In late May 1979, Inez Deaton, a 20-year-old married mother of a 2-year-old girl, needed to use a telephone. She went to the home of her best friend's parents in Houston. The only person there was her friend's cousin, Danny Paul Bible, then 27. The next day, May 27, a passer-by found her partly clothed body on the slope of Greens Bayou. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed eleven times with an ice pick. Around the time of her funeral, Bible left Houston.
For almost twenty years, no one was charged with her death. In that time Bible moved between Texas, Wyoming and Montana, killed three more people in North Texas in a single day in 1983, served part of a prison sentence for one of those killings and was released. The Deaton case was solved only because, in December 1998, Louisiana detectives questioning him about a motel rape heard him say he had killed a woman in Houston. A Harris County jury sentenced him to death in 2003, and Texas executed him on June 27, 2018, after a last-minute dispute over whether a man as ill as he was could be put to death by lethal injection at all.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice records that Danny Paul Bible was born on August 28, 1951, and that his native county was Brazoria County, on the Texas Gulf Coast south of Houston. He completed twelfth grade. Before prison he worked as a warehouseman, an electrician and a laborer. Little else about his childhood appears in the court records or news reports consulted for this page. The Houston Chronicle described him in 2018 as a former drifter whose violence dated back at least to 1979.
The court records do give a picture of his adult life before his arrest. Prosecutors told his 2003 jury that he had been violent toward a girlfriend from 1979 to 1982: he punched her in the face hard enough that she needed stitches, ground his knee into her ear until it bled, poured gasoline on her car and set it on fire, and attacked the car with an axe while her young son was inside. The Chronicle reported that one of these attacks on the car followed an argument over her haircut. He was married at least once, and one of his victims was his wife's sister.
Inez Deaton was 20 years old in May 1979. She was married and had a daughter who was 2. Wynona Bible, Danny Bible's cousin, was her best friend, according to the Houston Chronicle; the Associated Press also describes Deaton as a friend of Bible's cousin. The Fifth Circuit's 2016 opinion, quoting the federal district court, describes her instead as "a young mother and friend of Bible's sister." The state's 2018 brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, citing the trial record, says she went to use the telephone at "her friend's parents' home" and that "her friend's cousin, Bible, was the only person in the house." The Texas Tribune, summarizing the state's filings, says the house belonged to Bible's uncle and that Bible was staying there.
The court account adds detail about her last known movements. A few days before her body was found, Deaton stopped at a house next door to use the phone. The neighbor suggested she use the phone at the house where Bible was. Another neighbor saw her go in. No one else saw her alive.
She was found on May 27, 1979, by a man who came across her body along the north slope of Greens Bayou at Homestead Road in northeast Houston, according to KTRK and the court records it cited. The Texas Tribune places the body in a field near a deserted car wash. She was not wearing pants, and her underwear had been partly torn off. The medical evidence showed sexual assault, bruising to the head and eleven stab wounds from an ice pick. The physical evidence suggested she had been dragged to the place she was found and her body positioned there.
Her family did not attend Bible's execution in 2018, KPRC reported. The sources consulted do not name her husband or daughter, and they say little more about her life than that she was young, married, a mother and a close friend of the woman whose house she walked into.
Family members later testified that Bible behaved suspiciously after Deaton disappeared. Around the time of her funeral, he left. According to the district court's summary of the record, he went to Montana and Wyoming, where he was in an abusive relationship with a woman, and in Montana he committed aggravated kidnappings and theft. The state told the Supreme Court that he kidnapped a girlfriend and an eleven-year-old babysitter, that the evidence suggested he raped the girl, and that he pleaded guilty to theft and two counts of aggravated kidnapping in connection with that episode. He also had a robbery conviction from Harris County, for which the Chronicle reports he received a 20-year sentence.
No one connected him to Inez Deaton's death during these years. Josh Reiss, who headed the Harris County District Attorney's post-conviction writs division in 2018, told KTRK that catching Bible took a long time because he kept leaving for Montana.
In May 1983, in North Texas west of Fort Worth, three people were killed on the same day: Tracy Powers, who was Bible's sister-in-law; her son, Justin, who was 4 months old; and Powers' roommate, Pamela Hudgins, known as Pam. The Dallas Morning News reported that their bodies were found near Weatherford. KPRC placed the killings in Palo Pinto County, and the TDCJ record shows that Bible's prior prison term was a 25-year sentence from Palo Pinto County for one count of murder.
