On the night of February 6, 1998, Willie Ryman III, a Port Arthur firefighter known to his family as Billy, drove to his sister's house in the Pear Ridge area of Port Arthur, Texas, to check on her teenage daughters. His sister, also a firefighter, was on duty, and Ryman often stopped by when he knew she was working. When he opened the side door and switched on the kitchen light, a man who had been inside the house for some time, and who had just raped his nieces at gunpoint, ordered him in and shot him once. Ryman died on the kitchen floor. He was thirty-eight.
The gunman was Elroy Chester, a twenty-eight-year-old Port Arthur man who had been released from a Texas prison eleven months earlier. He was arrested soon afterward, and he admitted to four more killings in the same part of the city going back to September 1997. He pleaded guilty to Ryman's murder and was sentenced to death that August. For the next fifteen years his case was argued not over whether he had committed the crimes, which he never disputed, but over whether the state could execute him at all. His lawyers said he was intellectually disabled, and that the Supreme Court's 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia barred his execution. The Texas courts found otherwise, the federal courts deferred to them, and Texas executed him on June 12, 2013.
Chester was born on June 14, 1969, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), and Jefferson County was both his native county and the place where he committed his crimes. The prison system recorded his prior occupation as laborer and his highest grade completed as twelfth.
Most of what is known about his childhood comes from the hearing on his intellectual-disability claim, held years after his conviction. The Port Arthur Independent School District tested his intelligence three times. In March 1977, at seven, he scored a full-scale 69 on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. In March 1982, at twelve, he scored 59. In February 1983, at thirteen, he scored 77; his expert argued that this result was unreliable because the test had been given only eleven months after the previous one. The school district classified him as learning disabled, not as mentally retarded, the clinical term then in use.
The evidence his lawyers later presented, as summarized by the dissenting judge in the Fifth Circuit, described a boy who spoke in jumbled sentences with a small vocabulary, whom his school diagnosed with "a serious communicative handicap" and gave therapy, and whom other children called "stupid" and "retarded." He was in special education classes from third through twelfth grade, taught at a level that was never higher than third grade. One of his teachers, Elizabeth Segler, testified that she considered him moderately retarded.
Chester's adult record began with burglary. A Port Arthur police officer arrested him for burglary in 1988, according to the Beaumont Enterprise. The TDCJ lists a 10-year sentence from Jefferson County for burglary of a building and a 13-year sentence for burglary of a habitation and two more counts of burglary of a building, served at the same time.
When he entered the prison system at eighteen, in 1987, he was tested again. He scored a full-scale 69 on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and in October 1987 he scored 57 on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, a measure of everyday functioning, on entering the TDCJ's Mentally Retarded Offender Program. The prison's assessment recorded that he could read "only small words" and could not name the months of the year. His official classification in the program was "borderline intellectual functioning." Dr. Henry Orloff, a psychologist who directed the program at the time, later testified that there had been no basis for that label. Those 1987 numbers became the center of his appeals.
He was paroled to Jefferson County on February 13, 1990. According to the defense evidence, he never lived on his own, never had a driver's license or a bank account, held only menial jobs and could not fill out a job application. In about 1992 he worked for eleven months at a Luby's restaurant in Port Arthur, where one of his co-workers was Cheryl DeLeon. He later admitted that he often sexually harassed her there and that she complained about him to their boss, according to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. On January 11, 1994, he was returned to prison as a parole violator. He was released again, on mandatory supervision, on March 21, 1997. The Associated Press later described him as on probation at the time of his arrest.
The TDCJ's summary of the case gives his own explanation for what came next: he said he committed the crimes because he was out of his mind "with hate for white people," after a disagreement with a white staff member over a disciplinary report during his earlier imprisonment. At his trial he said he hated white people because he had been assaulted in prison. Prosecutors pointed out that his victims included Black, white and Hispanic people.
The first killing Chester admitted took place on September 20, 1997, six months after his release. John Henry Sepeda was seventy-eight and lived in Port Arthur with his wife. According to the Court of Criminal Appeals' account of the confession, Chester cut the telephone lines to the house with wire cutters, put on a mask he had brought, and went in carrying a gun and a flashlight. He began to burglarize the bedroom where the couple were asleep. Sepeda woke and moved toward him, and Chester shot him dead. Before he left he made Sepeda's wife give him the ring she was wearing. The Fifth Circuit later noted that the Sepeda killing involved the cutting of telephone lines leading into the house's call box, the method Chester used again five months later.
