Just In: Texas to EXECUTE FedEx DRIVER For kidnap and murder of Athena Strand -Tanner Horner case

Just In: Texas to EXECUTE FedEx DRIVER For kidnap and murder of Athena Strand -Tanner Horner case

Today, a jury has been hearing what prosecutors call the most critical evidence yet in the Tanner Horner trial. Inside the courtroom, never-released before video and audio from inside a delivery van detailing the final moments of 7-year-old Athena Strand’s life. We want to warn you, as you can imagine with this subject material, some of these details are very difficult to hear, but they go to the heart of the state’s case.

 Our senior crime and justice reporter Rebecca Lopez is there. >> Today was the most gut-wrenching testimony in the trial of Tanner Horner. Jurors and everyone in the courtroom saw a video of the last moments of Athena Strand’s life and the moment she was kidnapped. Prosecutors played video and audio from inside the delivery van.

 That video was shown only inside the courtroom and has not been released to the public. It shows Horner walking Athena to the truck, lifting her inside and shutting the door. At first, she doesn’t understand what’s happening. She asked him where they’re going, tells him she has school the next day. Horner covers up the camera so you don’t see what happens, but you hear it.

 Athena becomes alarmed and starts asking Horner where he is taking her, then begins to cry, asking if he’s a kidnapper, begging to go home, calling for her mother. Investigators say the recording captures more than an hour of fear, pain, and violence. Inside the courtroom, jurors wiped away tears, some openly sobbing as the recording played on.

 Our legal expert was in the courtroom and watched the video with us. >> It’s a clear-cut case of premeditation, calculation, deviance, and murder. >> You also see what happens afterwards. Jurors got to see Tanner Horner after he disposes of Athena’s body. He is sitting in the driver seat, smoking a cigarette, making phone calls, being very nonchalant.

 They also saw and witness him cleaning up the van. Prosecutor say it shows a man who simply wanted to clean up and move on. They are asking this jury to give him the death penalty. >> On the evening of May 5th, 2026, inside a Fort Worth courtroom, Judge George Gallagher read the verdict aloud. Tanner Lynn Horner, a 34-year-old former delivery driver, was sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Athena Presley Monroe Strand.

 The jury had deliberated for 2 hours and 17 minutes. The answer was unanimous. Horner sat at the defense table and showed no visible reaction as the judge ordered him to be executed before sunrise on a date to be determined at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville. The crime that brought him here had taken place 3 and 1/2 years earlier on a cold November afternoon in Paradise, Texas, a rural town of fewer than 500 people where nothing like this was supposed to happen.

Athena was a first-grader. She had three younger sisters she adored. Her favorite color was pink. She had been staying with her father for a semester while her mother waited in Oklahoma to see her on Friday. She never made it to Friday. On November 30th, 2022, a FedEx delivery van pulled up to the Strand house on County Road 3573.

The driver stepped out with a package, a box of Barbie dolls, the You Can Be Anything Collection, ordered by Athena’s mother as a Christmas gift. Athena came outside. The van was still in the driveway. What happened next unfolded in minutes in full view of a camera recording inside that van on a quiet rural road where no one else was watching.

 Horner drove away with Athena in the cab beside him. The camera lens was covered. The The microphone kept running. For over an hour, the recording captured everything. Athena asked him if he was a kidnapper. She said no. She asked for her mother. She asked to go home. She told him her mother had said no one could do that to her.

She told him he could not do it to her either. She did everything right. It was not enough. Two days later, after 200 volunteers had spent two cold days searching the terrain of Wise County, Horner led investigators to Bobo’s Crossing near Boyd, Texas. Athena’s body was in the water. She was 9 miles from home.

 Horner had gone back to work the morning after he killed her. He had driven his delivery route. He had passed a search party on a rural road, been told a young girl had gone missing in the area, and replied with two words, “Are you serious?” He had gone home and searched online for news about the missing girl. He had searched whether the cameras inside FedEx trucks recorded continuously.

 He had, by every measure, carried on as though nothing had happened. What followed was 3 and 1/2 years of legal proceedings, civil lawsuits, legislation passed in Athena’s name, a scholarship established in her honor, and a family that wore pink to every single court appearance because their daughter was no longer there to wear it herself.