Accounts of how they died differ, and none of them comes from a trial on the facts, because there was none.
Bible's own account, given to Louisiana investigators in 1998 and summarized by the Texas attorney general's office in 2018, was that he had been using drugs and alcohol, picked up Hudgins in his van, raped her and then hit her repeatedly. After disposing of her body, he said, he argued with his sister-in-law and pushed her and her baby down a stairwell, then left them by the side of the road. He then said he was going to visit his brother-in-law in jail, took his wife's car and flew to Montana. Authorities found the decayed remains of all three in the woods. In another statement, summarized by the federal courts, he described the 1983 events as raping a woman and then killing her and her baby.
The Houston Chronicle's 2018 accounts give a different picture: that Bible stabbed Powers, whose body was put in garbage bags and left in a field, and that Hudgins' body was left hanging from a roadside fence. This page reports both versions because the sources disagree and the record available here does not settle which is correct.
Bible pleaded guilty in 1984 to the murder of Pamela Hudgins and received 25 years. He was not convicted of killing Tracy Powers or Justin Powers. The sources do not say why those two deaths were not prosecuted, and this page does not guess.
Hudgins' brother, Larry Lance, would sit in the witness room at Huntsville thirty-five years later.
Bible did not serve his full sentence. The AP reported that he served seven years and was released to Montana in 1992 on mandatory supervision. KPRC reported that he served eight years under mandatory release laws, which let good-conduct time shorten a sentence and which Texas has since repealed. KHOU also says he was paroled in 1992. The Dallas Morning News gives nine years.
During his years behind bars, his defense later stressed, he had only two minor, nonviolent disciplinary infractions.
After his release, while still under supervision, he sexually abused five young relatives, his nieces, between 1996 and 1998. He later confessed to these assaults, and one of his nieces testified about them at his 2003 trial. The Chronicle reported that the youngest was 5 and that he offered to pay a 12-year-old to have his child. The AP reported that he told Louisiana detectives about at least nine rapes in all, five of them in San Jacinto County, northeast of Houston.
On November 7, 1998, in Louisiana, Tera Robinson heard a knock at her motel room door. When she opened it a crack, Bible forced his way in. She later testified that he grabbed her by the throat, slammed her against a wall and lifted her off the floor, threw her onto a bed, pinned her down and raped her. He then tied her wrists and ankles and tried to force her into a duffel bag. She broke free and called for help.
Bible fled to Florida, where he was arrested and returned to Louisiana. The federal courts' account places these events in late 1998; the AP's reports say he was arrested in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1999. He pleaded guilty to aggravated rape in Louisiana and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
On December 16, 1998, Bible gave Louisiana police a statement admitting the attack on Robinson, though he said he did not remember the sexual assault itself. During the same questioning he said he had killed Inez Deaton in Houston. Louisiana police contacted Texas authorities.
On December 18 he gave two more tape-recorded statements. In the first, he said he had been watching television when Deaton came to the door. He said he grabbed her and forced her to have sex with him, that she resisted and they struggled, and that he remembered strangling her and using a knife on her. He remembered putting her in the trunk of a car and dumping her body. As with the Robinson attack, he said he could not remember the sexual assault or the killing itself. The Texas Tribune, summarizing the state's account, says he described putting her in a garbage bag before leaving her in the field. In the second statement that day, he confessed to the 1983 killings. He later confessed to the abuse of his nieces.
The Houston Chronicle reported in 2018 that he confessed to the Houston killing in exchange for cigarettes and a Bible, and despite a detective's promise that he would not face execution. That claim about a promise comes from the Chronicle's report; the opinions consulted here do not describe it.
On direct appeal, his lawyers challenged the warnings he had been given before the statements. According to a published summary of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' 2005 opinion, the officer had warned him that what he said could be used against him "in court" rather than "at trial," and the court held that this was enough, because "court" is the broader term and would reasonably be understood to include a trial.