On November 15, 1997, Chester broke into the home of Etta Mae Stallings, eighty-seven, and her husband. By the court's account of his confession, he watched the house first to see who was there, cut the phone lines and went in wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun and a flashlight. The couple were asleep. Stallings woke up and took a gun from her dresser drawer, and Chester shot and killed her. He took the property he had gathered, and her gun, and hid them under a vacant house nearby.
Five days later, on November 20, 1997, Chester went after Cheryl DeLeon, his former co-worker. She was forty and still worked at Luby's. Her sister, Lina Ihle, told the Beaumont Enterprise in 2013 that Cheryl was the oldest of six children, five girls and a boy, and that she was responsible and caring. "She stayed at home a lot and worked - that was her life, work and family," Ihle said. At the time Cheryl was staying at her aunt's home while her grandmother was in the hospital. She was not related to the family whose home Chester entered in February 1998, the Enterprise noted.
Chester knew that she got off work at eight in the evening. After dark he went to the house wearing a mask and gloves and carrying a gun. He unscrewed the bulb in the light over a storage shed near the back door and lay on the ground beside the shed for thirty to forty-five minutes until her car pulled into the driveway. As she walked to the back door he ran up and grabbed her. She screamed and fought him. He struck her on the side of the head with the gun. In his account to police, the gun went off when he hit her, and she was killed. He went to his father's house and hid the gun in the attic. Her aunt, who was not at home, could not reach her by phone and sent someone to check on her.
Accounts of how she died differ. The Court of Criminal Appeals recorded Chester's claim that the gun fired by accident. The Associated Press reported that he stalked her and "fatally beat her with his gun." A Beaumont Enterprise photo caption in 2013 said she was shot in the throat.
On December 21, 1997, Chester killed Albert Bolden Jr., thirty-five, whom the court described as his common-law brother-in-law. He gave police two reasons: that Bolden had been beating his sister, and that Bolden had set him up on a date with someone who was not the woman Chester expected. Chester invited Bolden to commit a burglary with him and took him to a house in Port Arthur that he knew was empty. He admitted that he had no intention of burglarizing it. He sent Bolden through the door first and shot him in the back of the head, then fled and hid the gun.
The four killings were not the only crimes. The Court of Criminal Appeals described a six-month spree in which Chester burglarized at least five homes, sexually assaulted two people, killed at least five and fired at no fewer than five others. The Fifth Circuit's majority put it as at least five burglaries, five non-lethal assaults, five murders and three rapes, with victims ranging in age from ten to eighty-seven. The Associated Press, citing authorities, reported five people dead, five shot, three raped and twenty-five homes burglarized. One of the rape victims was a girl of ten. A jail officer testified that Chester told him he regretted raping such a young child, and that if he had known her age he would have "gotten her momma, then."
Port Arthur's residents responded by watching their own streets. A Port Arthur police officer told the Port Arthur News in 2016 that the city's community policing and neighborhood watch program "peaked during the Elroy Chester murders. People wanted to protect their neighbors so they would go out and patrol the streets." A residents' group, the Concerned Citizens of Pear Ridge, formed in reaction to the crimes, the same paper reported in 2021.
The account of the last night comes from the Court of Criminal Appeals, which set out the facts in its 2007 opinion; they were undisputed at trial. That evening Chester was walking through the neighborhood looking for a house to burglarize. He carried gloves, a knitted hat with two eyeholes cut into it, and a pistol he had stolen in an earlier burglary, with the serial numbers scratched off. He recognized one house as a place he had burglarized before. Through the open blinds he could see a teenage girl alone in the living room. She was the older of Kim Ryman DeLeon's daughters, and her baby son was asleep in the house. Chester cut the phone lines, which he later said was his normal practice, found the side door unlocked and went in.
He held her by her ponytail with the gun to her head and made her take him through the house while he collected jewelry. "I bet you wish you'd locked the door," he told her, according to her testimony. He had her switch off the lights and found a roll of duct tape in the dark garage. When her younger sister came home with her boyfriend, Chester forced them inside, threatened to "blow her head off" if they did not obey, and ordered them into a bathroom. He asked the boyfriend whether his car was an automatic or a stick shift; the older girl took that to mean he planned to use it to escape. He then forced both girls to undress, blindfolded them with duct tape, bound the boyfriend and dragged him into another room, raped the older girl and forced both sisters into sex acts at gunpoint.
