(TW: Drugs, Violence, Loss of life, Emotional)
She was born into a middle-class family; one that went to a bay house to fish and waterski before things turned south. Among constant fighting, her parents divorced multiple times. She first encountered drugs at age seven, after catching her sisters smoking pot. To stop her from telling their parents, they gave her some too, thus implicating her in the crime.
One of her sisters’ friends was in a biking club. When he came by and her sister wasn’t home, he took her on his motorcycle instead. He shot her so full of her that she became sick—so sick that he couldn’t get his way with her like he intended. That was the beginning of her relationship with dope.
By seventh grade, she dropped out of school she was so heavily addicted to drugs. At fourteen, she became a prostitute like her mother before her.
At sixteen, she met Stephen Griffith, and they were married a year later. The couple collected guns, joined a motorcycle club, and played football. She announced later that she was leaving him to work out her “wild streak”.
She became a groupie for the Allman Brothers Band, and continued on her path of drugs and prostitution. She met Jerry Lynn Dean in 1981 and Danny Garrett and 1983, both of whom she formed turbulent relationships with. However, the fighting with Jerry Lynn was constant. Her relationship with him ended when he defecated on photos of her mother, a fact that she held a severe grudge for.
It was on her birthday in June of 1983, that she, high on drugs, decided to drive with Danny to Jerry Lynn’s apartment in hopes of stealing his motorcycle. They didn’t expect him to be home, but he was asleep in his bed with a woman he’d met that afternoon-- Deborah Thornton. Upon seeing that the two were awake, she and Danny killed them with a pickaxe they found in the room in a drug-induced frenzy.
In the months before her trial, she found a Christian faith, and appeared to be a completely different person in court. She even testified during the punishment phase that being pickaxed herself would be insufficient to atone her crime.
She fully admitted to fault in the matter, and maintained that had she not been high, nothing would have gotten violent. In a letter to Texas Governor George W. Bush and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, she wrote, “When I share that I was out of it on drugs the night I brutally murdered two people, I fully realize that I made the choice to do those drugs. Had I chosen not to do drugs, two people would still be alive today. But I did choose to do drugs, and I did lose it, and two people are dead because of me.”
She married her prison minister, Rev. Dana Lane Brown, in a ceremony behind prison walls. Her case drew attention across the nation, and the likes of televangelist Pat Robertson, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the Italian Prime Minister, Pope John Paul II, and her victim’s brother joined the efforts to have her sentence repealed. All appeals for clemency were denied by Governor Bush and the Parole Board.
On February 1998, she lifted herself onto the gurney with grace. Once she was strapped on, she looked toward the small window to the viewing area and said, “I would like to say to all of you… the Thornton family and Jerry Dean’s family? That I am so sorry. I hope God will give you peace with this.”
“Baby, I love you,” she told her husband. “… Everybody has been so good to me. I love all of you very much. I’m going to be face to face with Jesus now. Warden Bagget, thank you so much. You have been so good to me. I love all of you very much. I will see you all when you get there. I will wait for you.”
She hummed softly until the drugs took effect.
She is Karla Faye Tucker. She lost her life for the sake of justice.