Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  The last hope on 26 February 2000, was that Texas Governor George W. Bush would grant clemency, but it was not forthcoming. In a written statement, he said:

  After careful review of the evidence of the case, I concur with the jury that Betty Lou Beets is guilty of this murder. I’m confident that the courts, both state and federal, have thoroughly reviewed all the issues raised by the defendant.

  Betty Lou had no last meal and made no final statement to the world. She made no eye contact with the family of her victims as they led her into the execution chamber and strapped her to the gurney, but she smiled at members of her own family who were present. The smile remained on the face of the sixty-two-year-old grandmother as she slipped into unconsciousness.

  Darlie Lynn Routier

  It was the early hours of 6 June 1996, in the upmarket neighbourhood of Dalrock Heights Addition near the town of Rowlett in Texas. Nights were normally quiet in this peaceful, law-abiding community but that night the dispatcher for the Rowlett Police Department was surprised by a 911 call at 2.31 a.m. At the other end was a hysterical woman. She shouted down the phone, ‘Somebody broke in to our house…They just stabbed me and my children!…My little boys are dying! Oh my God, my babies are dying!’ As the woman continued sobbing incoherently, the dispatcher traced the call to 5801 Eagle Avenue, a house owned by Darin and Darlie Routier. Having alerted the emergency services, the dispatcher calmed the woman sufficiently to get some details of what had happened. She had been in bed, she said, when someone came into the house and stabbed her two sons, six-year-old Devon and five-year-old Damon, before stabbing her. She fought the intruder who ran out of the house through the garage, tossing the knife away as he left.

  At the house, Darlie’s husband, Darin, who had been sleeping upstairs but had been woken by his wife’s screams, came running down. In the entertainment room he found the boys soaked in blood and his wife, her nightdress stained red by her blood, screaming into a mobile phone. Running to Devon, he saw two huge wounds in his chest. The boy had no pulse and his eyes were wide open and empty of life. Turning his attention to Damon, he saw some blood coming through the back of his shorts. As he breathed, his lungs rattled.

  Darin decided the best thing to do was to try to resuscitate Devon. He started to give him the kiss of life, but horrifically, as he did so, blood sprayed out back onto his face.

  The first police officer arrived on the scene moments later and took charge, ordering Darlie to grab a towel and apply pressure to Damon’s wounds, to try to staunch the flow of blood. Strangely, however, she did not follow his instructions, merely standing in the middle of the carnage, screaming that the killer might still be in the garage.

  Paramedics and other police officers arrived and took over. The policemen left the medics to get on with their desperate work and followed the trail of blood through the house, through the kitchen and utility room to the garage that joined on to the house. There was no one there, but a screen on the side window of the garage had been cut down the middle. They searched the remainder of the house, finding a third child, six-month-old Drake, unharmed upstairs in his cot. But the intruder was gone. The kitchen, through which he had probably fled, was a mess, the floor was awash with blood and a butcher’s knife, dripping with blood, lay on a work surface. Noting that some pricey jewellery and Darlie’s purse lay there untouched, they deduced that robbery was unlikely to have been the intruder’s motive.

  Devon was dead by the time the medics arrived but Damon was still alive, although only just. He was stretchered out of the house for the journey to Baylor Medical Center, but died before the ambulance reached its destination.

  As Darlie Routier was attended to, she told police officers that she had been asleep on the sofa when she felt a man on top of her. She awoke, screamed and started to try to fight him off. At that point he ran out of the room. When she looked round, however, she discovered that he had already knifed her sons. She described the killer as of medium height and dressed in black jeans, T-shirt and a baseball cap.

  She was driven off for medical treatment, leaving officers to scour the house for clues. They were concerned, however. Something did not seem right about this night of carnage at 5801 Eagle Avenue.