In March 2001, a Harris County grand jury indicted Bible for capital murder, for killing Inez Deaton in the course of an aggravated rape. Before trial, his lawyers moved to suppress his statements to police. After a hearing, the trial court denied the motion.
The trial, in June 2003, was short on the question of guilt. Testimony in the guilt phase lasted two days. Witnesses described Deaton's disappearance, and family members described Bible's suspicious behavior after she went missing. But the state's case rested on what a prosecutor called "the most compelling, most believable, best evidence you can ever have in a criminal case": his confession. As the federal district court later put it, apart from his conduct after Deaton disappeared, only the confession connected him to her death. The AP reported in 2018 that his guilt was not disputed. The jury convicted him of capital murder.
The punishment phase was much longer. Texas jurors in capital cases answer special questions, including whether the defendant would be a continuing threat to society and whether mitigating circumstances call for a life sentence. Prosecutors laid out his record: the beatings of his girlfriend, the Montana kidnapping and the rape of an 11-year-old girl, robberies and thefts, the 1983 killings, his confessions to abusing his nieces, and the Louisiana rape. The jury heard his taped confession to the Robinson attack, and Robinson testified.
During her testimony, the two prosecutors, Siegler and Goodhart, acted out the attack in front of the jury. Siegler lay on the counsel table while Goodhart pinned her arms down with his knees and positioned himself as Robinson described; later Siegler showed how Robinson looked after being tied up, and the prosecutors also appear to have acted out the attempt to force her into the duffel bag. The demonstration took up ten of the thirty-eight pages of her testimony. Bible's trial lawyer did not object, and later said in an affidavit, "I wish I had."
The defense argued that Bible could control himself in a highly structured setting, pointing to his clean record during about seventeen years of earlier imprisonment. A minister testified that he had had a spiritual encounter with Bible and that Bible had completed religious correspondence courses.
The jury deliberated about three hours, according to the Chronicle, and answered the special questions in a way that required a death sentence. Wynona Bible, Deaton's best friend and Bible's cousin, told the Chronicle, "Justice was done for Inez today."
TDCJ records show that Bible was received on death row on July 17, 2003. Weeks after his sentencing, the prison van carrying him there was hit head-on by a truck that had crossed into oncoming traffic. The Chronicle identified the guard driving the van as John Bennett, 40, who was killed. The Fifth Circuit's 2018 opinion says both drivers died, and the Dallas Morning News reported that the driver of the other vehicle was killed as well.
Bible suffered a fractured pelvis and a broken back, neck, arm and leg, and spent months in the hospital. He used a wheelchair from then on, though the courts and the prison system said he was not entirely immobile. In 2012 he was diagnosed with hypertension, diabetes, deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, and in 2016 with Parkinson's disease.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence on May 4, 2005, in Bible v. State, 162 S.W.3d 234, rejecting sixteen points of error. Among its holdings, according to a published summary, the corroboration rule for confessions (the corpus delicti doctrine) does not apply to unadjudicated offenses offered at the punishment phase of a capital trial. Bible did not ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review that decision, and the conviction became final in August 2005.
His state habeas application, filed in March 2005, raised seven grounds, including claims that his trial lawyers had been ineffective. The Court of Criminal Appeals denied it on January 25, 2012.
In federal court, Bible raised eight grounds. The main ones were that his injuries made him physically incapable of being a danger to anyone, so that executing him on the basis of a future-danger finding made in 2003 would violate the Eighth Amendment, and that his lawyer should have objected to the prosecutors' reenactment of the Robinson rape. He also argued that his lawyers had failed to object to race-based jury strikes and had not presented evidence about false confessions. Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt of the Southern District of Texas denied the petition on October 30, 2014.
The Fifth Circuit refused to allow an appeal on February 25, 2016. On the dangerousness claim, it said no court had ever held that the Constitution forbids executing a mentally competent prisoner who becomes physically unable to pose a danger after sentencing. On the reenactment, the panel was openly critical. It said the prosecutors' "theatrics possibly drew Bible's assault into sharper focus" and that the dramatization "was superfluous," but it held that the state courts had not been unreasonable in finding no constitutional error, given what it called his "unremitting violence." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October 2016.
