Man executed for crime he committed in 1979

A Texas prisoner accused of four different killings and at least nine r#pes was executed on Wednesday for a 1979 r#pe and murder in Houston that went unsolved for two decades until he confessed. 

Danny Paul Bible, 66, received lethal injection Wednesday evening after unsuccessful appeals contended his multiple health issues made it likely his execution would be botched and cause him unconstitutional pain. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-day appeal about an hour before he was put to death without apparent complications.

Asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Bible replied: “No, sir.”  

His head was shaking slightly as the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began. His attorneys said Parkinson’s disease was among his ailments.

As the drug started to take effect, Bible started taking quick breaths, muttered at one point that it was “burning” and that it “hurt.” His breaths then became snores and about a minute after the procedure began, all movement stopped. 

Despite fears from his attorneys that a vein would not be found for the IVs, prison technicians had one needle inserted in his left hand three minutes after he was strapped to the death chamber gurney. The second IV was inserted in his right hand after another three minutes.

He stared intently at relatives of two of his victims who watched through a window a few feet from him, but never said anything to them.

He was pronounced dead at 6:32 p.m., about 15 minutes after the lethal dose started. The execution was the seventh this year in Texas, the country’s most active death penalty state.

The four slaying victims included 20-year-old Inez Deaton, a friend of Bible’s cousin who was found on the banks of a Houston bayou in 1979. Investigators determined she had been raped and fatally stabbed with an ice pick. The killing went unsolved for decades before Bible linked himself to the case, and a jury decided in 2003 that the man who became known in Houston as “the ice pick killer” should die for the slaying.

The three other killings all occurred in North Texas on the same day in May 1983. The victims were Bible’s sister-in-law, Tracy Powers; her 4-month-old son, Justin; and Powers’ roommate, Pam Hudgins.

AP