In September 1996 and again on Christmas Eve, two young women who worked in north Texas schools were found dead in the bathtubs of their apartments at the Peartree complex in east Arlington. Christine Vu taught third grade. Wendie Prescott was a teacher's aide who wanted to become a teacher. Both had been raped, strangled and bound with duct tape. Arlington police believed early on that one man had killed them both. They had his fingerprints and, before long, his DNA. They did not have his name.
They got it in September 2000, almost four years after the second killing, when an FBI fingerprint search matched a print from Prescott's apartment to a man whose prints had gone into the system after a 1999 burglary arrest. Dale Devon Scheanette was convicted of capital murder for Prescott's death in January 2003 and executed in Huntsville on February 10, 2009. He was charged in Vu's death but never tried for it. At his punishment hearing, five women testified that he had attacked and raped them in 1998 and 1999, crimes that DNA linked to him but that were never tried either.
Scheanette was born on May 7, 1973, in Ouachita Parish in northern Louisiana, according to the Texas prison system's records as compiled by the Clark County, Indiana, prosecutor's office. He finished high school; the Texas Department of Criminal Justice lists twelve years of education and earlier work as a machine operator, warehouseman, forklift operator and laborer. An Associated Press report before his execution said investigators for both the prosecution and the defense had found no family problems that could be offered in mitigation.
Very little else about his early life is on the public record. A woman who dated him in the 1990s, interviewed for NBC's Dateline in 2024, said he worked behind the bar at a local club, was big and muscular, often carried a pistol, and was soft-spoken and polite. She said he preferred that she take baths rather than showers, and that once, when she tried to leave, he physically held her back. He had co-signed a lease at the Peartree Apartments in Arlington for a young woman who was then his girlfriend; he later married her and they had a child before they divorced. According to the Dateline account, he had moved out of Peartree before the second killing. The Dallas Morning News in 2009 described Wendie Prescott as his neighbor at Peartree, and at his trial his estranged wife testified that he spent considerable time at the complex around the time of both deaths.
A Dallas police officer who later testified against him said she met him in 1995 or 1996 while she was in uniform at a gas station. He told her he lived in an apartment complex in nearby Lancaster. They spoke on the phone several times over about six months, but she never dated him because, she told the jury, she "had a bad vibe." He liked to call himself a "jack of all trades."
Christine Vu was the second of five children in a family that left Vietnam for the United States at the end of the war and settled in Amarillo, Texas. Her brother Hiep told Dateline she was the "glue" of the family. She was quiet and studious, and as a girl she played teacher with her younger siblings. She earned an education degree, took her first teaching job in Lubbock, and then moved to Arlington to teach third grade at Moore Elementary. Her brother said she loved to travel, to cook and to try new restaurants. Her sister, Dr. Kim Kuo, later told the Dallas Morning News simply: "She loved children." Christine had wanted children of her own.
She lived at Peartree with her boyfriend of a couple of years, Thang Chi Khuu. On Tuesday, September 17, 1996, he came home a little after five o'clock. She usually got home from school around 4:30. According to his account on Dateline, the deadbolt was locked and he waited outside for a time, making calls, before he got in and found her in the bathtub. That night he called her brother Hiep to tell him someone had killed her.
Police found that she had been bound with duct tape, sexually assaulted and manually strangled; the autopsy, as described by the federal district court, also found drowning. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, reviewing its 1996 coverage in 2024, reported that police placed the time of death between about 4:30 and 5:45 p.m., based on when she normally came home. Accounts of her age differ: the Associated Press, the Star-Telegram and the 2003 Dallas Morning News trial coverage give 25; the federal courts, People and the 2009 Dallas Morning News give 26.
The first person investigators looked at was Khuu. Detectives thought his account shifted, and they questioned scratches on his body. Arlington police spokesman Dee Anderson told reporters at the time, "The boyfriend is a suspect: We have told him and he understands that." Khuu gave DNA samples voluntarily, let police search his car and took a polygraph, which, according to Dateline, he failed on questions about hurting her and placing the tape. He was released but stayed under suspicion until the fingerprint evidence excluded him.