A car pulled up. Chester dressed in the kitchen and waited by the side door. Billy Ryman opened it and turned on the light. Chester yelled at him to come inside and shot him as he did. Ryman fell, and Chester dragged him into the kitchen, where he died. Chester ran outside, and the younger sister locked the door behind him.
Ryman's girlfriend, Marcia Sharp, was waiting in his truck in the driveway. She heard the shot and thought it was a car backfiring, then saw a masked man run out of the house, try to get back in and come toward the truck. She locked the passenger door as he reached for it. He fired at the lock. She reached across and locked the driver's door as he ran around to it. He fired twice at that lock, stepped back, looked at her and fired twice through the driver's window. None of the shots hit her. He ran off down the street.
The Beaumont Enterprise's 2013 account, drawn from the family and trial testimony, adds that the sisters got a gun their grandfather had given them, that one of them fired it when Chester came back to the house, and that he escaped on a bicycle. The court opinions do not mention this. Ryman's family told the Enterprise it was certain that if he had not arrived when he did, Chester would have killed the girls and the boyfriend to get rid of witnesses.
Billy Ryman had been a Port Arthur firefighter for twenty years and was twice named the department's firefighter of the year, according to the Associated Press. He was divorced and had a son and a daughter. His sister, Kim Ryman Chiasson, told the Port Arthur News in 2018 that he took her children "and a gob of other kids to the beach and camping and just about everywhere," and that before he died they had been planning a six-week trip with all the children and their bicycles. "He was larger than life. A lot of fun and would do anything for anybody," she said. "He was a great dad to his kids and a great dad to my kids." He mowed her lawn while she cooked.
Colleagues remembered him the same way. Capt. Perry Manuel, a rookie when they became friends and, like Ryman, a Little League coach, said many of the younger men looked up to him: "you could see in his smile he really loved his job." Stephen Curran, then deputy chief, had grown up in the same neighborhood. "He's the guy you want to be with in a fire," Curran said. "He's going to get in where most people won't go." In his family, his brother Barry said, Billy was the peacemaker, the one who made people laugh and calmed them down. He is buried in Greenlawn Memorial Park in Groves.
A description of the attacker from one of Ryman's nieces led police to Chester at his father's house, the Associated Press reported, where officers found clothing that matched what the attacker had worn and jewelry taken from the home.
In custody, after he was asked for a blood sample, Chester told investigator Timothy Smith, whom he knew and seemed to trust more than the other officers, that he would show him where the gun was. Smith, two investigators from the district attorney's office and two Port Arthur detectives took him to his father's house in a jail jumpsuit, with his handcuffs chained to his waist and his legs shackled. Smith told him he would not be allowed to touch the gun. Chester insisted that only he could reach it and said it was unloaded.
In his bedroom he dragged a nightstand under a hole in the ceiling and started to climb it before he was stopped. An investigator named Rose climbed up instead and searched where Chester pointed, without finding anything. Chester then climbed onto the nightstand beside him and, while still directing Rose one way, reached with his shackled hands the other way. Smith drew his gun and ordered him down. Smith then climbed up, looked where Chester had been reaching, and found the gun at once. It was fully loaded. The Fifth Circuit's majority called it an apparent attempt "to mount a violent escape," and every court that reviewed the case treated the episode as evidence that Chester could plan and lie to protect himself.
Chester confessed to the Ryman killing and, over time, to the killings of Sepeda, Stallings, DeLeon and Bolden. DNA evidence tied him to the rapes of Ryman's nieces, and ballistics tests matched his gun to the slayings of Ryman and four others, according to the Associated Press. The AP also reported that the gun had been stolen in one of the twenty-five Port Arthur burglaries attributed to him.
Official accounts do not agree on the count. The TDCJ summary says he confessed in police custody to the Ryman murder, "two other murders, and three attempts to commit capital murder," and a 2002 Beaumont Enterprise report likewise said he had confessed to two other murders. Later AP and Enterprise reports, and the charges that were filed, name four other killings. The Fifth Circuit, describing the state record, said "at least five murders."
