Carla F. Tucker - Serial Killer - Research Paper Example

Karla Faye Tucker: Pickaxe Murderer Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous pickaxe murderer, made headlines in 1998 when she got executed. After all, she was the first woman to be executed in the state of Texas after more than a hundred years. Her story goes like this: On June 13, 1983, she and friend Daniel Ryan Garret went to Jerry Lynn Dean’s house. Tucker knew Dean because he was the husband of her best friend. She, however, disliked him because he once stained her living room because he had parked his motorcycle there, with dripping oil.

He also destroyed Tucker’s pictures of her mother. So Tucker and Garret went to Dean’s house to steal the Harley Davidson motorcycle (Stewart, 2011). Upon seeing Dean, Garett attacked him with a hammer. The victim was making a bubbling sound that irritated Tucker so much that she finished him off by stabbing him with a pickaxe (Stewart, 2011). They noticed another woman in the apartment. This was the second victim, Deborah Thornton, who was hiding under some sheets in a corner. Thornton was there because she fought with her husband, went to a party and met Dean.

High because of the kill they made minutes ago, Tucker attacked Thornton with her pickaxe, stabbing her many times and finally leaving the dead body with the pickaxe still stuck on the torso. They took Dean’s money and stole his car when they left. The police was alerted and several of Tucker’s phone calls were wiretapped. It was heard there that tucker experienced orgasms every time she places a blow on her victim’s bodies. After a little more than a month, on July 20, 1983, Garret was arrested when he was leaving his house to go to work.

Tucker was arrested on the same day along with a third suspect named Albert Sheehan (Stewart, 2011). Before a jury of eight women and one man, Tucker faced her trial on April 11, 1984. Her trial was presided over by a female judge. The third suspect, Sheehan, denied all charges against him and testified against both defendants, but admitted that he indeed went to Dean’s apartment. There were no witnesses for the defense. After just seventy minutes of deliberation, the jury decided to convict Tucker.

Because she was now convicted, the trial is now on the penalty phase (Stewart, 2011). This time, the defense called in a female psychiatrist. The psychiatrist then told the panel that Tucker was on drugs since she was nine. She also described Tucker’s state of mind when she did the killings. Tucker was allegedly intoxicated with methadone, heroin, valium, marijuana, tequila, among others drugs. The psychiatrist also refuted Tucker’s claim that she derived sexual pleasure when she was stabbing her victims’ bodies.

In fact, the psychiatrist claimed that it was unlikely for Tucker to have experienced real sexual satisfaction in her life (Stewart, 2011). When it was Tucker’s turn to tell her side of the story, she told the jury that the killings were “not real” for her. “I did not see the bodies; I do not remember seeing holes or blood” (Stewart, 2011). For three hours, the jury deliberated her case and on April 25, 1984, the jury recommended that Tucker be sentenced to death by lethal injection.

For eleven years, Tucker spent her life on the female death row at Gatesville penitentiary and made appeals, even to the state governor at the time, George W. Bush, for clemency. All of her appeals were rejected. On February 2, 1998, she was