That evidence was a high-quality latent print lifted from the inside latch of the deadbolt on Christine's door. It was not Khuu's. Male DNA from two men was recovered; one profile was Khuu's, and the other was unknown. There was no forced entry, and the doors and windows were locked. Investigators came to think the killer might have hidden in a closet and waited.
Wendie Prescott's mother, Ora Lee Prescott, was killed in 1977 on her way home from work, when Wendie and her sisters were small. That killing was never solved. Wendie and her older sister, Skyla, were raised by their aunt and uncle, Brenda and Norman Norwood. Skyla told Dateline she became fiercely protective of her younger sister: "I was like, I'm gonna protect my sister." Her best friend, Tasha Fry, met her on a playground in third grade and remembered her as outgoing and full of life.
By 1996 Wendie was 22 and living at Peartree, a few hundred feet from where Christine Vu had lived. She worked as a teacher's aide at Erma Nash Elementary School in the Mansfield school district, was enrolled in a beauty college, and wanted to become a teacher. She and Skyla were planning to move in together when her lease ran out. "Wendie was a beautiful young lady," her aunt said in 2009.
On December 24, 1996, she was supposed to go Christmas shopping with her sister and then join the family's Christmas Eve gathering. She never called and never arrived. Her aunt and uncle went to the apartment, and her uncle found her naked body face down in a partly filled bathtub. Her neck, hands and feet were bound with duct tape. The federal appeals court, summarizing the trial record, put the discovery at about 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve; the Star-Telegram's contemporary reporting said neighbors called police just after 12:20 a.m. on Christmas morning after hearing her relatives scream. The autopsy found that she had been manually strangled, and that being in the water may also have contributed to her death. Sperm samples were collected.
The scene told investigators something about the attacker. Her clothes were stacked neatly on a chair, which suggested to them that she had undressed under threat rather than in a struggle. A VCR and some other items were missing. Again there was no forced entry.
Two young women killed the same way in three months in one complex frightened the neighborhood. Detective Tommy LeNoir, the Arlington homicide detective who led the investigation and had worked homicide in the city for nearly a quarter of a century by 2009, recalled: "There was a lot of fear in the community and in the Police Department." Residents, he said, moved out in large numbers. One resident told the Star-Telegram the complex was "the last place" he expected such a crime; an Arlington school district employee moved away because of it.
LeNoir said later that police "strongly suspected it was the same person without the forensics." The forensics followed. Crime scene investigator Joel Stevenson found a clear dust print on the TV stand in Prescott's apartment. Dust prints are fragile, and this one was unusually well preserved. The DNA from the two cases matched each other, and the latent prints from the two apartments could be compared. But neither the fingerprints nor the DNA matched anyone in the databases available in the late 1990s. LeNoir's list of leads grew past 500 names.
Over the next three years a series of rapes took place in apartments in Lancaster, Arlington and Grand Prairie. None of them was ever tried, but all five were later linked to Scheanette by DNA and presented to the jury that sentenced him, and the federal district court summarized the evidence on each. The women are not named here.
In September 1998, a woman in Lancaster was raped in her children's bedroom by an intruder who told her there would be a shootout if she called police. In October 1998, the Dallas police officer who had refused to date him was attacked in her Lancaster apartment after coming home from work. He restrained her with her own handcuffs, and when she asked him how he had got in, he said again that he was a "jack of all trades." The attacker threatened her and her parents and recited their address. In December 1998, another Lancaster woman was attacked while her two-year-old son was in her bed. She fought back and locked herself in a bedroom; the man kicked the door down, and her son slapped at his legs and begged him, "Let my mom go!" She escaped.
On February 23, 1999, a University of Texas at Arlington student was attacked after the phone lines were cut. During the assault she bit him. He beat her severely, and she needed two operations on her face, including surgery for a broken eye socket. She got to a nearby fraternity house to call for help. UT Arlington's student newspaper, The Shorthorn, placed the attack at a sorority house on West Fourth Street; Dateline described the place as her apartment.