On March 19, 2018, a judge of the 351st District Court in Harris County signed a death warrant setting the execution for June 27, 2018. Bible was brought from death row to Houston for the hearing. His appellate lawyer, Margaret Schmucker, told the Chronicle that no appeals were pending: "There's nothing more I can do in the courts for him." Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg called him one of the "worst of the worst."
On June 8, 2018, nineteen days before the execution date, Bible's lawyers, from the Federal Public Defender's office in Dallas and Schmucker's office, filed a federal civil rights suit against Texas prison officials, Gov. Greg Abbott and the execution team.
They argued that Bible had what they called a "galaxy of medical issues": heart failure, coronary artery disease, peripheral artery disease, chronic venous insufficiency, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, sleep apnea, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, hypertension and a blood clotting disorder. Texas's protocol requires two working IV lines. An anesthesiologist retained by the defense, Dr. Sinha, reported that Bible's veins could not be seen or felt, that his tremors and weight would make placing needles harder, that his groin was too scarred to use and that even if lines were placed his veins might "blow" when the pentobarbital began to flow. The lawyers also said he struggled to breathe lying flat and would feel he was suffocating while strapped to the gurney. They pointed to aborted lethal injections in Alabama and Ohio, where execution teams spent hours searching for veins before giving up.
Their main argument was that lethal injection could not be carried out on Bible without severe pain. In the alternative, because Supreme Court precedent requires a prisoner challenging a method of execution to identify a feasible alternative, they proposed two: a firing squad, with Bible in his wheelchair, or nitrogen hypoxia. If neither could be used, they argued, the execution should not go ahead. They also challenged the rule barring his lawyers from watching the IVs being placed.
The state answered that the suit was a "meritless tactic" to delay a "well-deserved execution," in the words of Assistant Attorney General Stephen Hoffman. It noted that prison medical staff had recently drawn Bible's blood, that Texas had never failed to find a vein under its protocol, and that Texas law allowed only lethal injection. The state also argued that Bible could have raised his health long before: his injuries dated to 2003 and his 2016 appeal had relied on them. David Mitcham, the Harris County trial bureau chief, told KHOU the suit lacked "any kind of medical foundation."
On June 21, the federal district court dismissed the suit. It found that Bible's delay was an independent reason to deny relief, that the pain he described was too minor or too speculative to stop an execution, and that firing squad and nitrogen were not available alternatives because Texas law permits only lethal injection. It said Dr. Sinha's report was weakened because he had not examined Bible, had wrongly described him as confined to a wheelchair, and used "exaggerated, emotional, and conclusive language."
On June 26, the Fifth Circuit affirmed. It agreed that the suit was a dilatory tactic and held that "some pain and discomfort when the state's team inserts the IVs" did not meet the constitutional standard, that the claim that his veins could blow was "too speculative" given the recent blood draws, and that the claim about lawyers' access was barred by the statute of limitations. It expressly declined to decide whether a prisoner in Bible's position had to propose an alternative method, noting that the Supreme Court was about to take up that question in Bucklew v. Precythe. Separately, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed a second state habeas application on June 22, rejecting renewed arguments about his disability and dangerousness and a challenge to the clemency process. On June 25 the Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously denied clemency.
His lawyers then asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay. Nadia Wood, of the federal defender's office, wrote that "his unique and severe medical conditions render lethal injection an intolerably cruel method of execution as applied to him." The state's brief replied that Bible had eluded justice for almost twenty years and "should not be rewarded with a stay of execution simply because his evasion of the authorities resulted in him reaching an older and more infirm age." On the afternoon of June 27, the Court denied both the stay and the petition, without noted dissent.
Bible was brought to the death chamber at the Huntsville Unit in a wheelchair. A TDCJ spokesman, Jeremy Desel, said he could walk and that the wheelchair simply made it easier to get from one place to another; prison logs recorded him "walking around cell" in his final hours. Protesters outside the prison shouted through a megaphone in his support.
The AP reported that technicians placed the first IV in his left hand about three minutes after he was strapped down and the second in his right hand three minutes later; the Chronicle said both lines were set in under fifteen minutes. Asked by the warden whether he had a final statement, he answered, "No, sir." The TDCJ records his last statement as "No last statement."
