Shortly after 11 p.m. on Wednesday, November 15, 1989, Officer Gerald Walker of the Garland Police Department pulled over a pickup truck for speeding near the corner of Saturn Road and Lexington Drive in Garland, a suburb northeast of Dallas. Walker had been a Garland officer for seventeen years. Before he walked up to the truck, he radioed its license plate to his dispatcher. The driver shot him in the chest with a shotgun. An off-duty firefighter found him lying face down in the street, and he was pronounced dead at about midnight at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
The driver was Daniel Joe Hittle, a thirty-nine-year-old Minnesota parolee who had served eleven years in prison for killing his adoptive parents. That same evening, at a house in east Dallas, Mary Alice Goss, Richard Joseph Cook Jr. and Raymond Scott Gregg were shot dead, and Goss's four-year-old daughter, Christy Condon, was shot in the face. Christy died in the hospital days later. Hittle was charged over the Dallas shootings but was tried only for the officer's death. He was convicted of capital murder in Dallas County, sentenced to death, and executed at Huntsville on December 6, 2000.
Little about Hittle's early life appears in the sources consulted for this page. He was about twenty-three in April 1973, which places his birth around 1950, and he was fifty when he was executed. He was raised by adoptive parents, Henry and Margaret Hittle, on a farm near Motley, in central Minnesota. He had a sister, Judy, later Judy Anderson, who would testify against him in Texas.
A childhood friend, Gary Wentworth, described him to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2000 as a boy who was quiet at home and among friends. "He was never really violent, but he'd get that way when he drank," Wentworth said. "He didn't like people making fun of him. We'd have sleepovers at each others' houses. My mom always thought he was a nice kid, quiet and polite." According to Forum Communications' 2023 account, which drew on Wentworth's interview, the relationship between Daniel and his parents had been tense for years, and they clashed over religion and discipline.
Henry Hittle was forty-six and Margaret Hittle was forty-five. At about 11 p.m. on April 4, 1973, their son confronted them at the farmhouse over a scratch on his truck, which he believed their dog had made. According to Wentworth's account to the Star Tribune, Margaret Hittle dared her son to shoot, and he did. Henry Hittle tried to reach for a gun of his own and was shot too. Sheriff's deputies arrived about an hour later and found both bodies near the front entryway of the house.
Wentworth said that Hittle later told him, during a visit at Stillwater prison, that he had been drunk that night. One later account, the Texas Execution Information Center's report on his execution, says instead that court testimony showed he stabbed his parents to death. The Minnesota sources consulted describe a shooting. The disagreement is set out in the section on disputed points below.
The Star Tribune reported the arraignment on April 6, 1973, two days after the killings, and the Fergus Falls Daily Journal reported the next day that a grand jury would convene. The case was brought in Cass County, where Hittle was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder.
In Minnesota in 1973, a conviction for first-degree murder carried a mandatory life sentence. Hittle, represented by a public defender, accepted a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, and the court sentenced him to two concurrent terms with a limited maximum of thirty years each, instead of the forty years the offense could carry. He was sent to the state prison at Stillwater.
Under the indeterminate sentencing system then in place, a thirty-year maximum did not mean thirty years in custody. Release came at the discretion of the state's corrections board, which could parole a prisoner long before the maximum ran out.
Hittle challenged his convictions from prison twice, and both challenges reached the Minnesota Supreme Court.
The first was a petition to withdraw his guilty pleas. He argued that the record made when he pleaded guilty in 1973 showed the trial court should not have accepted the pleas, and that the record of a postconviction hearing held in 1978 showed he should be allowed to take them back. The district court denied the petition. On October 12, 1979, the Minnesota Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Scott, affirmed. "There is no basis to either contention," the court wrote.
The second came after Minnesota adopted sentencing guidelines in 1980. A state law allowed prisoners sentenced under the old system to ask to be resentenced under the guidelines, but only if they could prove that their early release would not present a danger to the public and would not be incompatible with the welfare of society. Hittle applied. The court noted that his criminal history score at the time of the killings would have been zero, and that the presumptive guidelines sentence for second-degree murder at that score was 116 months. It also noted that a judge applying the guidelines could have run the two sentences consecutively without departing from them.
The district court refused to make the finding that release would be safe, and on June 28, 1982, the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed, in an opinion by Chief Justice Amdahl. "Given the violent nature of the offenses for which he was sentenced and given petitioner's failure in prison to deal with his alcohol and drug dependency," the court wrote, the lower court had properly refused to make that finding. The opinion gave his target release date as June 1985, when he would have served 146 months, and said he remained under the jurisdiction of the Minnesota Corrections Board.
Hittle was released on parole in 1984, about eleven years after he entered Stillwater, according to Associated Press reports from 1989 and 2000 and the Forum Communications account, which says he was paroled for good behavior. That was earlier than the June 1985 target date stated in the 1982 opinion. None of the sources consulted for this page explain the parole decision itself or what conditions were set.