At about 3 a.m. on October 26, 1999, a masked man with a pistol woke Adrienne Fields in her bedroom, held the gun to her back and raped her for about two hours. She had followed the news of the Peartree killings and had moved, she said later, because she feared she would be next. He knew her name. During the attack he said that "the devil keeps making" him do it and that she was "not like the others," and she understood that he had done this before. Fields spoke publicly under her own name to WFAA in 2015 and to Dateline in 2024; she later became an author, speaker and founder of a nonprofit for survivors. The Dallas Morning News reported in 2003 that the October 1999 victim, who was pregnant at the time, was attacked in Grand Prairie and remembered him saying as he left, "I don't know. I'm mad at the world."
In 1999 Scheanette was arrested for burglarizing a car audio shop in DeSoto, south of Dallas, and was later convicted of burglary. That arrest put his fingerprints into the system.
In the summer of 2000, the dust print from Prescott's TV stand was resubmitted to the FBI's fingerprint system, which had been upgraded. According to the Fifth Circuit, one candidate scored more than 2,500 points, almost 1,000 more than the next. An FBI analyst matched the print to Scheanette, and two Arlington investigators confirmed it. The same man's prints matched the print from the deadbolt in Christine Vu's apartment. LeNoir recognized the name. On his list of more than 500 leads, Scheanette had been number 17.
Investigators had also been working the rape cases. According to the Dateline account, a stalking complaint brought to police by Wendie's friend Tasha Fry against an ex-boyfriend, who was later excluded by DNA, helped LeNoir connect the UTA attack to the Peartree killings, and a Grand Prairie detective brought him the Fields case. When LeNoir compared the DNA, the profiles from Vu, Prescott and two of the rape victims came from the same man. Lancaster investigators then identified three 1998 assaults that matched.
Arlington police arrested Scheanette on September 5, 2000, after watching his house and stopping him when he drove away. According to LeNoir's account on Dateline, he cooperated but did not ask why he was being arrested. In the interview he denied ever being in the victims' apartments and refused to give DNA or fingerprints voluntarily. He said he had been sexually abused as a child. He asked LeNoir not to let him get the death penalty and said, "I will tell you everything I know you want to know." When LeNoir said that was not his decision to make, Scheanette asked for a lawyer. He never confessed.
Police obtained a search warrant for blood and saliva samples. "We got a search warrant, blood samples and made a DNA hit on two murders," LeNoir said. The DNA matched the sample from Prescott's body with a stated statistical certainty of one in 763 million. The DNA from Vu's case matched with a stated certainty of one in 21.4 quadrillion. The rape cases matched at figures ranging from one in 20 million to one in 3.89 quadrillion. Another warrant allowed investigators to examine a scar on his body, which was where the UTA student said she had bitten her attacker.
Tarrant County prosecutors indicted Scheanette on all seven cases, District Attorney Greg Miller told The Shorthorn in 2009. Texas law did not allow the two murders to be tried together, according to Dateline, and the state chose to go first with Wendie Prescott's death, for which Scheanette was indicted for capital murder (murder in the course of sexual assault) in August 2002. He was also charged with capital murder in Christine Vu's death.
The trial opened in Fort Worth on January 6, 2003, before senior state District Judge R.E. Thornton. Miller, then an assistant district attorney, prosecuted. The state's case rested on the dust print and the DNA. The defense, led by J.R. Molina with David Pearson, gave no opening statement and called no witnesses. Pearson attacked the scientific evidence, telling jurors, "DNA has been oversold and overbilled." Scheanette did not testify. Molina said later that his client was "very studious" during the case and asked for printouts of case law, "a 3-inch stack." "He was a good student in the law," Molina said. Years later Molina was blunter about the state's evidence: "The DNA evidence, the fingerprint evidence that came in, were very strong."
On January 8, 2003, after about an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury found Scheanette guilty of capital murder. Norman Norwood, who had raised Wendie, said outside the courtroom, "We've crossed one hurdle. Now we see what kind of punishment he gets." Christine Vu's brother Hiep said: "The person responsible has been convicted. We've waited six years for this." An alternate juror told the Dallas Morning News, "The evidence was overwhelming."
The jury's choice was death or life in prison with no parole eligibility for forty years. At the punishment hearing, prosecutors put on evidence of Christine Vu's death and called the five women who had been attacked in 1998 and 1999. They described being beaten, forced into sex acts and threatened, with threats against their families if they went to the police. Miller later called the testimony "very therapeutic" for them. Fields told Dateline she felt empowered by testifying; the UTA student said she was angry at him for the pain he had caused. The state also showed that jail guards had found a triangular piece of plexiglass in his cell that could have served as a weapon, and introduced his 1999 burglary conviction.
