Why So Many Want to Save Her

By S.C. Gwynne/Austin

Karla Faye Tucker is the nicest woman on death row. She is so nice, in fact, and so well liked by people who know her that it is virtually impossible to look at this attractive, sweet-natured, born-again Christian and imagine the gruesome crime to which she confessed in Houston, Texas, on June 13, 1983. Back then she was a drug-addicted prostitute who, during a weekend orgy with her boyfriend, had consumed an astonishing quantity of heroin, Valium, speed, percodan, mandrax, marijuana, dilaudid, methadone, tequila and rum. The two then took a pickax and hacked to death Jerry Lynn Dean, 27, her ex-lover, and Deborah Thornton, 32, his companion of the moment, while they slept. Tucker, who left the pickax embedded in Thornton's chest, boasted at her trial that she had experienced an orgasm with each swing of the ax.

She was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to death. Fourteen years later, in the state with the busiest execution chamber in the land, Tucker now finds herself next in line to die. Barring a last-minute delay or commutation, on Feb. 3 she will be strapped to a gurney in Huntsville, Texas, and given a lethal injection that will stop her heart. If that happens, she will become the first woman executed in Texas since Chipita Rodriguez was hanged in 1863 for killing a horse trader--and the first woman in the U.S. since Velma ("Death Row Granny") Barfield was put to death in North Carolina in 1984 for poisoning her boyfriend.

There is no doubt that Tucker is guilty. She says so herself. What makes her case striking is not just her gender but also her apparently profound conversion to Christianity. The latter has prompted an unlikely cohort of supporters to come to her defense at the 11th hour, including Deborah Thornton's brother and Jerry Lynn Dean's sister, the homicide detective who put her on death row, several former prosecutors, televangelist Pat Robertson and thousands of citizens. Her staunchest supporter is Dana Brown, the prison chaplain she met and married two years ago--a relationship that has never been consummated, even by a kiss, because death-row inmates are not allowed contact with visitors. Says Tucker's attorney, George ("Mac") Secrest: "If ever there was a case for commutation, this is the one."

Skeptics respond that jailhouse conversions are both commonplace and not relevant in deciding who receives a pardon. And in spite of efforts to save her, it seems unlikely that either the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles or Governor George W. Bush, who must concur for a sentence to be commuted, will block her execution. Bush, a law-and-order Republican facing a re-election campaign this year, would seem to gain little politically by such a move. Moreover, there simply are not the requisite legal questions or doubts about her guilt that might prompt commutation. Pardon has never been given to anyone in Texas based on religious conversion.

None of which will make it any easier to watch the pleasant, earnestly friendly Tucker become the 145th person killed since Texas resumed the death penalty in 1982. She has said repeatedly in interviews that she is "far removed" from the person who committed the crime. But she is the person almost certain to die for it.

--By S.C. Gwynne/Austin