Betty Lou Beets was the second woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. A Henderson County jury convicted her in October 1985 of the capital murder of her fifth husband, Jimmy Don Beets, a Dallas Fire Department captain who vanished from Cedar Creek Lake in August 1983 and was presumed drowned. Nearly two years later, acting on an informant's tip, investigators dug up his remains from a flower planter in the front yard of the couple's mobile home. Behind the same home, under a storage shed, they found the remains of her fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Barker, who had not been seen since 1981. She was charged in Barker's death as well, but that case never went to trial.
The prosecution's theory was that she killed Jimmy Don Beets for money: his city life insurance, his firefighter's pension and his property. That theory raised a legal question the Texas courts had never answered, whether a person who kills a spouse to collect insurance commits "murder for remuneration" under the state's capital murder statute. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals first said no and threw out her capital conviction, then reversed itself ten months later. Her case went on to divide the full federal appeals court in New Orleans over her trial lawyer's decision to take the media rights to her story as his fee. In her last years she and her supporters argued that she was a battered woman whose history of abuse no jury had heard. Prosecutors, the victim's son and the Texas parole board answered that she had never admitted the crime or shown remorse. She was executed on February 24, 2000, after Governor George W. Bush declined to grant a 30-day reprieve.
She was born Betty Lou Dunevant on March 12, 1937, in North Carolina, according to Texas prison records. In a 1995 Dallas Observer profile she described a pine cabin with no electricity, running water or glass in the windows, where her parents, Louise and James Dunevant, sharecropped tobacco. The family later moved to Newport News, Virginia, to work in the cotton mills.
As a small child she lost most of her hearing. In her own account, published by her supporters before her execution, she said a case of measles with a long, high fever left her with very little hearing, and that she taught herself to lip read without knowing what she was doing; the Dallas Observer reported the same cause, measles and ear infections, at about age five. An Amnesty International appeal in January 2000 instead said she became nearly deaf from meningitis at six. She did not get hearing aids until she was about 40.
The rest of her childhood is known mainly from her own later statements and from material her appeal lawyers gathered. She told the Dallas Observer that when she was about 13 her mother suffered a breakdown and was in and out of a state hospital for years, leaving her to cook, clean and care for two younger siblings, and that her father drank heavily and hit her. In the account circulated in 2000 she said she had been raped at the age of five and could not remember by whom. Amnesty International summarized her early life as one of extreme poverty and nearly constant physical, sexual and emotional abuse. These are her claims and her advocates' summaries; they were never tested in court.
In the late spring of 1952, at 15, she left the ninth grade to marry Robert Branson, who was 18. The marriage lasted 17 years and produced six children: Faye, Connie, Shirley, Phyllis, Robert II (known as Robbie) and Bobby. The family moved to Mesquite, east of Dallas, where Branson worked as a welder. She later said he was jealous, controlling and abusive, and that she attempted suicide more than once during the marriage; Branson did not respond to the Dallas Observer's calls. She filed for divorce in December 1969, accusing him of cruel treatment. Her children's affidavits, filed during her appeals, described the divorce as the point at which she began drinking heavily and the family came apart.
In 1970 she married Bill Lane, a house painter. Family members told the Dallas Observer that Lane beat her and threatened her with guns. They divorced within months but stayed in contact. At 1:45 a.m. on January 17, 1972, Dallas County deputies called to her apartment in Hutchins found Lane in the yard with two gunshot wounds in the back. She told investigators that Lane had threatened her at a club that night and later broke down her back door, and that she fired a .22 pistol at him. Lane told deputies she had invited him over to talk and shot him as he backed out of the door. She was first charged with assault with intent to murder; the charge was reduced to misdemeanor aggravated assault after Lane signed an affidavit taking the blame, and she paid a $100 fine and $50 in costs. At her 1985 trial she admitted on cross-examination that she had a misdemeanor conviction for shooting Lane, whom the appeals court described as having been hit in the side and stomach. Lane survived. The two remarried and divorced again in September 1973. Lane died of a heart attack in 1982, the Dallas Observer reported.
She moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, and worked in a convenience store, where she met a salesman, Ronnie Threlkeld. They married in February 1978 after living together on and off. She later accused him of beating and choking her, and her son Bobby backed that account in an affidavit; Threlkeld told the Dallas Observer he had slapped her once. The marriage ended in Dallas after she accused him of an involvement with one of her teenage daughters, which he denied. Threlkeld said that the next day she tried to run him down with her car as he loaded his belongings; she said he had tried to ram hers. No charge from that episode was reported.
Doyle Wayne Barker was a construction worker. He and Betty Lou married in October 1978 and moved to Cedar Creek Lake, a reservoir about 60 miles southeast of Dallas, where she had bought a lot and a mobile home and found work as a bartender and waitress. They divorced in July 1980 and remarried in July 1981. His age was never reported, and little else about his life has been published.
She later said Barker beat her repeatedly. Her son-in-law Leon, Faye's husband, said in an affidavit that he had seen her several times with black eyes, bruises and split lips, and that she told him "Wayne" had done it. He said that in 1981 he saw her after an especially severe beating and that he and Faye photographed her injuries.
Barker disappeared in 1981. According to the Dallas Observer, she told people that after another beating he walked out saying he was going for cigarettes and never came back, leaving his new pickup truck in the driveway. Her son Bobby, who lived with the couple part of the time, testified in 1985 that when he asked where Barker had gone, his mother told him he had just left. No one appears to have searched for him. His remains were not found until June 1985.
Jimmy Don Beets joined the Dallas Fire Department in 1957 and spent about 26 years there, rising from driver to captain. By 1983 he commanded the No. 9 station in southeast Dallas and lived at Cedar Creek Lake on his days off, near his parents, who had retired there. He had survived a heart attack about five years earlier while pouring a concrete sidewalk for a blind neighbor, and after a year's leave he was cleared to return to duty. Neighbors and friends described a man who spent his free time helping people nearby, hunting and fishing. He was aiming to retire in 1987.
He had one child, a son, James Don Beets, known as Jamie, born on Christmas Eve 1957, an hour after Jimmy Don drove his first wife to the hospital. Father and son were often at odds; Jimmy Don disliked his son's drug use and his trouble holding a job, but he paid his bail as a teenager and helped feed his family when he was out of work. His first marriage ended in 1968, and his second, to a woman named Suzy, ended for good in 1981. A third marriage lasted less than a year.
In the summer of 1982 he met Betty Lou Barker, then tending bar at the Cedar Club in Seven Points. They married at the Kaufman County courthouse on August 19, 1982. It was her seventh marriage and his fourth. Even before the wedding he moved into her two-bedroom mobile home in a grove of cedars in the Cherokee Shores area, about 50 feet from the water, and kept his boat at the back of the lot. His own house, a three-bedroom lake house he owned outright, burned down in December 1982 while his son's family was living in it; he was rebuilding it in 1983. His former wife Suzy told the Dallas Observer that the couple seemed very much in love.
In May 1983, three months before he disappeared, a niece of his who worked for J.C. Penney Life Insurance noticed an application for a $10,000 policy on his life that listed his wife as beneficiary and gave the mailing address of one of her daughters. A document examiner later testified that the signature "J.D. Beets" on the application was in her handwriting. Jimmy Don cancelled the policy himself on May 19, 1983, and, by her own later account, told her not to do anything like that again until they had talked about it. She said at trial she had thought the form was for a credit card.
On the evening of August 6, 1983, customers at the Redwood Beach Marina on Cedar Creek Lake noticed an empty boat drifting nearby and towed it in. Inside were a fishing license in the name of Jimmy Don Beets, a life jacket and a bottle of nitroglycerin heart tablets, with some of the tablets scattered on the floor. The propeller was missing. The marina owner telephoned the number listed for Jimmy Don Beets, and his wife came to the marina and identified the boat and the license. She said he had gone fishing the night before and had not come home. High winds put off the search until morning.