The defense called family members and a chaplain. It also called S.O. Woods, a retired prison security official, to describe how a life-sentenced inmate would be classified and held, and Dr. Gilda Kessner, a psychologist who put Scheanette's risk of violence in prison at 18.8 percent against a base rate of 16.4 percent for life-sentenced murderers and pointed to his age, his family support and the absence of assaults in the county jail. On cross-examination Woods agreed that the crimes showed planning ("Very much so"), and when prosecutors compared them with the Texas Seven prison escape, he answered, "Very similar."
On January 15, 2003, the same jury sentenced Scheanette to death. He arrived on death row on February 6, 2003.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence on September 15, 2004 (Scheanette v. State, 144 S.W.3d 503). The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case in January 2005 on a petition he filed himself. On state habeas, the Court of Criminal Appeals sent the case back once in April 2005 for more information on his claims that his lawyers had been ineffective, then denied relief on December 14, 2005.
In federal court, a petition he filed himself in March 2005 was dismissed without prejudice because his state claims were not finished. A petition filed through counsel in January 2006 raised ten grounds, among them that his trial lawyers had harmed him by calling Woods and Kessner, whose testimony prosecutors turned to their own use; that the jury instructions on mitigating evidence sent the jurors mixed signals; and that Texas's future dangerousness question was unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge John McBryde in Fort Worth denied the petition on April 10, 2006. Without the defense experts, he wrote, the jury would still have heard about the murder, the linked assaults and the rest of the state's evidence, and "that scenario hardly creates a reasonable probability" of a life sentence.
On March 26, 2007, a Fifth Circuit panel of Judges E. Grady Jolly, W. Eugene Davis and Priscilla Owen refused him a certificate of appealability on every claim (Scheanette v. Quarterman, 482 F.3d 815). On the experts, Judge Davis wrote that counsel had made a reasonable strategic choice after a thorough investigation, and that "Strickland does not allow second guessing of trial strategy."
After that, Scheanette had his appellate lawyer, Richard Alley of Fort Worth, withdrawn. "I was withdrawn at his request," Alley said in 2009. "I was the lawyer on deck. Then he took over from there." Acting as his own lawyer, Scheanette filed at least half a dozen federal appeals in his last year, raising at least fourteen claims of rights violations and an unfair trial. Prosecutors called them meritless and said the evidence "credibly connects Scheanette to two murders and five brutal sexual assaults." All were rejected.
On Friday, February 6, 2009, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7-0 against recommending that Gov. Rick Perry commute the sentence. On Monday, February 9, the Fifth Circuit denied his last request to proceed, dismissed his appeal and refused to stop the execution. On the day of the execution, a woman who identified herself as his sister filed a three-page handwritten motion with the U.S. Supreme Court asking for a reprieve. The court denied it less than an hour before the scheduled time. He declined all interviews with reporters.
The families had decided differently about watching. Brenda Norwood, Wendie's aunt, said she hoped he had accepted responsibility and asked God for forgiveness. "I had to forgive because I can't live with that," she told the Dallas Morning News. "I can't hate him for what he did because that would not bring Wendie back." She would not attend: "You have to let the law of the land prevail." Christine Vu's sister, Dr. Kim Kuo, said she would go, not for revenge. "We've accepted [Christine's death], but I will go mainly to bear witness for her."
On Tuesday, February 10, 2009, Scheanette, 35, was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville. He chose no witnesses of his own. Six relatives of the two women watched, and he never looked toward them. Asked for a final statement, he said: "My only statement is that no cases ever tried have been error-free. Those are my words. No cases are error-free." He was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m., nine minutes after the drugs began to flow. His last meal request was fried chicken and fried pork chops with fries.
He was the seventh person executed in Texas in 2009, the 430th since the state resumed executions in December 1982, and the first of two Texas executions that week. February 10 was Adrienne Fields's birthday. "The day of my birth, he lost his life," she told WFAA. Family members told Dateline they felt closure, and that the tears they shed that night were for Christine and Wendie.