To understand how a 31-year-old delivery driver came to do what he did on that driveway in Paradise, Texas, and why a Texas jury needed only 2 hours and 17 minutes to send him to death row, we have to go back. Back to 1991. Back to Fort Worth, Texas. Back to the very beginning of Tannerlin Horner. If you are drawn to stories of justice, of lives taken too soon, and of the long road that leads from a crime to a courtroom, subscribe to No Way Out.

 This is where true crime meets truth. Real cases, real consequences, the darkest corners of human decision broken down so that every person who deserves to be remembered is remembered, and every person who deserves to be held accountable is held accountable. This is No Way Out. Tanner Lynn Horner was born on August 8th, 1991 in the Fort Worth area of North Texas.

He arrived in a family that had already accumulated more damage than most households carry across generations. His mother, Melissa Horner, was 19 years old when she became pregnant. She did not know she was carrying a baby until she was 8 and 1/2 weeks along. In the weeks before she found out, she drank heavily, used drugs, and worked at strip clubs in Fort Worth.

 Her life had not been given to her gently. She was born to a teenage mother whose marriage collapsed before Melissa could walk. The stepfather who came after did not protect her. He abused her from the time she was 4 years old. By 14, she was in rehab for marijuana use. She dropped out of school shortly after. It was at one of those clubs that she met Terry Horner, Tanner’s father.

 She later described the night they met as violent, saying he raped her. Despite that, the two remained involved and eventually married. Terry spent nearly 90% of his adult life in prison. His occupation was theft. His own sister said he had molested her and threatened her life three times. He was not a father in any meaningful sense.

When Melissa found out she was pregnant, she stopped drinking alcohol. But she continued smoking cigarettes and marijuana through the rest of the pregnancy. After Tanner was born, her dependency on heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine continued. She was arrested multiple times on drug and prostitution charges and served jail time.

During those stretches, Tanner and his younger brother went to their grandmother, Jackie. Jackie was Melissa’s mother. Her father had been abusive. She had been sexually assaulted as a young woman. Two of her siblings died by suicide. She had dropped out of school at 15 while pregnant with Melissa, eventually earned her GED, and spent 40 years working as a barber.

 By the time she was raising Tanner, multiple sclerosis had begun limiting what her body could do. She stepped in regardless. She provided food, a roof, and consistency. She called Tanner her first grandchild and said it mattered to her. The generational pattern of abuse, addiction, and absence moved through that family without interruption.

 Tanner was born into the middle of it. Without the ability to choose otherwise, and without anyone around him who had broken the pattern far enough to show him a different way. From the first day Tanner Horner walked into a school building, it was clear the environment was not going to suit him. Other students formed friendships easily. Tanner did not. He tried.

 He approached people, started conversations, looked for a way in. The other students were not interested and moved away. He tried again. The result was the same. Melissa recognized that what she was watching was not ordinary shyness. He communicated differently. When he was frustrated or overwhelmed, he did not direct it outward.

 He hit himself on the head. He hit walls. He had meltdowns that consumed the entire household for hours. She had him assessed over a 6-week period. The diagnosis was Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism spectrum disorder. It explained the rigid attachment to routine, the difficulty with unexpected change, the inability to read the unspoken social rules that others absorbed without thinking.

The school in Azle, Texas placed him in behavior improvement classes for half of each school day. A psychologist confirmed he was academically capable, but needed structured support for the social and emotional difficulties his diagnosis produced. His seventh grade speech and language pathologist visited the family home and saw the full picture.

 A mother who was not stable, a household that moved constantly, a young person who needed consistency above almost everything else, and was receiving almost none of it. The bullying was persistent. Other students picked on him because he was different and because he could not defend himself socially. His response was never to fight back.

He turned the distress inward, hitting himself repeatedly when upset. A friend from those years described the pattern plainly. Tanner would hurt himself before he would hurt anyone else. During those same years, Tanner developed a habit of eating coins. It was unusual, but not alarming enough to investigate.

 No one connected it to anything serious. No doctor tested him. No treatment was given. The lead the coins introduced into his system accumulated in his bones silently over years, entirely undetected. When the school years ended, the accommodations and support structures that had been holding things imperfectly in place ended with them.