Over the next three weeks the Henderson County sheriff's office, the Coast Guard, Texas Parks and Wildlife and hundreds of volunteers, many of them Dallas firefighters, searched the lake. No body was found. Two days after the boat was found, his widow picked out a casket and burial plot at a Seagoville funeral home and went to the fire department to collect his paycheck. A Dallas Fire Department chaplain, Denny Burris, met her several times in the following weeks. He later testified that she asked whether she was covered by any city life insurance and whether she would receive his pension. When he checked, he found about $110,000 in life insurance and a pension of about $1,200 a month, and he told her the city attorney's view that, with no body, insurance proceeds could not be paid for seven years.
Jamie Beets did not believe his father had drowned. He told the Dallas Observer that the scattered pills, which his father had not needed for at least two years, and the missing propeller, removed with a tool that was still in the boat's toolbox, convinced him something was wrong. He asked a local lawyer to tie up his father's assets and pressed the sheriff's office and the district attorney, Bill Bandy, who said he had no evidence of foul play. Over the next year and a half he fought his stepmother over the rebuilt lake house; she tried to sell it, and he blocked the sale. A state fire investigator told him that witnesses had seen her enter and leave the house before each of two fires there, but no charges were filed. In July 1984 she sold her husband's boat for $3,250, signing his name to the title. On March 5, 1985, at the request of her lawyer, E. Ray Andrews, a Henderson County judge declared Jimmy Don Beets dead and made her administrator of his estate. Through a Dallas law firm Andrews had brought in, she applied for his pension and life insurance. The Dallas Police and Fire Pension Board voted to approve a settlement that was to be finalized on June 10, 1985.
In late April 1985 Rick Rose, a Henderson County sheriff's investigator who as a patrol deputy had helped search the lake, arrested a small-time local offender who offered information in exchange for leniency. The man, who had given Rose reliable tips before, said he had been drinking with Betty Lou Beets at a motel and that she had told him the last man she had been with was buried in her front yard. Rose and a district attorney's investigator, Mike O'Brien, had him take a polygraph, which indicated he was telling the truth.
The investigators found that almost nothing had been done on the case beyond the missing-person reports. They traced one of her daughters, Phyllis Coleman, in Dallas, and a Dallas homicide detective questioned her. According to the Dallas Observer, Phyllis said she had heard from her brother Robbie that their mother had killed Jimmy Don and buried him in the yard, and that her sister Shirley had told her their mother had also killed Barker and that Robbie and Shirley had helped. For about six weeks the investigators questioned friends and neighbors and a man then living with her, Raymond Bone, who agreed to keep them informed of her whereabouts. Robbie and Shirley would not talk.
On June 8, 1985, Mansfield police arrested Betty Lou Beets on a Henderson County warrant and turned her over to Rose, who booked her into the county jail. O'Brien later recalled that when he told her he was going to search her yard for her husband's body she answered that Jimmy Don had drowned, and that when he said he would then look for Barker she asked for her lawyer. She declined to talk to officers.
That evening, with a search warrant, officers used a backhoe to knock over the brick-and-wood planter in front of the porch. Jimmy Don had built it, about four feet square and four feet tall, shortly before he disappeared, and it had been filled with peat moss and flowers. Under it they found a blue sleeping bag holding his remains, about 30 feet from the front door. Behind the mobile home, under a shed Jimmy Don had built over an earlier cinder-block patio, they found a second sleeping bag with a second set of remains. The Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Charles Petty, identified them as Jimmy Don Beets, through dental records, and Doyle Wayne Barker. Two bullets were recovered from Jimmy Don's remains, one from the skull and one from the trunk, and three from Barker's. A firearms examiner testified that all five were .38-caliber, the same caliber as a collector's pistol taken earlier from her home in an unrelated incident, but he could not say they came from that gun.
She was charged with murder in both deaths and held on $1 million bail. Her daughter Shirley Stegner, then 26, was arrested the next day at her home in Balch Springs and also charged with murder, with the same bail. After investigators learned of the J.C. Penney application, the district attorney concluded he could prove a financial motive and pursued capital murder in Jimmy Don's death. A grand jury indicted her on July 11, 1985, for murdering Jimmy Don Beets "for remuneration and the promise of remuneration," naming his city retirement benefits, his life insurance and his estate. Two days before her arrest, fire investigators had found that her mobile home was deliberately set alight with diesel fuel; she blamed Jamie Beets, the Dallas Observer reported. No one was reported charged over that fire.