The pentobarbital began at 6:17 p.m. Witnesses reported that he trembled, took quick breaths and said the drug was "burning" and that "it hurts," then began to snore. He stopped moving within about a minute and was pronounced dead at 6:32 p.m. He was 66. Desel said there was "no issue in any way shape or form with obtaining a vein."
Relatives of two of his victims watched through a window a few feet away; Bible looked at them but said nothing. Larry Lance, Pamela Hudgins' brother, issued a statement read by Desel. He called Bible "as vile and evil a person that has ever drawn breath," said he hoped Bible would "burn in hell for eternity," and added, "We are glad to have witnessed him draw his last breath." Josh Reiss of the Harris County District Attorney's Office told KTRK, "He is the reason you have the death penalty." Schmucker told KTRK it was a shame for the state to execute "someone who can't get out of a wheelchair," and told the Texas Tribune that Bible had accepted responsibility for Deaton's murder and would never have left prison in Louisiana in any case.
He was the seventh person executed in Texas in 2018.
The case is closed. TDCJ's death row records, checked for this page in October 2026, list Danny Paul Bible, TDCJ number 999455, as executed on June 27, 2018, with no last statement. No further proceedings were possible after his death. The sources consulted do not show any later prosecution or formal closure of the 1983 deaths of Tracy and Justin Powers.
Proven in court: the capital murder of Inez Deaton (jury verdict, 2003, affirmed on appeal) and the murder of Pamela Hudgins (guilty plea, 1984). He also pleaded guilty to aggravated rape in Louisiana and to aggravated kidnapping and theft in Montana, and had a robbery conviction in Harris County.
Confessed but not tried: the killings of Tracy Powers and her son Justin; the abuse of his five nieces (one of whom testified about it); and other rapes, at least nine in all by the AP's count. The Chronicle reported he was accused of at least nine rapes, and KHOU reported that he confessed to hundreds of sexual assaults; that larger figure appears only in that one report.
Disputed or uncertain: how Tracy Powers, Justin Powers and Pamela Hudgins died (his confession describes a beating and a fall down stairs; the Chronicle describes a stabbing and a body left on a fence); whether Deaton was a friend of Bible's sister or of his cousin (court records conflict; most sources say cousin); the exact day she went to the house (May 26 in the state's brief; "a few days" before May 27 in the federal opinions); and whether a detective promised him he would not be executed, which only the Chronicle reports.
Bible's relationship to Tracy Powers is given in every source consulted as sister-in-law (or "former sister-in-law"). None of them says he killed his own sister.
August 28, 1951: Danny Paul Bible born; TDCJ lists Brazoria County, Texas, as his native county.
About May 26, 1979: Inez Deaton, 20, goes to use the phone at the Houston home where Bible is staying.
May 27, 1979: Her body is found by Greens Bayou. Bible leaves Houston around the time of her funeral.
1979 to 1982: Violence against a girlfriend; time in Wyoming and Montana.
May 1983: Tracy Powers, her 4-month-old son Justin and her roommate Pamela Hudgins are killed in North Texas.
1984: Bible pleads guilty to murdering Hudgins and receives 25 years (Palo Pinto County).
1992: Released to Montana on mandatory supervision.
1996 to 1998: Sexually abuses five young nieces.
November 7, 1998: Attacks Tera Robinson in a Louisiana motel; flees to Florida, where he is arrested.
December 16 and 18, 1998: Confesses to the Robinson attack, the Deaton murder and the 1983 killings.
March 2001: Indicted in Harris County for the capital murder of Inez Deaton.
June 2003: Convicted and sentenced to death.
July 2003: Prison van crash on the way to death row; a guard is killed and Bible is badly injured. Received on death row July 17.
May 4, 2005: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
January 25, 2012: State habeas relief denied.
October 30, 2014: Federal district court denies habeas relief.
February 25, 2016: Fifth Circuit denies a certificate of appealability. Supreme Court declines review in October 2016.
March 19, 2018: Execution date set for June 27.
June 8, 2018: Lawsuit challenging lethal injection filed; firing squad and nitrogen proposed.
June 21 to 26, 2018: District court dismisses; Fifth Circuit affirms; Court of Criminal Appeals dismisses a second habeas application; parole board denies clemency.
June 27, 2018: Supreme Court denies a stay. Bible is executed at Huntsville and pronounced dead at 6:32 p.m.