Chester pleaded guilty to capital murder in the 252nd District Court of Jefferson County. Texas law requires a jury to decide punishment when death is possible, so the only question at trial in August 1998 was whether he would be sentenced to death or to life in prison. His trial lawyers were Doug Barlow and Layne Walker; the prosecutor was Paul McWilliams. Chester sat behind a sheet of Plexiglas and wore a stun belt, the Enterprise reported.
Against his lawyers' advice he took the stand. He said committing crimes was "a whole lot of fun," that he had been "trippin" the night he killed Ryman, and that the girls he raped were "lucky they ain't dead." He said that if the jury gave him death he would have his "homies" kill the Port Arthur officer who had arrested him for burglary in 1988, and that if he received life he would kill a guard in prison. When McWilliams pressed him to name the "home-boys" he said had been with him during some of the killings, so that more people would not die, Chester answered, "You've got to die one day." "That's true. You sure do," McWilliams replied.
The jury deliberated for 12 minutes before returning answers that required a death sentence. The Enterprise wrote in 2013 that the time was still a local record. Ryman's mother said on August 24, 1998, that the verdict gave the family some relief. "It gets this part out of the way," she said. "And then we've got to go on and live with it for the rest of our lives." Chester arrived on death row on September 26, 1998.
The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence on January 26, 2000, and denied his first state habeas corpus application on May 31, 2000, both in unpublished decisions. Chester then filed a federal habeas petition. It was still pending in 2002 when the law changed.
On June 20, 2002, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Atkins v. Virginia that executing mentally retarded offenders violated the Eighth Amendment. The Court left it to the states to decide how to identify them. In Jefferson County, the Beaumont Enterprise reported, prosecutors and victims' families saw at once that the ruling could affect two local death row cases, Chester's and that of Walter Bell Jr. First Assistant District Attorney Ed Shettle called it a "real can of worms." Ryman's mother, Shirley Ryman, then sixty-six, said the decision was "wrong." "They say it's cruel," she said. "Well, what did he do to us?" Kim Chiasson said: "I feel like we're being victimized again."
On February 26, 2003, the Fifth Circuit dismissed Chester's federal petition without prejudice so that he could raise an Atkins claim in state court. The Court of Criminal Appeals allowed a second state application, filed in November 2004, because Atkins had not been decided when he filed his first. The Texas Legislature had not passed a statute on how Atkins claims should be decided, so the courts used the standard the Court of Criminal Appeals set in Ex parte Briseno in 2004. An applicant had to prove three things by a preponderance of the evidence: significantly subaverage intellectual functioning, usually shown by IQ scores of about 70 or below; significant deficits in adaptive behavior; and onset before eighteen. Briseno also suggested seven questions fact-finders could use on the second point, among them whether the person's family and teachers thought he was retarded as a child, whether he made plans and carried them out or acted on impulse, whether he led or was led, whether he could lie effectively, and whether the crime itself required forethought and planning. The court described them as guidelines until the Legislature acted. The Legislature did not act.
The convicting court, Judge Leonard Giblin's 252nd District Court, held an evidentiary hearing. Chester's side presented the four childhood and prison IQ scores and a fifth, 66, from a test at twenty-nine; the Vineland score of 57; testimony from two of his sisters about his inability to live or work on his own; the special education teacher; two experts who diagnosed him as mentally retarded or mildly mentally retarded; and his enrollment in the prison program. The State called a diagnostician, Vicki Pitman, who testified that his school records labeling him learning disabled were accurate and that a learning disability is not the same as mental retardation, and a psychiatrist, Dr. Edward Gripon, who had examined Chester and testified that he spoke coherently about a wide range of subjects, including current politics, parole violations and many details of his crimes. Gripon did not think Chester was mentally retarded, but on cross-examination he agreed that a person with an IQ of 69 and a Vineland score of 57 measured at the same time would properly be diagnosed as mildly mentally retarded.
The trial court adopted the State's proposed findings in full. It found the IQ evidence unpersuasive, citing the gap between the 1982 and 1983 results and the fact that three of the tests were an older version of the children's scale. On adaptive behavior it went through all seven Briseno questions. It credited Pitman over Segler, and Gripon over Chester's psychologist, noting that Gripon had practiced psychiatry for thirty-two years while the defense expert had been licensed for six years and had held seven jobs in that time. It found that the family had an incentive to lie and that the prison program was open to inmates who were not retarded. And it relied on the crimes themselves: the masks and gloves, the cut phone lines, the targeting of Cheryl DeLeon and Albert Bolden, and the attempt to reach the loaded gun while shackled.
