The Final 24 Hours of Karla Faye Tucker — The First Woman Texas Executed in 135 Years

She smiled at the man strapping her to a gurney and thanked him for his kindness. 20 minutes later, she was gone. 15 years earlier, that same woman drove a pickaxe into two strangers until her arms gave out, and she said it made her feel alive. This is the story of how a Houston party girl became the first woman put to death in Texas in over a century, and why millions of people begged the state to let her live.

>> Mostly hit me was his love, you know. His love, it just surrounded >> Courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have reviewed the legal issues in this case, and therefore I will not grant a 30-day stay. May God bless Karla Faye Tucker, and God bless her victims and their families. >> Welcome to The Last Chamber, [music] where we go beyond the headlines and into the darkest corners of true crime.

Houston, Texas, 1983. A sprawling, restless city of over 2 million people, home to NASA’s Mission Control and, less proudly, a spot on the list of America’s most dangerous places to live. It’s in this city that our story begins, but it doesn’t start with a body. It starts with a childhood that never had a chance.

 Karla Faye Tucker was born on November 18th, 1959, the youngest daughter of Larry and Carolyn Tucker. Her home life was chaos before she could even understand the word. Her much older sisters had her smoking cigarettes by age eight. Her parents split when she was 10, and in the wreckage of that divorce, she learned a secret that shattered whatever stability she had left.

 The man she called her father wasn’t her biological one. She was the product of an affair. By 12, Karla was using drugs and involved with men far older than she was. By 14, she’d left school entirely, and her own mother introduced her to prostitution, teaching her how to survive by selling her body. Around this time, a boyfriend from a motorcycle club gave her something that would define the rest of her short life, heroin.

She and her mother spent years chasing rock bands across the country as groupies, living off nothing but adrenaline and chemicals. Carla married young to a mechanic named Steven Griffith, but the marriage was violent on both sides and it collapsed after 2 years. When her mother died, Carla was only 20 and grief [music] pushed her deeper into the biker world she already knew too well.

 It was in that world that she met Shawn, a young woman who would become her closest friend, and a bartender named Danny Garrett,  35 years old, who would become far more than a friend. The four of them, Carla, Shawn, Danny, and a mechanic named Jerry Lynn Dean, were about to become tangled together in a way none of them could undo.

Carla despised Jerry from the moment she met him. She thought he was beneath Shawn. When Jerry parked his motorcycle in their apartment and oil leaked onto the carpet, Carla chased him out in a fury. From there, the two of them waged a slow-burning war, vandalizing each other’s belongings, trading insults, even trading blows.

 At one point, Carla broke Jerry’s glasses so badly he needed surgery to remove glass from his eye. Despite it all, Shawn married Jerry in February of 1983. The marriage lasted 4 months before it collapsed under accusations of abuse. None of that would have mattered if Jerry Lynn Dean hadn’t invited a stranger home one night in June.

On the night of June 12th, 1983, Jerry brought home a woman he just met at a pool party, 32-year-old Deborah Thornton. She’d come to blow off steam after a rough patch in her marriage. She had no idea she was walking into someone else’s war. The next morning, Jerry’s friend Gregory Traver waited for him outside, expecting a normal work day.

 Jerry never showed. Assuming his friend had simply overslept, Gregory walked to the apartment himself. The door was open. The television and stereo were stacked together like someone had been preparing to steal them. Jerry’s prized Harley-Davidson was gone. Gregory called out, got no answer, and kept moving room to room until he opened the door to the spare bedroom.

 What he found there would haunt him for the rest of his life. Jerry was on the floor in a pool of blood. On the bed lay a woman he didn’t recognize. A pickaxe still buried in her chest. When police arrived, they found a scene almost too violent to process. Jerry had been struck in the back of the skull and stabbed 20 times with the pickaxe.

 Deborah Thornton had been stabbed 15 times, the final blow driven straight through her heart. At first, investigators assumed a robbery had spiraled out of control. There was no forced entry. Both victims’ wallets and Jerry’s truck were missing, and a hammer from his own toolbox had been used in the attack. But something about the sheer brutality of it didn’t sit right.

This wasn’t the work of a burglar caught off guard. This felt personal. Investigators quickly cleared Deborah’s husband, whose alibi held up, and looked hard at her father, a man with a disturbing past who had reason to want her silenced. Neither lead went anywhere. Then one name kept surfacing every time they asked about Jerry, Karla Faye Tucker.

