Deborah Tucker Essay

When women commit a shocking crime or murder, they are most likely to kill the people who are closest to them. To illustrate, Karla Faye Tucker, convicted of murder in Texas in 1984 and was put to death fourteen years later. She was the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1984, and the first in Texas since 1863 when Chipita Rodriguez was hanged for killing a horse trader. The Dallas Morning News asserts that “Tucker, 38, was convicted of using a 3-foot-long pickax to hack Jerry Dean to death during a burglary at his Houston apartment in 1983. Also killed was an overnight guest, Deborah Thornton” (Hoppe). In addition, Karla Faye Tucker also become the second woman put to death in the United States since capital punishment was re-introduced in 1976, shortly after North Carolina own Velma Barfield, who was executed in 1984.

She started smoking with her sisters when she was eight years old, and when she was the age of 10, her parents divorced. By the of age 12, she had turned to drugs and sex, likewise, at 14, she dropped out of school and followed her mother, a rock groupie, into prostitution and began traveling with the Allman Brothers Band, The Marshall Tucker Band, and the Eagles band. When was 16, she was married briefly to Stephen Griffith. By the age 20, she began hanging out with bikers, where she met a woman named Shawn Dean and her husband Jerry Lynn Dean, who introduced her to a man named Danny Garrett in 1981. According to the Texas Monthly, that on June 13, 1983, “Tucker and a male accomplice, [Danny Garrett] sneaked into a Houston apartment and, for no real reason, murdered a man and a woman with a pickax. Each victim suffered more than twenty blows. Tucker continued to hack at her victims long after they were dead and left the pickax sticking out of the woman’s chest. Hardened police officers were haunted for years afterward by the carnage”