 Tanner stepped out of that system and into the wider world without the framework it had provided, carrying everything that had been building inside him since before he was born. Without the structure of a school day to anchor his time, Tanner Horner drifted into the rhythms that filled the space. He was in his mid-teens and then his late teens, moving through the Fort Worth and Lake Worth area without a clear direction.

He picked up work when it was available and lost it when it was not. He lived primarily with his mother and grandmother, leaving sometimes for a few weeks and returning again, a pattern that neighbors observed, but did not think much about. He found his way into music. It was a social world with a lower barrier to entry than most.

 People gathered around shared interest in sound and performance, and the atmosphere in local band circles was loose enough that someone like Tanner could participate without the standard social audition that other environments demanded. He sang at times. He spent time with people who played in small local bands, going to practices and shows, forming the casual connections that that world produces.

Among the people he spent time with were individuals who used drugs recreationally, and Tanner used with them. A man from that circle who knew Tanner during those years described him as someone who was drawn to that world without fully belonging in it. Present, familiar, but somehow on the periphery, even when he was in the room.

During this period, a concept took shape in Tanner’s internal experience that he began to describe to the people close to him. He called it Zero. He spoke about it to his fiance, a woman he had become engaged to during his adult years. She told him she believed he had multiple personalities. He told her he thought he had two.

The conversations between them on the subject were apparently relaxed, unremarkable, the kind of exchange between two people who had accepted something as part of their daily reality without finding it alarming. Tanner described Zero as a separate part of himself that existed alongside him, rather than within him.

He used the image of a car to explain how it worked. Most of the time, he said, he was the one driving, aware of his surroundings, in control of where he was going. But there were other times when Zero took the wheel while Tanner sat in the passenger seat, present and conscious, but no longer the one making decisions.

And then there were moments, he said, when he was in the trunk entirely, no awareness of what was happening, no memory of how he had gotten there, coming back to himself in a place or situation he could not account for. Zero was not a stranger to the people closest to Tanner. He had spoken about it openly with his fiance.

She believed he had multiple personalities. He told her he thought he had two. The conversations between them were casual, unremarkable, the kind of exchange between two people who had accepted something as a feature of daily life. Zero was simply part of how Tanner understood himself, not an alarm, not a crisis, just a name for something he had always felt was there.

The summer of 2013 was a significant period. Tanner was in his early 20s, living in and around Fort Worth, spending time in the familiar circuit of people he knew from music and social gatherings. At some point that summer, at a gathering at his grandmother’s house, a young woman who was 16 at the time drank and smoked marijuana with Tanner over the course of an evening.

By the end of the night, she was intoxicated to the point where she was barely conscious. Tanner sexually assaulted her. She later said it happened twice. Later in 2013, in August, a second incident occurred with a separate young woman. And in December of that year, a third. No complaint was filed after any of the three incidents.

The women involved did not go to police. The incidents occurred and were absorbed into the private histories of the people they happened to, sitting there without formal record, without legal consequence, without any mechanism that would carry the information forward into the systems that were supposed to track the behavior of people who posed a danger to others.

Tanner’s younger cousin, known in the family simply as Billy, carried his own private knowledge during this period. Billy was younger than Tanner and had grown up in proximity to him, spending time near the lake by Jackie’s house, where the extended family gathered. On two occasions, Tanner had sexually assaulted him.

 Billy had not fought back. He was smaller than Tanner. Tanner had beaten him before. He went along with what happened because the alternative felt more dangerous. He said nothing to anyone afterward. He had no framework at that age for what to do with what had been done to him. And so he carried it alone. Billy also carried something Tanner had said to him more than once during those years.

 A remark offered in the casual way that made it easy to dismiss as dark humor or idle musing. Tanner had said he wondered what it would feel like to kill someone. Billy heard it, filed it away, and said nothing. There was nothing obvious to do with a remark like that when the person who said it was a family member and when nothing beyond the words had yet occurred to make them feel like a warning.

Tanner’s life in his mid to late 20s settled into a surface pattern that looked unremarkable from the outside. He was not in the criminal justice system. He had no charges, no record, nothing in any database that would flag him as a concern. He worked when he could find work. He had a son, a little boy roughly a year old by the time 2022 arrived.