When police first questioned Carla, she was unshaken. She admitted she hated Jerry, but denied any part in his death, and even agreed to a polygraph test before her boyfriend Danny convinced her to back out. For weeks, investigators had nothing solid enough to charge her. Then a homicide detective named J.C.

Moser, who wasn’t even officially assigned to the case, got a tip from an old friend who happened to be Danny Garrett’s ex-wife. That lead brought Danny’s own brother Doug into an interrogation room. Terrified and worn down by weeks of guilt, Doug admitted he’d helped Carla and Danny cover their tracks, and that Carla had recently started talking about killing again to keep the secret buried.

Carla’s sister backed up his account. Investigators wired Doug with a hidden microphone and sent him to Carla’s house to get her talking. What came out of that conversation was almost unbelievable. Karla described stealing Jerry’s motorcycle parts for cash, sneaking into his apartment using keys she’d taken from Shawn weeks earlier, and finding Jerry asleep with a woman she didn’t expect to be there.

 She admitted to climbing on top of him, and when he woke and grabbed her arms, Danny struck him with a hammer. According to her own account,  she then picked up the pickax and began swinging it into his body, later confessing that the act had left her disturbingly excited. When Deborah Thornton woke and fought back, Karla turned the pickax on her, too.

 Within hours, [music] Danny Garrett was arrested on his way to work, and armed officers stormed Karla’s house. Both were charged with capital murder before the day was over. At trial in April of 1984, Karla’s defense argued this wasn’t a planned killing, but a drug-fueled explosion of rage during a robbery.

 The jury didn’t buy it as an excuse. After deliberating for just an hour, they found her guilty. She addressed the court for nearly 5 hours, describing the life that led her there, but it changed nothing. Carla Faye Tucker was sentenced to death, becoming the only woman on death row in the entire state of Texas. Danny Garrett was convicted separately later that year, and received the same sentence.

 The two would never see each other again. He died in prison in 1993 from liver disease. While awaiting trial, something in Carla had already begun to shift. She picked up a Bible in the jail library for the first time in her life, and started attending recovery meetings behind bars. She would [music] later say that forgiveness was the thing that finally let her breathe.

 In 1995, she married a prison chaplain named Dana Lane Brown. Over the following decade, she built a reputation not as a killer, but as proof that people could change. Her case became a national spectacle. Supporters pleading for her sentence to be reduced to life in prison included Pope John Paul II, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, US House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and televangelist Pat Robertson.

 Even more strikingly, Ronald Carlson, Deborah Thornton’s own brother, and Peggy Kurtz, Jerry Dean’s sister, spoke publicly in her favor, moved by the woman she had become. It wasn’t enough. [clears throat] On January 28th, 1998, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected her final appeal. Governor George W.

 Bush refused to intervene. On February 2nd, 1998, Karla Faye ate her last meal, a peach, a banana, and a garden salad with ranch dressing, and spent her final hours with family, calm and [music] resigned. The next evening, February 3rd, 1998, she was walked into the execution chamber. She asked that her sister, her husband, and two friends be present.

Moments before the injection, she thanked the prison’s death house captain, Richard Allen, for his kindness. At 6:45 p.m., she was pronounced dead. Carla Faye Tucker was the first woman executed in the state of Texas in 105 years. The effects of that night didn’t end when she did. Richard Allen, the man who oversaw her execution, later told filmmaker Werner Herzog that watching her die triggered something in him he couldn’t [music] shake.

He began shaking uncontrollably hours later, resigned from his position, and reversed his lifelong support for the death penalty, saying no one had the right to take a life, even under the law. Carla Faye Tucker was laid to rest at Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery in Houston. Her crime was undeniable, and so was her transformation.

The question that has followed this case for decades is whether a person can change so completely that the punishment no longer fits who they’ve become, or whether some acts are simply too violent to be forgiven, no matter what comes after. What do you think? Should Carla Faye Tucker have been executed, or should her years of reform have earned her a life sentence instead? Tell us in the comments below, and if there’s a case you want us to dig into next, drop it there, too.

 We’re always looking for the next story to tell. If this story moved you, subscribe to The Last Chamber. New cases every week. >> Dana, this one’s for you. I’m not going to make it [laughter] through this. Um I love you, Dana. You’ve been my rock throughout of this. And  thank you for helping me know a part of God’s love that I could have never known without you, Anna.

 For being used by God to help me know that I could even love the way that I do.