbed Tucker above the elbows, whereupon Garrett intervened.

Garrett struck Dean numerous times in the back of the head with a ball-peen hammer that he found on the floor.

After hitting Dean, Garrett left the room to carry motorcycle parts out of the apartment.

Tucker remained in the bedroom.

The blows Garrett had dealt Dean caused him to begin making a "gurgling" sound.

Tucker wanted to "stop him from making that noise" and she then picked up a three-foot pickaxe that was lying against the wall and began hitting Dean.

Garrett then re-entered the room and dealt Dean a final blow in the chest.

Garrett left the bedroom again to continue loading Dean's motorcycle parts into his Ford Ranchero.

Tucker was once again left in the room and only then noticed a woman who had hidden under the bed covers against the wall.

The woman, Deborah Ruth Thornton, had argued with her husband the day before, went to a party and ended up spending the night in Dean's bed.

Upon discovering Thornton, Tucker grazed her shoulder with the pickaxe.

Thornton and Tucker began to struggle, but Garrett returned and separated them.

Tucker proceeded to hit Thornton repeatedly with the pickaxe and then embedded the axe in her heart.

Tucker would later tell people and testify that she experienced multiple intense orgasms with each blow of the pickaxe.

The next morning, one of Dean's co-workers who had been waiting for a ride entered the apartment and discovered the victims' bodies.

Police investigation led to the arrests of Tucker and Garrett, five weeks after the killings.

In September 1983, Tucker and Garrett were indicted for murder and tried separately for the crimes.

Tucker was charged with the murders of both Dean and Thornton, but after she testified against Garrett at his trial, the charge for the murder of Thornton was dropped.

Garrett was not charged with Thornton's death, either.

Tucker entered a plea of not guilty and was jailed awaiting trial.

Soon after being imprisoned, Tucker took a Bible from the prison ministry program and read it in her cell.

She later recalled, "I didn't know what I was reading. Before I knew it, I was in the middle of my cell floor on my knees. I was just asking God to forgive me."

She was the first woman to be executed in the United States since Velma Barfield in 1984 in North Carolina, and the first in Texas since Chipita Rodriguez in 1863.

She was convicted of murder in Texas in 1984 and executed by lethal injection after 14 years on death row.

Due to 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 without parole, 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 troubled, and Tucker started smoking cigarettes with her sisters when she was eight years old.

During her parents' divorce proceedings when she was 10 years old, Tucker learned that her birth was the result 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 16, she was briefly married to a handyman 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.