The case ended with the execution on February 10, 2009. Scheanette was convicted of one murder, Wendie Prescott's. He was charged with, but never tried for, Christine Vu's murder, and the five sexual assaults were indicted but never tried; the public sources fetched for this page do not say how those pending charges were formally closed after his death. Wendie's mother's 1977 killing, a separate case with no known connection to Scheanette, was still unsolved as of the 2024 Dateline broadcast.
The case was broken by database growth rather than by a new witness: a single preserved dust print, run again years later through an upgraded FBI system, identified a man whose prints were on file because of an unrelated burglary. LeNoir called Scheanette "criminally sophisticated." Miller, Tarrant County district attorney by 2009, said that year, "In all the years I've been doing this, Scheanette's the worst I've encountered," and described him as a "serial killer and serial rapist" who "personifies evil." "I will never forget the seven women," he said.
Adrienne Fields stayed silent for nearly two decades, through depression, divorce and guilt that she had survived when two women had not, before she began speaking publicly. Her message, she told WFAA, was that survivors do not have to feel alone or that their lives are over because of what was done to them. In June 2024, NBC's Dateline revisited the case in a two-hour episode, "Dark Intentions," reported by Andrea Canning, with Christine Vu's brother, Wendie Prescott's sister and friends, two survivors, LeNoir and Miller.
Proven in court: the capital murder of Wendie Prescott in the course of a sexual assault, on the fingerprint and DNA evidence, affirmed on direct appeal and in state and federal habeas review.
Charged, not tried: the capital murder of Christine Vu. The evidence against him in her case (the deadbolt print and a DNA match) was presented at the punishment hearing, where the standard was not proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on that charge. He never admitted it.
Linked, not tried: five sexual assaults in 1998 and 1999. DNA linked each of them to him, and each woman testified at sentencing, but none of these charges reached a verdict.
Never admitted: Scheanette denied being in the apartments, never confessed to any of the crimes, and his final words were about error in trials, not about the victims.
Speculation: Miller said in 2009 that "the only unknowns are how many did he rape, or kill," and LeNoir said that the possibility of other victims "certainly exists." No other case has been publicly attributed to him in the sources reviewed. The nickname "Bathtub Killer" was a media label.
Small conflicts in the record: Christine Vu's age (25 or 26); Wendie Prescott's age (22 in nearly every source, 20 in the Fifth Circuit opinion); the hour Prescott was found (about 11 p.m. on December 24 per the court summary, or just after midnight on Christmas morning per the Star-Telegram); and whether Scheanette still lived at Peartree in December 1996.
May 7, 1973: Dale Devon Scheanette is born in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana.
1995 or 1996: He befriends a Dallas police officer at a gas station, telling her he lives in Lancaster.
September 17, 1996: Christine Vu, a third-grade teacher, is found dead in her bathtub at the Peartree Apartments, Arlington.
December 24-25, 1996: Wendie Prescott, a teacher's aide, is found dead in her bathtub at the same complex.
September 1998 - October 1999: Five women in Lancaster, Arlington and Grand Prairie are attacked and raped in their homes; all five cases are later linked to Scheanette by DNA.
1999: He is arrested for burglarizing a car audio shop in DeSoto and later convicted; his prints enter the system.
Summer 2000: The dust print from Prescott's TV stand is resubmitted to the FBI system and matched to him.
September 5, 2000: Arlington police arrest him.
August 2002: Indicted for the capital murder of Wendie Prescott.
January 6, 2003: Trial opens in Fort Worth.
January 8, 2003: Convicted of capital murder after about 90 minutes of deliberation.
January 15, 2003: Sentenced to death.
September 15, 2004: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
January 2005: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
December 14, 2005: State habeas relief denied.
April 10, 2006: Federal habeas petition denied in Fort Worth.
March 26, 2007: Fifth Circuit denies a certificate of appealability.
February 6, 2009: Board of Pardons and Paroles votes 7-0 against clemency.
February 10, 2009: Executed in Huntsville at 6:21 p.m., aged 35.
June 7, 2024: NBC's Dateline airs "Dark Intentions" about the case.