Rodney Reed

Rodney Rodell Reed (born December 22, 1967) is an American death row inmate who was convicted on May 18, 1998, by a Bastrop County District Court jury for the April 1996 abduction, rape, and murder of Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old resident of Giddings, Texas.

Although Reed initially denied knowing Stites, after his DNA matched semen inside Stites's dead body, Reed said that he was having a clandestine affair with Stites and that they had consensual sex the day before her death.

During the penalty phase of the trial, the state argued for capital punishment on the basis of Reed being suspected in the rapes of four women and a 12-year-old and an attack on another woman.

Local law enforcement already had Reed's DNA on file from an investigation into an alleged rape of a woman with intellectual disabilities in May 1995.

Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old resident of Giddings, Texas, was found dead on April 23, 1996.

Police had received a call at 3:11 pm notifying them that her unidentified body had been discovered in some bushes near a dirt road behind Bastrop High School in Bastrop, Texas.

A pickup truck that belonged to Stites' fiancé that she regularly drove to work had been found earlier, parked at the school nearby.

The authorities determined that Stites had been beaten, sodomized, and raped before being strangled to death with her belt sometime between 3:00 and 5:00 am.

When discovered in the bushes, Stites was wearing a black bra and jeans.

Part of the belt that had been used to kill her was found near her body, and the other part of the belt was found near the truck.

Her body had been partially burned, and her shirt was found nearby.

Stites had lived in Giddings with her fiancé, a local police officer, Jimmy Fennell Jr., whom she was scheduled to marry in three weeks.

Her fiancé said he last saw her around 3:00 am after the couple showered together and she left for work.

Bastrop High School was en route from their home in Giddings on the way to her workplace in the produce section at the H-E-B grocery store in Bastrop.

After Stites did not arrive for her 3:30 am shift, the store called her mother, who then called the police.

H-E-B offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the capture of her killer, but it went unclaimed.

On July 12, 1996, an anonymous woman called the authorities once and said she believed that her son may have been with Stites in the hours before she was killed, but the call could not be traced.

Stites was buried in her hometown of Corpus Christi on April 26, 1996.

The authorities began to suspect Reed had been involved in the Stites murder based on similarities in the case to an attack on another woman six months later on November 9, 1996.

Linda Schlueter, age 19, had agreed to give a ride to a man she met after stopping at a drive-up payphone at a now-closed Long's Star Mart.

When she went to drop him off, he attacked her and said he would kill her if she failed to perform sexual acts upon him, but then fled the scene with her vehicle after seeing car lights approaching.

Reed was detained by police based on Schlueter's description, and she subsequently picked him out of a photo line-up.

The police department had been familiar with him because of prior arrests.

Schlueter's vehicle was found close to where Stites's pickup truck had been abandoned at Bastrop High School.

DNA extracted from three sperm found in Stites' vagina and saliva found on her chest matched to Reed.

Her brother never recovered from her death and died by suicide in 1997.

Reed was officially charged with the murder of Stacey Stites on April 4, 1997, and held without bond.

At the time, he was already in jail on an unrelated charge.

He was indicted and "charged with two counts of capital murder, one for murder in the course of aggravated sexual assault and one for murder in the course of kidnapping."

His arraignment was scheduled for May 29, 1997, and jury selection began in March 1998.

The jury was described as "mostly white", with no African-Americans among the 12 jurors or two alternates.

Reed was sentenced to death on May 29, 1998, and is incarcerated at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit death row facility in Polk County, Texas.

His conviction and death sentence remain controversial.

Reed was scheduled to be executed on November 20, 2019, but doubt over Reed's guilt led to bipartisan support for a stay of his execution from Texas state legislators, as well as numerous celebrities and other public figures.

On November 15, 2019, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously recommended that Texas Governor Greg Abbott grant Reed a 120-day reprieve.

Later that day, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals indefinitely stayed Reed's execution to review his claims of actual innocence.

His execution was further delayed in 2023 when the Supreme Court authorised Reed to seek DNA testing on the murder weapon.

Reed's father, Walter, was a native of Bastrop, Texas, and an Air Force veteran while his mother, Sandra, was a nurse.

Reed was raised with his six brothers in Texas and attended Hirschi High School in Wichita Falls, Texas.

He played on the school's football team and was a state Golden Gloves champion boxer.