He moved to Texas. By November 1989 he was living in the Dallas area, still on parole from Minnesota, with a wife. Dallas police said in 1989 that he had no criminal record in Texas.
Gerald Ray Walker was forty-eight. He had joined the Garland Police Department seventeen years earlier, and he had earned four departmental commendations and seven from citizens. He was married to Becky Walker and had one son. Lt. John Williams of the Garland police told the Dallas Times Herald after his death, "He was a good, hard worker." Walker had enough seniority to work days, but he chose the night shift. "The reason he worked nights was because he liked to get out there with them," Williams said, meaning the younger officers he worked with. He was the first Garland police officer to die in the line of duty. His name is on the Texas Peace Officers' Memorial in Austin, which gives his end of watch as November 15, 1989.
Mary Alice Goss was thirty-nine and lived at the Dallas house where she was killed. Testimony at Hittle's trial, as summarized in later reports, described her as his drug dealer, and the Texas Execution Information Center said the two had been feuding. The Forum Communications account says his anger was over an arrangement having to do with a drug deal. No source consulted gives more about her life.
Richard Joseph Cook Jr. was thirty-six and also lived at the house. Raymond Scott Gregg was nineteen. The sources consulted say nothing more about either man.
Christy Condon was four years old, Mary Alice Goss's daughter. She was shot in the face and was in critical condition at Baylor University Medical Center the next day. According to the Texas Execution Information Center, she died in the hospital two days after the shooting.
The sources agree on who died and on most of what happened, but not on the order of events.
The Texas Execution Information Center, writing from Texas Department of Criminal Justice and Associated Press material after the execution, gives this account. Hittle argued with his wife that evening and drove away from home in his pickup with a 20-gauge shotgun. When Walker stopped him for speeding, Hittle shot him in the chest at close range. He then drove to Goss's house, kicked in the door and opened fire, killing Goss, Cook and Gregg. He reloaded and shot Christy. Then he drove home. The Forum Communications account gives the same order: the traffic stop first, then the house.
The Associated Press report filed from Garland the day after the shootings described it the other way around. It said Dallas police planned to charge Hittle in "four earlier Wednesday shootings," meaning shootings earlier on the day Walker died. A 2012 NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth report on a Garland memorial service also described Walker as having stopped a man who had just killed several others. The account in the AP report of how the Dallas victims were found is the same in either version: a woman who had left the house during an argument came back and found the three adults dead and Christy wounded.
The Fifth Circuit, in its 2000 opinion, described the deaths together as one "crime spree" without giving the order.
Hittle did not know that Walker had radioed in the pickup's license plate. Police went looking for the truck, and officers spotted it near Hittle's home and gave chase. Hittle ran the truck off the road and wrecked it. He then fired at the pursuing officers. According to the Associated Press account from the time, he stopped shooting when he ran out of ammunition. When he refused orders to show his hands, a police dog was sent in, twice, before he complied and was arrested.
Hittle was taken to a hospital and treated for bruises and scratches, then booked into the Garland city jail. A shotgun was recovered from his truck. Dallas police said forensic tests would show whether the same weapon had been used in Garland and in Dallas. Their results are not reported in the sources consulted.
On Thursday, November 16, 1989, Garland police charged Hittle with capital murder in Walker's death and with three counts of attempted capital murder, for shooting at the officers who chased him. Allan Peck, a Garland police spokesman, said he was held without bond on the capital murder charge and on $250,000 bond on each of the attempted capital murder counts. In Dallas, Lt. Ron Waldrop of the homicide unit said: "We're going to file capital murder and attempted murder charges against him later in the day."
A Dallas County grand jury indicted Hittle for the capital murder of Gerald Walker in November 1989. In Texas, the murder of a peace officer acting in the line of duty is a capital offense. The Dallas killings remained charged but never came to trial. In 1997 a federal appeals court referred to "other murders with which Hittle had been charged."
While he awaited the end of his case, Hittle sued. In 1991 he filed a civil rights complaint under 42 U.S.C. section 1983 in federal court in Dallas against the City of Garland, its police department and several Garland officers, among them J.G. George, D.W. Roehrig, S.A. Cross, D. Swavey and J. Holmes. The published appeal does not describe what he claimed the officers did.
The case went badly for him. His lawyers asked to withdraw, and the court allowed it after a hearing held in his absence, finding they had valid professional reasons. The court declined to appoint new counsel because Hittle had shown he could represent himself. He asked not to be displayed as a prisoner or closely guarded during the civil proceedings, and the defendants answered by telling the court about his murder conviction and the other murders with which he had been charged. The district court granted summary judgment to the officers on the ground that the claims against them were barred by the statute of limitations.