  For a start, the children had been killed by deep, thrusting stabs, but Darlie Routier’s wounds to the neck and arm were more superficial – described by experts as ‘hesitation wounds’. The slash on her throat, although close to a vital artery, had been made at a forty-five degree downward angle, which could suggest a self-inflicted wound. Then there was the floor of the kitchen which was covered in broken glass. Darlie had run into the kitchen, picked up the bloody knife and put it on the work surface, in the process destroying fingerprints that might have been on it. However, her feet showed no cuts from the glass. Another knife in the kitchen was found to show traces of the screen that had been slashed by the intruder to gain access to the garage; interestingly, the soil under that screen showed no trace of a footprint. Importantly, the sink in the kitchen had undoubtedly been washed out but traces of blood were discovered on the cupboard doors below. Investigators began to construct a scenario where Darlie killed her sons and then inflicted her own wounds over the sink before washing away the blood.

  There were other things that made them uneasy: she never once asked how her sons were or even whether they were still alive and when she arrived at the hospital, she was wheeled into the same ward as them, but had absolutely no response to the sight of their bodies; spots of blood on her clothing suggested that she had been in close proximity to them when they were stabbed; there was no real sign of a struggle in the entertainment room and there was no blood trail away from the property.

  Darlie Peck had been born in Pennsylvania in 1970 but moved to Lubbock, Texas, at the age of seven after her parents divorced and her mother remarried. She met and fell in love with Darin Routier when they were both teenagers and they married in August 1988, honeymooning in style in Jamaica. They would continue to live in style, style that they could not really afford.

  Darin worked in the computer chip industry before launching his own business, testing circuit boards, from his home. Before long, the business had grown sufficiently for him to move into premises in an upmarket office building. By this time, too, Devon and Damon had been born, in 1989 and 1991, respectively.

  Business was booming and they amassed enough money to build a $130,000 Georgian-style small mansion in the desirable Dalrock Heights Addition and Darin drove off to work each morning in a gleaming new Jaguar. But, as fast as they were earning it, they were also spending it. Darlie had expensive habits, always wanting the biggest, the best and the gaudiest. When she had breast implants, they were size EE, the kind that topless models in men’s magazines have done. Her clothes bills, meanwhile, were astronomical. They also bought a twenty-seven-foot cabin cruiser that they berthed at the expensive nearby Lake Ray Hubbard Marina.

  As for the boys, Devon and Damon, they seemed more of an encumbrance to Darlie, interfering with her sumptuous lifestyle. They were often left unsupervised, even when very young, according to neighbours.

  By 1995, they were spending more than Darin earned and their money problems started to get to them. They argued about it, but did nothing to stem the flow of cash. Meanwhile, the business started to lose money and creditors piled up. The Saturday before the deaths of the two boys, the bank had denied them a loan of $5,000.

  As police pondered the reason for the boys’ murders, Darlie staged a ghoulish event – a graveside posthumous seventh birthday birthday party for Devon. Present were Darlie and Darin, baby Drake, Darlie’s mother and her sixteen-year-old sister Dana, some friends and other family members and a camera crew from the local TV station. Darlie had contacted them to let them know about the party. The police were also covertly filming and taping the event.

  As the pastor finished his eulogy as they circled the grave, Darlie pulled out a can of Silly String and started to spray its contents across the grav
e of her son, dead for just over a week. She was chewing gum, laughing and shouting, ‘I love you, Devon and Damon!’

  Four days later, she was arrested for the murder of her two children and her trial opened in Kerrville on 16 October 1996. Needless to say, it was sensational. The prosecution pushed for the death penalty although it seemed unlikely that would happen; the last woman to be executed had been during the Civil War, more than a hundred years previously.

  They focused only on the death of Damon, reasoning that they could prosecute her for the murder of Devon if she was only given a life sentence or in the unlikely event of an acquittal.

  The prosecution tore her apart with the substantial amount of evidence that was piled up against her, but her team responded by rebutting the assumption that she was unaffected emotionally by the deaths of her sons. Darin, called to testify, said she had been devastated. Darlie’s testimony had been contradictory before and after her arrest but an expert was called to testify as to the psychological trauma from which she must have been suffering.