Texas law in 1983 made murder a capital crime only when it came with one of a short list of aggravating circumstances. One was committing a murder "for remuneration or the promise of remuneration," or hiring another person to kill for it. The provision had been used against killers for hire and the people who paid them. Prosecutors in Henderson County read it more broadly: a person who kills in order to collect insurance, a pension or an inheritance is killing for remuneration. That reading made her case a death penalty case. Without it, the killing of Jimmy Don Beets would have been ordinary murder, which did not carry a death sentence.
The trial opened in October 1985 in the 173rd District Court in Athens, the county seat, before a packed courtroom. E. Ray Andrews, the best-known criminal defense lawyer in Athens and her lawyer since 1981 or 1982, represented her with Gilbert Hargrave. Bandy prosecuted. In his opening he called her "cold as a well-chain" and described the killing as a calculated financial scheme. A defense motion for a change of venue was denied.
Her son Robbie Branson was the central witness. He had moved in with his mother and stepfather at 17, after a burglary arrest in Navarro County, and was on felony probation at the time of the trial; Andrews had represented him in that case, and Jimmy Don had paid the bail and legal fee. Robbie testified that on the night of August 5, 1983, his mother told him in the kitchen that she was going to kill Jimmy Don that night and told him to leave because she did not want him there when she did it. He rode his motorcycle around the lake for about two hours. When he came back, he said, she told him it was done, and he helped her put the body, wrapped in a sleeping bag, into the planter he and Jimmy Don had built. The next day, he said, she put some of Jimmy Don's heart pills in the boat; he took off the propeller, drove the boat out into the lake, abandoned it and swam to a landing, where she picked him up. He said he had kept quiet for almost two years to protect his mother and began cooperating after her arrest to protect himself. The judge instructed the jury that Robbie was an accomplice as a matter of law, so his testimony needed independent corroboration.
Shirley Stegner testified that her mother had told her beforehand of a plan to kill Jimmy Don and make it look like a drowning, that her mother called her on the night of August 6 and, asked whether she had done "what we had talked about," said yes, and that weeks later her mother told her that she and Robbie had buried him in the planter. "I cared very much for Jimmy Don Beets," Shirley told the jury. "He was the best stepfather that I'd ever had."
The State also called the marina owner, the deputy who visited the home the morning after the boat was found, the search coordinators, the chaplain, the niece who caught the J.C. Penney application, the document examiner, a city benefits supervisor who testified to an $86,000 city life policy naming her as beneficiary, the pension fund administrator, who described the settlement of $15,852.59 plus $790.42 a month that was cancelled when she was arrested, and an insurer that had issued a policy of $23,428 with a $20,000 accidental death benefit. Petty testified that a fracture of Jimmy Don's cheekbone could have come from a fight with another man.
Andrews had won a pretrial ruling keeping out any evidence about Barker's death, for which she was not on trial. Near the end of the State's case the judge reversed himself, and Shirley was allowed to testify about it. She said that in October 1981, as she and her mother sat drinking by a campfire outside the mobile home, her mother said she was going to kill Barker because she could not take any more beatings and did not want him around, and because the trailer was in his name and she would lose it in a divorce. A few days later, Shirley testified, her mother told her that she had shot Barker in the head while he slept, firing through a pillow, and that the first shot had misfired. Shirley said that out of fear for her mother she helped drag his body to a hole already dug in the back yard, ostensibly for a barbecue pit, and that the next day they bought cinder blocks and built a patio over it. "I was afraid of my mother," she testified.
On cross-examination Shirley said she too was charged with Barker's murder and that her bail had been cut from $1 million to $5,000, but that she had been promised nothing for her testimony. Andrews attacked her credibility hard. The defense's own lawyers later told a federal court that the Barker evidence was devastating. The appeals court noted that apart from the remark about the trailer, Shirley never said her mother had killed Barker for money, and that there was no evidence she had gained anything from his death. Asked on the stand only whether she had known Barker was buried on her property, Betty Lou Beets said she had not. This testimony is the only account of Barker's death given under oath. It was never tested before a jury on a charge of killing him.