The boy did not live with Tanner, but Tanner spoke about him with what sounded like genuine feeling. He wanted to be present for his son. He had a fiance. He lived in a shed structure on the family property in West Fort Worth with his mother and grandmother, a cramped and disorganized living situation that was consistent with the way the household had always operated.

 He eventually secured a job as a delivery driver. The work suited the surface requirements of his life, structured routes, defined tasks, time in a vehicle alone without the social friction that group environments produced. He worked for at least one employer before moving to the company that would take him into rural Wise County. That first employer had adjusted his route without warning, which Tanner described as sending him into a state of severe distress.

He then moved to Big Top Spin Inc. The company was a Fort Worth-based contractor holding FedEx delivery routes across Wise County. It had been incorporated in April 2022 and was run by Richard G. Davis, a man whose professional background included mortgage lending and managing a trampoline park franchise. The operation Davis had built employed 18 drivers and covered 10 active routes dispatched from FedEx’s largest hub at Alliance Airport in Fort Worth.

 It generated an estimated two and a half million dollars in annual revenue. Tanner Horner wore a FedEx uniform. He drove a FedEx branded van. His routes took him through the rural roads and small towns of Wise County, through Springtown, Poolville, Bridgeport, Runaway Bay, and the town of Paradise, approximately 60 mi northwest of Dallas, where fewer than 500 people lived on roads that saw little traffic and where a delivery van arriving at a driveway was an ordinary and trusted event.

Tanner Horner had been driving for Big Top Spin for several months by the time November 2022 arrived. The job suited him in the specific way that structured solitary work tended to suit people who struggled in social environments. He was alone in a van for most of the day. He had a set sequence of addresses to visit. He knew the roads.

 He knew where the driveways were, how far back from the road certain houses sat, which gates needed to be approached carefully. The routine was fixed, and the fixed nest of it was what made the job workable for him. His previous employer had pulled that structure away without warning, shuffling routes and reassigning drivers to unfamiliar areas without consultation.

 For most people, an unexpected route change was a minor inconvenience. For Tanner, it had been destabilizing in a way that was hard to overstate. He described that period as one where he could barely function, where the unpredictability of not knowing what each day would bring had built inside him until he reached a point he could not push through on his own.

He took a week away from work. He sought help. He was placed on medication. The medication helped, and once it was in his system consistently, he was able to return and eventually move to Big Top Spin, where a stable assigned route initially gave him back the structure he needed. November changed things.

 The holiday season brought a surge in delivery volumes across the entire FedEx contractor network, and Big Top Spin responded the way contractors under that kind of pressure always did, by pushing harder. Six-day work weeks became standard. Routes were compressed and adjusted to absorb the increased load.

 Drivers were moved around the coverage area without the kind of advance notice that would have allowed Tanner to mentally prepare for working unfamiliar territory. The consistency he had depended on began to erode. He was not taking his medication consistently. He had missed several days. He noticed what going without it did to him.

A shift in how he experienced the edges of his own awareness. Something sitting alongside his ordinary thinking that felt like a pressure building without a clear release. He kept working. The season demanded it. Big Top Spin was not in a position to reduce the load on any of its 18 drivers, and Tanner kept showing up at the Alliance Airport hub in the mornings, loading his van and heading out on his routes.

 On the morning of November 30th, 2022, he loaded his van and left the hub. The day was cold, the kind of cold that settled over North Texas in late November and sat there without announcing itself dramatically. Just a steady gray chill that made the rural landscape of Wise County feel emptier than usual. The county roads ran through open ranch land and cedar thickets, past houses set back on long driveways, past fenced pastures and dry creek crossings, with almost no other traffic to share the road.

He made his stops through the morning and into the afternoon, working the sequence of addresses that his route required. One of those addresses was on County Road 3573 in Paradise. The package for that stop was a box of Barbie dolls, the You Can Be Anything collection, ordered online as a Christmas gift.

 Tanner Horner had no connection to anyone at that address. He had never been to that house before. It was a delivery stop, one entry on a list of many, distinguished from the others by nothing except its position in the sequence of his afternoon route. He turned down County Road 3573 as the light was already beginning its early fade toward dark.