  Fatally, however, Darlie was allowed to take the stand as the defence’s final witness. The prosecution team destroyed her, asking why the sink had been cleaned up, why her dog failed to bark when the intruder entered the house and accused her, quite simply, as having lied throughout. She was left distraught and destroyed in front of the jury.

  On 1 February 1997, the jury found her guilty of first-degree murder and three days later she was sentenced to death.

  Thirteen years after Darlie Routier was sentenced, questions remain and many believe she deserves a retrial. A bloody fingerprint was found at the scene, for instance, that cannot be linked to Darlie, her sons, or anyone involved in the investigation. Witness statements are said to have been ignored; one claimed to have seen a man fitting Darlie’s description of her attacker earlier that day, but did not tell police about it until six years after the murders. Photographs of bruises that Darlie had suffered on the night in question were never shown to the jury. Darin also said that the couple’s financial difficulties had been exaggerated, that his business was actually owed $30,000 at the time. It had been said that Darlie had been suicidal prior to the night of 6 June, but Darin refuted these claims. He also said that she did not enquire about her sons on arriving at the hospital because she already knew they were dead. A doctor also pointed out that her neck wound missed her carotid sheath by just two millimetres, almost killing her.

  Her defence team believe that DNA testing would help to get her a retrial but following a review of the evidence, in 2003, the State of Texas upheld her conviction. In September, 2008, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the request for more DNA testing.

  Meanwhile, Darlie remains on death row in a Texas prison, either a heartless murderer or an innocent victim of an overly-aggressive investigation.

  Frances Elaine Newton

  Frances Elaine Newton was only the third woman to be executed by the State of Texas since 1982 and the first black woman executed there since the American Civil War. Those facts alone would make her remarkable, but her case is also made remarkable by the fact that there was absolutely no incontrovertible evidence against her and what evidence the prosecution did bring forward, was suspect.

  She was executed for the shooting to death on 7 April 1988, of her twenty-three-year-old husband Adrian, her seven-year-old son, Alton and her twenty-one-month-old daughter, Farrah. It was alleged that she did it for money, having taken out insurance policies, worth $50,000 each on herself, her husband and both her children. They said that she forged her husband’s signature on the insurance forms and hid from him the fact that she was setting money aside to pay the premiums. She was the beneficiary of the policies.

  The marriage of Frances and Adrian Newton had been in difficulty for some time before that fatal day. Each was involved in an extra-marital relationship and to make matters worse Adrian was using drugs. A marijuana smoker, he had recently graduated to cocaine and was coming home late and was tetchy and difficult to talk to. Nonetheless, their relationship had weathered a number of storms and they had after all been together since they were kids.

  In the version of events as told by Frances, that afternoon they decided to try to work things out. Adrian told her he had stopped using cocaine and marijuana and they smoothed out a few other issues. They finished their conversation and he sat down to watch television.

  Wanting to see for herself that he was no longer using drugs, Frances sneaked into the room where he kept his stash in a cabinet. When she opened it, however, she was horrified to find not drugs, but a gun. She thought back to a whispered conversation between Adrian and his brother earlier that day. It seemed then that something was going on that Adrian did not want her to know about, that he might be in some kind of trouble. No matter what, she did not want there to be a gun in the house, especially as their two children were there.

  She slipped the gun, a .25 calibre Raven Arms pistol, into a duffle bag and when she left the apart-ment at around 6 p.m. to do some errands, she took the bag with her. Little did she know that she would never see Adrian, Farrah or Alton alive again.