The defense case was that Robbie had shot his stepfather and his mother had covered it up out of love. Her daughter Faye Lane testified that Robbie and Shirley had never told her their mother confessed anything to them. Raymond Bone said he did not believe she was guilty because she had always treated him decently. Her son Bobby testified that Robbie and Jimmy Don had argued and fought after a family trip to Virginia a few weeks before the disappearance.
She testified on the tenth day of the trial. She said Jimmy Don and Robbie argued in the bedroom over damage to the boat and Robbie quitting his job, that she heard a shot, and that she found her husband on the floor bleeding from the head and mouth. She said Robbie told her he had not meant to do it. She described wrapping the body, holding it and trying to explain to him why she was going to bury him in the yard to protect her son. "I could never hurt Jimmy Don," she said. "I loved Jimmy Don. Nobody's ever been as good to me as he was." She admitted forging his name on the insurance application and the boat title and falsely reporting him missing. She said it was her lawyer, not she, who had suggested pursuing the insurance and pension, and that she had never felt entitled to any of it. On cross-examination she admitted a misdemeanor conviction for public lewdness, from an incident at a Dallas topless bar in 1980, and the misdemeanor conviction for shooting Bill Lane. Bandy pointed out to the jury that she had not cried on the stand.
The jury found her guilty of capital murder; the Texas Attorney General's office and the federal courts date the verdict October 11, 1985, while the Dallas Observer reported that jurors deliberated about six hours and returned the verdict at about 9 p.m. on October 12. She collapsed and was hospitalized overnight. Neither side offered new evidence at the punishment stage. On October 14 the jury answered the special issues in the State's favor and the judge sentenced her to death. She was received at the women's death row at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville the same day as prisoner No. 810.
On October 8, 1985, two days into the trial, she signed a contract giving all literary and media rights to her story to Andrews's son. Andrews later testified that it was signed after an attempt to collect his fee from her children fell through. The trial judge did not learn of it until a hearing three months later, when the prosecutor asked her about it, and he did not ask whether she waived her right to a lawyer free of conflicts. The contract became the subject of a State Bar grievance, but Andrews was not disciplined for it. The Dallas Observer found no sign the rights ever earned him any money.
On November 12, 1987, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed her conviction. The court found the evidence ample to prove she murdered her husband, but held that the State had not proved murder for remuneration. Writing for the court, Judge Marvin Teague concluded that the statute covered killers for hire and those who hire them; the insurers and the city pension fund that stood to pay her had nothing to do with the killing. Judge Clinton, writing for four judges, put it plainly: a person who kills expecting money from a blameless source is not guilty of capital murder under that provision. The court ordered an acquittal on the capital charge only. Three judges dissented.
The State asked for a rehearing, which was granted on February 17, 1988. On September 21, 1988, in an opinion by Judge W. C. Davis, the court affirmed the conviction and the death sentence. The new majority held that "remuneration" in its ordinary sense includes a reward or benefit received because of an act, and that a person who kills in order to receive insurance or retirement benefits payable on the victim's death commits murder for remuneration. It pointed to a 1979 decision in which the court had affirmed the death sentence of a father who killed his eight-year-old son for life insurance, and it also upheld the admission of the Barker evidence, finding the two deaths so similar in method and concealment that the evidence was relevant to who killed Jimmy Don. Judge Clinton, joined by two colleagues, dissented, accusing the majority of revisionism against clear legislative history. Judge Teague dissented separately. "Ms. Beets is evidently a greedy and insensitive killer," he wrote, but he added that the difference between her life and death came down to a few judges' opinion of the meaning of one English word. The court denied her further motion for rehearing on January 25, 1989, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on June 26, 1989.
An execution date of November 8, 1989, was stayed so she could file a state habeas petition, which the Court of Criminal Appeals denied on June 27, 1990. A second date, December 6, 1990, was stayed by a federal district judge on December 4. After hearings in January and April 1991, Judge Parker of the federal district court in the Eastern District of Texas granted her a writ of habeas corpus on May 9, 1991.