County Road 3573 ran through one of the quieter stretches of Paradise, Texas, a town of fewer than 500 people sitting in the rolling terrain of Wise County, roughly 60 miles northwest of Dallas. The roads around it were unpaved county routes lined with cedar and scrub oak, cutting through open pasture, and the low-lying areas were creek beds ran dry between rains.

People in Paradise knew their neighbors and recognized the vehicles that regularly used the roads near their homes. A delivery van was a familiar sight, part of the ordinary rhythm of a rural community close enough to the Fort Worth area that packages arrived at doors regularly. Jacob Strand lived on County Road 3573 with his wife Ashley.

 He had built his life in Wise County, worked there, owned property there, raised his family there. His daughter Athena’s mother, Maitland Gandy, lived in Oklahoma. The two had separated some years earlier and arranged shared custody. Athena spent most of her time with Maitland, but the two parents had agreed that would stay with Jacob and Ashley for a semester.

It was a practical co-parenting decision, the kind that separated parents make when they are trying to do right by their family despite their circumstances. Maitland lived about 2 hours from Paradise by road. She had seen Athena a few days before November 30th, a quick handoff between one parent’s home and the other.

 She told her daughter she loved her and that she would see her on Friday. Jacob had plans to take Athena to see Christmas lights that evening after the drop-off. The goodbye was brief, shorter than Maitland would have chosen if she had been given a choice. Athena was in the first grade. She went to school in the area, sat in the classroom, did her work, and wrote entries in the journal her teacher assigned.

She had three younger sisters back in Oklahoma and spoke about them with the kind of open enthusiasm that older siblings carry naturally. She loved them and did not bother concealing it. The previous September she had spent 3 days at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth after falling ill. During those days in the hospital, nurses had given her a small teddy bear in cotton candy pink, her favorite color.

 She kept the bear. It was the kind of small kindness she held on to. Her teacher, Lindsey Thompson, had assigned the class a journal entry in the days before November 30th. The topic was stranger danger. Athena wrote her entry the way a first-grader approaches assigned work, directly, practically, in the plain language of someone putting down what they had been taught.

She finished the entry, closed the journal, and went home. On the morning of November 30th, Jacob left the house early for a hunting trip. Ashley was home with Athena and the couple’s infant. Athena’s older sister was at a relative’s home nearby getting help with homework. The house was quiet in the way that a house with one parent and a sleeping infant is quiet, not silent, but settled, without the noise of a full household in motion.

Ashley was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Athena had been told to go upstairs and do laundry. The afternoon stretched out across the cold landscape of Wise County. The county road outside the house saw its usual minimal traffic. A FedEx branded delivery van turned off the road and pulled up to the house.

 The driver stepped out with a package, a box of Barbie dolls, Maitland’s Christmas gift for her daughter, arriving at the house before Athena had any idea it was coming. The driver set the package at the door and walked back toward the van. Athena had come outside. She was wearing blue jeans with flowers embroidered on the pockets, a gray long-sleeve shirt, and light brown boots.

The afternoon light was already pulling back toward dark. Athena was in the kitchen. The infant was nearby. Athena’s older sister was somewhere else. Jacob was miles away. Nobody was watching the driveway. Tanner Horner was at the van when Athena came outside. The package had been set down. He was moving back toward the driver’s side door when she appeared.

 The cameras inside the van were recording. What he did next was not the action of a man finishing a delivery. He did not wave and get in the van and drive away. He put Athena inside the vehicle. The van pulled out of the driveway on County Road 3573 and moved away from the Strand house. Athena was in the cab beside him.

The camera inside the van captured it. She was upright, alert, seated next to Horner as he drove. The camera lens was covered shortly after. Horner reached up and blocked it. The recording from inside the van went dark on the visual side. The microphone kept running. Horner spoke to Athena as he drove the rural roads of Wise County.

 He told her she was pretty. He asked her how old she was. He asked where she went to school. He drove for a time and then stopped the van. He told her they were going to hang out. Then he told her to take off her shirt. Athena told him no. She started to cry. She asked him what he was doing. She asked him if he was a kidnapper.