  When she had run her errands, at about 7 p.m., she decided to visit her cousin Sondra Nelms. The two spent some time talking before Frances invited Sondra back to her apartment. Turning round as she was backing out of the drive, she noticed the bag containing the gun on the car’s rear seat. She braked and, with Sondra Nelms watching, got out, picked up the bag and took it to a burned-out house next door to Sondra’s house, a property that was actually owned by her parents. There she hid the bag and returned to the car. All of this was confirmed by her companion.

  At around 8 p.m. they pulled up outside the apartment. When they went in, everything initially seemed perfectly normal. Adrian was still sitting down with the television on but it looked as if he had fallen asleep. Frances walked round the couch, however, and screamed. He was covered in blood. She flew towards the children’s bedroom and started to scream uncontrollably. The children were also lying still, covered in blood. Frances was hysterical. In the two hours she had been gone, her life had been wiped out.

  Despite her confused state, Newton told police officers everything she knew. She even told them that she had removed the gun from the house earlier that evening and where she had hidden it. She told them that Adrian was a drug-user and explained that she knew that he owed some money to a drug-dealer. This vital fact was corroborated by Adrian’s brother, Terrence, who even gave them the address of the dealer to whom he owed the money. For some reason, however, they failed to follow up the lead. Later, in court, when Newton’s attorney asked Sheriff’s Officer Frank Pratt whether to his knowledge the drug-dealer was interviewed by anyone in connection with the murders, Pratt replied, ‘No.’

  On 8 April, it was confirmed that the gun the police had retrieved from the duffle bag in the abandoned building was a match for the bullets used in the murders. The gun, it emerged at Frances Newton’s trial, was loaned by its owner to Jeffrey Freelow five or six months before the killings. Freelow identified the gun and testified at Newton’s trial that he kept it in a chest of drawers in his bedroom. Freelow, who had known Frances Newton since the pair had been at high school together, began a relationship with her a couple of months before that murders. He told the court that as Newton often did his laundry, she would have gone into that drawer and would, therefore have had access to the gun.

  It took them two weeks to arrest Frances Newton, after she had cashed in the insurance policies on Adrian and Farrah. They charged her with the murder of twenty-one-month-old Farrah.

  The primary evidence against her was, apart from the insurance, some traces of nitrate – gun residue – on the hem of her skirt. The nitrate, however, might arguably have come from fertiliser at her father’s house that had been transferred from Farrah’s hands onto the skirt.

  Frances Newton insisted she was innocent from the beginning but despite the paucity of evidence, she was found guilty and se
ntenced to death on 24 October 1988. The appeals process began.

  One issue that would not go away was the vexed and complicated matter of the gun. Harris County Sheriff, Sergeant J. J. Freeze told Newton at one point that police had in their possession two guns and Newton’s father has said, under oath, that Freeze told him the same thing, adding that Frances would soon be released. The existence of a second gun was actually confirmed by Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson at one point. She said another gun had been found in the apartment but it had not been fired. With that she tried to dispose of the second gun theory. Soon after, however, Wilson and her boss, District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal withdrew her statement, Wilson saying she had, as she put it, ‘misspoken’. Rosenthal insisted there was only one gun.

  There was also the matter of whether Frances Newton had been properly represented in court. Her court-appointed attorney Ron Mock had a record of incompetence and professional misconduct charges had been brought against him five times. It transpired that Mock had never actually investigated the case. If he had, perhaps he would have pursued the story of Adrian owing money to a drug-dealer, or would have made more of the second gun theory. Newton and her family pleaded with the judge to permit them to replace him. When the judge quizzed Mock, the lawyer admitted that he had neither talked to any prosecution witnesses nor subpoenaed any defence witnesses. The judge granted the motion to remove Mock but, strangely, did not grant a postponement or delay in the trial to allow Newton to find a new attorney. She was left with no alternative other than to continue with her existing attorney.

  The case was raising too many doubts as time passed, but an execution date was set for 1 December 2004. Two hours before the moment when Frances Newton was due to die, however, Texas Governor Rick Perry granted a one hundred-and-twenty-day reprieve to allow time to look at the forensics again.