The judge found that Andrews was a material witness on the remuneration element. Andrews himself had suggested pursuing the insurance and pension when she came to him, about 18 months after Jimmy Don's disappearance, for help with the fire insurance claim on the lake house, and so could have testified that she did not know of the benefits. By staying on as her lawyer rather than withdrawing to testify, the judge held, Andrews labored under an actual conflict of interest that hurt her defense. He also found the book-rights contract a separate conflict, but one that had not affected Andrews's work. He praised Andrews as a "competent and tenacious" lawyer who had fought for her to the full extent of his ability.
On March 18, 1993, a Fifth Circuit panel reversed. Judge Edith Jones, writing for the panel, called the media rights contract "almost surely unethical" but held that it did not create an actual conflict. The panel rejected her other claims, including that Andrews failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence of abuse; it noted that Andrews had known her personally and represented her before and that she had given him no hint of abuse by earlier husbands, and it doubted that such evidence would have moved a jury that had found a calculated killing for profit. It also upheld the district court's finding that the State had made no secret promises of leniency to Robbie and Shirley, observing that several years later no charges had been pursued against either of them. The full court reheard the case en banc and on September 22, 1995, voted 8 to 5 to reverse the grant of the writ. The majority, again by Judge Jones, held that a lawyer's conflict between his own interests and his client's should be judged by the ordinary test for ineffective counsel, under which a defendant must show both poor performance and actual harm, and found neither. Judge King, writing for the five dissenters, would have upheld the writ. The Supreme Court declined review in 1996.
Her remaining claims went back to the district court, which denied them on September 2, 1998. On June 28, 1999, a Fifth Circuit panel rejected her argument that applying the remuneration statute to an insurance killing was a new and unforeseeable expansion of the law that violated due process. The plain words of the statute and the 1979 decision in the father's insurance case, the court held, gave fair warning. Rehearing was denied on August 18, 1999, and the Supreme Court denied review on January 18, 2000.
Andrews was later elected Henderson County district attorney. In about 1994 he was charged with soliciting $300,000 to drop a murder charge against a Corsicana businessman accused of killing his wife. He checked into a hospital for treatment of substance abuse and gambling addiction, pleaded guilty under a plea agreement and went to federal prison. His co-counsel at her trial, Gil Hargrave, said in an affidavit for her appeal that Andrews had done very little investigation and spent his afternoons during the trial drinking at a VFW hall. Her later lawyers and supporters cited both facts often.
By the time her last appeals ran out, the case had become a cause for groups working against domestic violence and the death penalty. Her lawyer, Joseph Margulies, and her supporters argued that she had been abused as a child and by her husbands, that experts retained after her trial had diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, battered women's syndrome and organic brain damage, that she was hearing-impaired and learning disabled, and that she had been abusing alcohol and diet pills at the time. Amnesty International called her history one of severe physical and sexual abuse from an early age and argued that the jury had heard none of it, and that it had never heard evidence contradicting the financial motive that made the case capital. It also stressed that Andrews's fee depended on the value of her story, which, Amnesty argued, would be worth more if she lost.
Her supporters also invoked a 1991 Texas measure calling for the parole board to review the cases of battered women convicted of killing family members, and said she had never been notified or reviewed under it. Margulies said that her daughters had given an earlier defense lawyer photographs of her after beatings and that a proper investigation would have found the evidence the jury never saw. She said she did not remember what happened on the night Jimmy Don died. "I wouldn't willingly do that," she told CNN in a death row interview, "but I don't remember what happened then." In a statement circulated by her supporters she wrote that to execute her was to tell every battered woman that there was no end but death.
Human Rights Watch urged Bush to grant a reprieve, citing the abuse allegations, the lawyer's conduct and the book-rights conflict. Two United Nations special rapporteurs, Asma Jahangir, on extrajudicial executions, and Radhika Coomaraswamy, on violence against women, wrote to Bush asking him to consider "the violent abuse which Betty Lou Beets suffered at the hands of her spouses" and its effect on her actions. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty also wrote. The governor's office said it had received 2,108 calls and letters opposing the execution and 57 in favor.