On September 15, 1997, the Fifth Circuit affirmed in an unpublished opinion. It rejected his claim that the judge was biased against him and called his complaint about the severing of his case "patently frivolous."
Hittle was tried in Dallas County before State District Judge Richard Mays for the capital murder of Gerald Walker. The sources consulted give only a partial picture of the trial, but the federal appeals record shows several of the pieces of evidence.
The prosecution played a recording of the police dispatch traffic about the events around Walker's death. It also presented testimony that Hittle's wife had bought shotgun shells at Outdoorsman Sporting Goods before the shootings. Later, Hittle claimed the state had withheld a cash register tape from that purchase. A state court found as a fact that no such tape existed.
There was a dispute over the jury before the trial began. A juror, Nancy Schmidt, asked to be excused because she needed to care for a sick child. The judge let her go and seated an alternate. Hittle later argued that she was not disqualified under state law, that the judge should not have excused her or replaced her, and that he should have received a continuance and a hearing to contest the reason she was let go.
The jury deliberated about an hour before finding Hittle guilty of capital murder, according to the Associated Press account cited by Forum Communications.
At the punishment phase, the state called acquaintances who testified that Hittle had said he intended to kill a game warden. His sister, Judy Anderson, testified against him and told the jury he had to be stopped before he could hurt anyone else.
The defense offered mitigating evidence, and the court's charge became a basis for later appeals. Hittle's lawyers later argued that the instructions improperly put a burden of proof on him regarding mitigating evidence, that the jury should have been told mitigating evidence could not be treated as aggravating, and that evidence of the kind presented at punishment, such as an abusive childhood or a mental disorder, should have been treated as mitigating as a matter of law. The courts rejected all three arguments.
A week after the verdict, Judge Mays formally sentenced Hittle to death by lethal injection. "Hittle, who seemed jovial and carefree throughout the trial, said nothing, merely nodding when State District Judge Richard Mays pronounced the death sentence," the Associated Press reported. Because he had received the death penalty for Walker's murder, prosecutors did not pursue trials for the four deaths in Dallas.
After the sentence, Becky Walker told the Associated Press that she was worried parole laws around the country were not protecting the public. "There are other Hittles running around out there," she said.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and death sentence on April 7, 1993, in an unpublished opinion, Hittle v. State, No. 71,138. The United States Supreme Court declined to review the case.
Hittle then sought habeas corpus relief in the Texas courts. The state courts made findings of fact, including the finding that there was no cash register tape for the shotgun shells and findings that answered his complaints about his trial lawyers, and the Court of Criminal Appeals adopted them and denied relief.
In 1994 he filed a federal habeas petition in the Northern District of Texas. A magistrate judge wrote what the Fifth Circuit later called a "lengthy and comprehensive report and recommendation" denying relief, and the district judge adopted it and refused him a certificate of appealability.
He applied to the Fifth Circuit for that certificate. On August 3, 2000, a panel of Judges Davis, Jones and Barksdale denied it in an unpublished opinion by Judge Edith H. Jones. The court noted that he had raised the same claims as in the district court and "has not bothered to explain precisely why any of the district court's analysis or conclusions were wrong," and that it had reviewed each claim anyway.
The court held that the juror claims rested on state law, which a federal habeas court could not review, and that Hittle had not connected them to any constitutional violation. Three claims had never been raised in the state courts and were procedurally barred: that the jury charge failed to define reasonable doubt, as a 1991 Court of Criminal Appeals decision later required; that admitting the police dispatch tape violated his right to confront witnesses; and that the game warden testimony violated due process. He made no effort to show cause or prejudice to excuse the default.
On the punishment charge, the court found no constitutional defect. Constitutional law, it said, does not require any particular mitigating evidence to be treated as mitigating as a matter of law and does not stop a jury from considering such evidence as aggravating. It also held that no special instruction under Penry v. Lynaugh was required, because Hittle's personal background did not fit the kind of evidence that case addressed. The Brady claim failed because there was no tape to disclose. On five claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, Hittle had not overcome the state courts' findings of fact.
Texas set his execution for December 6, 2000. Hittle declined to speak with reporters in the weeks before it, according to the Texas Execution Information Center.
He was put to death by lethal injection at Huntsville that evening and was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. He was fifty. His last statement, as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice recorded it, was three words: "Santajaib Singh Ji." The Texas Execution Information Center identified this as the name of an Indian religious teacher who advocated love and nonviolence. Becky Walker was among the witnesses.
His was execution number 238 in Texas since the state resumed executions, by the department's own count, and he was TDCJ inmate number 981. On the same day, Virginia executed Christopher Goins, who had been convicted of killing five members of his girlfriend's family. The Associated Press reported the two executions together.
