At about 11:45 on the night of April 17, 1990, Missouri City police took a 911 call from a woman who said she had been stabbed several times in her home by a Black man she did not know. Kim Wildman was thirty-eight. The call cut off, and when officers forced their way in they found her naked on the kitchen floor, bleeding. "Help me, I'm dying," she told them. She died soon after from two knife wounds. Her attacker had come in through an unlocked window while she was probably asleep. The recording went to the FBI, and the case went cold.
Edward George McGregor was born on March 29, 1973, in Missouri City, a suburb of Houston, and at seventeen he lived a few doors from Wildman. He grew up to be a UPS delivery driver with no criminal record. Sixteen years later, Houston police investigating two killings six months apart, in 2005 and 2006, took a DNA sample from him as a suspect, and it matched the evidence from Wildman's murder. He was arrested on May 1, 2006. He denied killing her; he said they had had consensual sex.
He was released, then arrested again that December, when his DNA turned up in another cold case. Edwina Latriss Barnum, twenty-three, had been shot and strangled in her Houston apartment in May 1994, and she too had connections to him. Police also named him publicly as a suspect in the deaths of Danielle L. Subjects, twenty-eight, and Mandy R. Rubin, twenty-five. He was never charged with those two.
He was tried only for Wildman, jointly by the Fort Bend and Harris County district attorneys, with the Barnum killing put before the jury as extraneous-offense evidence. Because he had been seventeen, he could not be sentenced to death, and on September 6, 2010, after the capital murder conviction, the court imposed life. The First Court of Appeals affirmed on August 9, 2012.
What followed turned on three jailhouse witnesses. McGregor argued that the state had hidden deals it made with them, on pending charges and letters to the parole board, while they told the jury there were none. One of them, Delores Lee, had testified that she overheard him admit the killing on the night of the murder. In November 2016 Judge James Shoemake, in 139 findings of fact, concluded that all three had falsely denied being promised benefits, that Lee had lied about the confession, and recommended a new trial. In June 2019 the Court of Criminal Appeals refused, holding the false testimony immaterial because a jury would have convicted him anyway. The prosecutor was later disciplined by the State Bar of Texas for failing to disclose the deals. The Supreme Court of the United States denied review on June 8, 2020, and the conviction stood.