The other side of the argument came from the record and the victim's family. Her claims of abuse surfaced only in her appeals and were not part of her trial, where she had testified that Jimmy Don treated her better than anyone ever had and blamed her son. The Dallas Observer found no evidence that Jimmy Don ever physically abused her, and reported that people who dealt with her did not see her as brain-damaged; she earned a GED in prison. O'Brien, the investigator, rejected the idea that she was a helpless victim. James Beets, Jimmy Don's son, said she had told friends that her husband of 11 months was the best thing that had happened to her. "Why is she saying what she is saying about my daddy?" he asked. A victims' advocate, Dianne Clements, said no one was talking about the survivors of the men who died. One of the jurors, Connie Harrington, wrote to Bush that the jury had decided correctly and that she had killed for the insurance money.
On Tuesday, February 22, 2000, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles refused her requests for a 180-day reprieve and for commutation. ABC News reported that the board's chairman said she had never confessed or shown remorse and had not shown that domestic violence caused the crime. At the hearing her daughter Faye Lane said she had seen her mother abused all her life. "I'm not saying that my mother should go free," she said, "but to be allowed to live out her remaining years in prison."
Under Texas law the governor could commute a death sentence only on the board's recommendation; without one, his only power was a single 30-day reprieve. On February 23, U.S. District Judge James Nowlin in Austin dismissed a civil rights suit over the 1991 review provision, calling the request for a stay "yet another example of a prisoner attempting to delay execution just prior to the execution date." The Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court rejected appeals the next day.
Bush, then campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, flew back to Austin and on the afternoon of February 24 issued a written statement. "After careful review of the evidence of the case, I concur with the jury that Betty Lou Beets is guilty of this murder," he said, adding that he was confident the state and federal courts had thoroughly reviewed her claims. He had said beforehand that the question he would ask was whether she was guilty.
She spent the morning with relatives, declined a last meal and, according to a prison spokesman, wrote letters, read the Bible and talked with the chaplain while she waited. About 100 people protested outside the Walls Unit in Huntsville. She was taken from the holding cell at 6 p.m. and strapped to the gurney at 6:01. Asked by the warden whether she wished to make a final statement, she did not respond. The lethal drugs began at 6:08, and a contract physician pronounced her dead at 6:18 p.m., Larry Todd of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice told reporters. The Associated Press reported that she made no eye contact with the victim's family but smiled at her own relatives in the next witness room. Witnesses included relatives of Jimmy Don Beets, among them his son and his sister; none of her children attended.
She was 62, two weeks short of her 63rd birthday. She was the 208th person executed in Texas since 1982, the oldest up to that time, the fourth woman executed in the United States since 1976 and the second in Texas since the Civil War, after Karla Faye Tucker in 1998. She left five children, nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Outside the prison, James Beets asked that God be with her family. "Now she knows what we feel like," he said.
After the trial Jamie Beets was declared his father's sole heir and received about $150,000 in benefits and property, the Dallas Observer reported. Jimmy Don's skull, held as evidence, was buried with the rest of his remains in November 1989. Jamie said for years afterward that he suffered nightmares, and that he had set out to rebuild his life.
Neither Robbie Branson nor Shirley Stegner was prosecuted for the burials; the Fifth Circuit noted in 1993 that no charges had been pursued against either of them. Her son Bobby died after being struck by a car in about 1994. Shirley, who had remarried, declined to discuss her mother in 1995 and last visited her on Mother's Day 1993.
The case appears in Irene Pence's book Buried Memories (2001). In the law, Beets v. State remains a leading Texas decision that killing for insurance or other death benefits can be capital murder for remuneration, and the en banc decision in Beets v. Scott is still cited on how federal courts judge a defense lawyer's personal conflicts of interest.
Proven and final: that Betty Lou Beets murdered Jimmy Don Beets, and that she did so for remuneration as the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals construed that term, after it had first held the opposite.
Charged, never tried: the death of Doyle Wayne Barker. The only sworn account is Shirley Stegner's testimony at the 1985 trial, which was admitted as evidence of a similar act, not tried as a charge. Betty Lou Beets denied knowing Barker was buried on her property, and in 1995 she said Shirley had made up the story and suggested that Bill Lane had killed Barker. Lane died in 1982 and never answered that claim.