The case is closed. Hittle was executed on December 6, 2000, which the Texas Department of Criminal Justice list of executed offenders confirms (checked in this run). The capital murder conviction for Gerald Walker's death was upheld through every level of review. The two Minnesota second-degree murder convictions stood after the Minnesota Supreme Court's decisions of 1979 and 1982. The four Dallas deaths, of Mary Alice Goss, Richard Joseph Cook Jr., Raymond Scott Gregg and Christy Condon, were charged but never tried, so there is no verdict on them.
Becky Walker's warning about parole was the public argument the case left behind in Texas: a man paroled in Minnesota after a double killing had moved to Texas and been arrested there for five more deaths. In Minnesota, the Forum Communications account published in 2023 under the heading "The Vault" made the same point from the other side, describing the 1984 parole as the decision that preceded the Texas killings. The 1982 Minnesota Supreme Court opinion shows that the state's courts had refused to shorten his sentence two years before his release, citing the violence of the crimes and his failure to address his alcohol and drug dependency in prison. The sources consulted for this page do not show whether Minnesota reviewed the parole decision after 1989.
Gerald Walker is remembered by his department. In May 2012, on National Peace Officers Memorial Day, Garland police and students from Lakeview Centennial High School's law magnet program held their annual ceremony for the city's officers killed on duty, Walker among them, along with Michael Moore and Ronnie Lerma.
Judy Anderson, Hittle's sister, died in 2018, according to Forum Communications.
The Dallas killings. Hittle was charged in the deaths of Mary Alice Goss, Richard Joseph Cook Jr., Raymond Scott Gregg and Christy Condon, but he was never tried for them, so his guilt for those four deaths was never decided by a jury. The Fifth Circuit's 2000 opinion stated as background that he "killed four other individuals" during the same crime spree, and post-execution reports treated it as established. That description comes from the court's summary of the case history, not from a verdict.
The order of events. Post-execution accounts (the Texas Execution Information Center and Forum Communications) put the traffic stop first and the Dallas house second. The contemporary Associated Press report called the Dallas shootings "earlier," and a 2012 NBC 5 report also said Walker had stopped a man who had just killed several others. The sources consulted do not settle the question.
How his parents died. Forum Communications, citing a childhood friend's 2000 interview, describes a shooting. The Texas Execution Information Center report says court testimony showed he stabbed them. Neither cites the 1973 court record directly, and the Minnesota Supreme Court opinions do not say how they were killed.
Walker's years of service. The 1989 Associated Press report gives seventeen years, and so does the 2000 AP report on the execution. The 2012 NBC 5 report says thirty-two years. At forty-eight, thirty-two years of service is unlikely; this page uses seventeen.
Christy Condon's age and death. The OCR text of the November 17, 1989, Associated Press story gives her age as fourteen in one line and four in another; every other source says four. The Texas Execution Information Center says she died two days after the shooting; Forum Communications says days later.
Whose house. The 1989 AP report as reproduced in The Battalion places the Dallas shootings at an east Dallas apartment that it attributes to Hittle in one passage, while saying Goss and Cook lived there. Later accounts call it Goss's home. This page calls it the house where Goss and Cook lived.
About 1950: Daniel Joe Hittle is born (age inferred from court records and the TDCJ age at execution).
April 4, 1973: Henry Hittle, 46, and Margaret Hittle, 45, are killed at their farmhouse near Motley, Minnesota.
April 6, 1973: Hittle is arraigned.
1973: Indicted in Cass County on two counts of first-degree murder; pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder; sentenced to concurrent thirty-year terms.
1978: Postconviction hearing on his request to withdraw his pleas.
October 12, 1979: Minnesota Supreme Court affirms denial of plea withdrawal.
June 28, 1982: Minnesota Supreme Court affirms denial of resentencing under the guidelines.
1984: Paroled, about eleven years into his sentence; moves to Texas.
November 15, 1989: Officer Gerald Walker, 48, is shot during a traffic stop in Garland and dies about midnight. Mary Alice Goss, 39, Richard Joseph Cook Jr., 36, and Raymond Scott Gregg, 19, are shot dead in Dallas, and Christy Condon, 4, is wounded. Hittle is arrested after a chase.
November 16, 1989: Charged with capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder.
November 1989: Christy Condon dies in the hospital.
November 1989: Indicted for the capital murder of Gerald Walker.
1990: Convicted in Dallas County and sentenced to death by Judge Richard Mays (month not confirmed in a source fetched for this page).
1991: Files a federal civil rights suit against Garland and its officers.
April 7, 1993: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the conviction and sentence.
1994: Files a federal habeas petition.
September 15, 1997: Fifth Circuit affirms dismissal of his civil rights suit.
August 3, 2000: Fifth Circuit denies a certificate of appealability.
December 6, 2000: Executed at Huntsville at 6:20 p.m., aged 50.
2018: His sister, Judy Anderson, dies.