 She asked for her mother. She asked to go home. She asked him why he was doing it. He told her it was because she was pretty. She told him her mother had said no one could do that to her. She said he could not do it to her either. The recording continued for over an hour. The sounds on it changed as the minutes passed.

Athena’s voice gave way to screaming. There were sounds of movement inside the van. Physical contact, banging, struggle within the confined space. At one point, Horner’s voice was heard telling her that if she did not stop, he would hurt her worse. The van moved through the back roads of Wise County.

 No one outside knew what was happening inside it. At approximately 6:30 in the evening, Ashley Strand called for Athena to come to dinner. There was no answer. She called again. Nothing. She went upstairs to the bedroom where Athena had been doing laundry. The room was empty. She went through the rest of the house.

 She went outside and called Athena’s name across the property in the cold and the dark. The county road was quiet. The fields around the house were still. There was no response from any direction. She called Jacob. He was at his hunting camp miles away and answered his phone to news that stopped him in place. He headed home immediately.

Ashley called the Wise County Sheriff’s Office. Officers arrived at the property and began searching the surrounding area. The prevailing early assessment was that Athena may have wandered off. There had been a small disagreement between her and Ashley earlier in the day, not unusual, and the initial assumption was that she might have walked somewhere familiar.

The rural property had outbuildings, open fields, and wooded terrain in multiple directions. Officers moved through all of it. They found nothing. The outbuildings held no trace of her. The fields were empty. The road in both directions showed nothing. As the hours passed, more officers arrived. The search area expanded.

Lights moved through the dark across Wise County and voices called Athena’s name into the cold air. She was not there. She had not wandered off. She had not hidden somewhere on the property. The driveway where the delivery van had been parked just hours earlier was empty, and the van that had been in it was long gone.

Somewhere out on the backroads of Wise County with Athena Strand inside it. By the time midnight passed on November 30th, 2022, law enforcement in Wise County had a missing young girl and no leads. What they did not yet know was that the answer to where she was had been sitting in plain sight since the moment the delivery was made.

In the footage from the van that had pulled up to the house that afternoon. In the company records that logged every stop on every driver’s route. In the digital trail that a delivery contractor left behind with every package it placed at every door. That trail existed. It had not yet been found. By the morning of December 1st, 2022, Athena Strand had been missing for more than 12 hours.

The Wise County Sheriff’s Office had worked through the night without finding her, and as daylight returned to the county, the operation expanded. An Amber Alert was issued, broadcasting Athena’s description across a region that stretched well beyond Wise County. The blue jeans with flowers embroidered on the pockets, the gray long-sleeve shirt, the light brown boots.

 The alert moved through phones and television screens and radio broadcasts across North Texas. The community responded without hesitation. Within hours, more than 200 volunteers arrived in Paradise. They came from Fort Worth, Decatur, Springtown, Bridgeport, and towns further out. People who had no connection to the Strand family and no obligation to be there, who saw the alert and got in their cars.

 They spread across the terrain around the Strand property, moving through the fields and creek beds and wooded areas in organized groups, covering ground that law enforcement could not cover alone. The Texas EquuSearch deployed as well, bringing experienced riders on horseback to work through the rougher terrain that was difficult to search on foot.

It was a coordinated effort across a landscape that offered no shortage of places where a person could be hidden. Maelin Gandy was in Oklahoma when she received the call about her daughter. She described the drive south as something her body resisted every mile of. A physical inability to breathe properly, a sensation that her system was shutting down against the news it had been given.

She covered the 2-hour distance in 45 minutes and arrived in Wise County to find a search already in motion, a community already on the ground, and her daughter still missing. Jacob Strand was back at the property. Ashley was there. The family was present at the center of an operation that was growing by the hour, and there was nothing any of them could do except wait and stay out of the way of the people who were looking.

The search continued through the full length of December 1st without producing a result. Officers knocked on doors along County Road 3573 and the surrounding routes, asking residents to check their outbuildings, their barns, their sheds, any structure on their property that a young person could have entered. The terrain of Wise County was searched in sections, with search groups moving methodically through one area before shifting The FBI offered investigative support and resources.

 The Texas Rangers were involved. The operation had the full weight of multiple agencies