Who fired the shots in 1983: she testified that Robbie shot his stepfather during a fight; Robbie denied it. The jury, the state courts and the federal courts rejected her account, although the pathologist allowed that the facial fracture could have come from a fight. By 2000 she said she could not remember what happened.
Abuse: her account of childhood abuse and of beatings by Branson, Lane, Threlkeld and Barker comes from her own statements, her children's affidavits and her appeal lawyers' experts, and was never heard by a jury. Threlkeld disputed it in part. No source reports abuse by Jimmy Don Beets, and she testified he treated her well.
Knowledge of the benefits: the State said she asked about insurance and the pension within weeks; she said her lawyer raised the idea 18 months later. The federal courts held that Andrews's failure to testify on this point did not deny her a fair trial.
Variations between sources: the cause of her deafness (measles in her own account and the Dallas Observer; meningitis in Amnesty International's appeal); the lake where the boat was found (Cedar Creek Lake in the trial record and press; "Lake Athens" in the 1995 federal opinion and Amnesty material); the date the boat was found (the night of August 6 in the trial record; August 12 in the Attorney General's 2000 summary); the verdict date (October 11 or 12, 1985); Jimmy Don's age (45 in the Dallas Observer; 46 in Texas prison and prosecutors' summaries); whether he was retired (the Attorney General and the 1999 opinion say retired; the trial record and the Dallas Observer describe him as still serving); and the count of executions under Bush (120 or 121).
March 12, 1937: Betty Lou Dunevant is born in North Carolina.
Childhood: loses most of her hearing after a childhood illness; family moves to Newport News, Virginia.
Spring 1952: at 15, marries Robert Branson; they have six children.
December 1969: files for divorce from Branson.
1970: marries Bill Lane; they divorce within months.
January 17, 1972: shoots Lane at her Hutchins apartment; he survives. She later pleads to misdemeanor aggravated assault.
September 1973: divorces Lane a second time.
February 1978: marries Ronnie Threlkeld; the marriage ends within the year.
October 1978: marries Doyle Wayne Barker and moves to Cedar Creek Lake.
July 1980: divorces Barker; arrested for public lewdness in Dallas (misdemeanor conviction).
July 1981: remarries Barker.
About October 1981: Barker disappears.
August 19, 1982: marries Jimmy Don Beets in Kaufman County.
December 1982: Jimmy Don's lake house burns.
May 19, 1983: Jimmy Don cancels a $10,000 policy applied for in his name without his knowledge.
August 5 to 6, 1983: Jimmy Don Beets is shot; his boat is found drifting on the evening of August 6; a three-week search follows.
July 24, 1984: she sells his boat, signing his name.
March 5, 1985: Jimmy Don is declared dead; she is made administrator of his estate.
Late April 1985: an informant's tip reopens the case.
June 8, 1985: arrested in Mansfield; both bodies recovered from her yard. Shirley Stegner is arrested the next day.
July 11, 1985: indicted for capital murder (murder for remuneration).
October 8, 1985: signs media rights to her story over to her lawyer's son.
October 11 or 12, 1985: convicted of capital murder in Athens.
October 14, 1985: sentenced to death; received on death row as No. 810.
November 12, 1987: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reverses the capital conviction.
September 21, 1988: on rehearing, the court affirms the conviction and death sentence.
June 26, 1989: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
November 1989: execution date stayed for state habeas proceedings.
December 4, 1990: federal court stays a December 6 execution date.
May 9, 1991: federal district court grants a writ of habeas corpus.
March 18, 1993: Fifth Circuit panel reverses.
September 22, 1995: full Fifth Circuit, 8 to 5, reverses the writ.
September 2, 1998: district court denies remaining claims.
June 28, 1999: Fifth Circuit affirms.
January 18, 2000: Supreme Court denies review.
February 22, 2000: Board of Pardons and Paroles refuses reprieve and commutation.
February 23, 2000: federal judge in Austin dismisses her suit over battered-women review.
February 24, 2000: Governor Bush declines a reprieve; she is executed at Huntsville, pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m.