On February 28, 2007, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied relief in an unpublished opinion by Judge Paul Womack; Judge Price dissented. The court found that the trial court had misstated two of the IQ results. Corrected, the record showed full-scale scores below 70 on three of the four tests before he turned eighteen, including the 59 at twelve. The court held that Chester had proved significantly subaverage intellectual functioning, and it was undisputed that the evidence dated from before eighteen. It called the Vineland evidence "persuasive."
But it held that it could not substitute its judgment for the trial court's on adaptive behavior while the findings were supported by the record, and it found that they were. Chester had not proved significant deficits in adaptive behavior, the court said, so he had not proved that he was mentally retarded. The same day, the court ruled that two Houston men, Darrell Carr and Demetrius Simms, could not be executed because they were retarded; in those cases the Harris County prosecutors' own experts had agreed. The Supreme Court declined to review Chester's case on October 17, 2007.
In a new federal petition, Chester argued that the Texas decision was contrary to Atkins and an unreasonable application of it, because the Briseno questions replaced the clinical definition of adaptive deficits with lay impressions. Under the 1996 federal habeas statute, a federal court could grant relief only if the state ruling was unreasonable under Supreme Court law or rested on an unreasonable finding of fact. On April 28, 2008, U.S. District Judge David Folsom of the Eastern District of Texas denied the petition. He noted that the State did not dispute Chester's subaverage intellectual functioning, and that Chester did not contest the finding that his crime required forethought and planning.
On December 30, 2011, a divided Fifth Circuit panel affirmed. Chief Judge Edith Jones wrote for herself and Judge Carl Stewart. Atkins, the majority held, had not required states to use the clinical definitions of the American Association on Mental Retardation, so using the Briseno factors could not be an unreasonable application of it. The hearing had been "a battle between experts," and the trial court's credibility findings were entitled to deference. The majority went further and pointed to the crime. Chester, Jones wrote, "masterminded a sophisticated break-in and dealt with a crisis as it developed," and shooting at the truck's locks was "problem-solving in response to a crisis."
Judge James Dennis dissented at length. In his view Atkins had adopted the clinical definitions in substance, and the Texas courts had used the Briseno factors in place of the clinical adaptive-skills test rather than as aids to it. Under the clinical definition, he wrote, limits in two of ten skill areas are enough, while under the Briseno approach "a single area or moment of strength" could outweigh evidence of significant limitations in many areas. He pointed out that the 1987 Vineland test had been given eleven years before the crime and fifteen years before Atkins, so Chester "could not have been faking mental retardation to avoid the death penalty," and that neither the state courts nor Texas had given a reason for setting the score aside. He cited a study finding that of eighty-one Texas Atkins claims resolved by 2011, fourteen had succeeded. He would have sent the case back to the district court for a decision under the full clinical definition.
The Supreme Court denied review on October 29, 2012. On December 11, 2012, an execution date of April 24, 2013, was set. Lina Ihle, Cheryl DeLeon's sister, said she was pleased: "Now he actually knows he can count the number of days until his death. Nobody else had a choice in theirs', he just took it." The date was later moved to June 12 because of what the district attorney's office called a legal issue.
On February 20, 2013, Judge Jones gave a lecture on the death penalty to the Federalist Society chapter at the University of Pennsylvania law school. It was not recorded. In early June, thirteen lawyers and groups filed a judicial misconduct complaint based on the recollections of people who attended, chiefly a Pennsylvania capital defense lawyer, Marc Bookman. They alleged that Jones had made remarks about race and crime and had discussed pending cases, among them Chester's. According to Bookman's affidavit, she told the audience that Chester claimed to be mentally retarded but still managed a burglary spree, and that his attempt to reach the gun while shackled showed he was "far too canny to be mentally retarded."
On June 4, 2013, Chester's lawyer, Susan Orlansky of the Alaska firm Feldman Orlansky and Sanders, asked the Fifth Circuit to stay the execution, recall its 2011 mandate and remove Jones from the case. Orlansky argued that the views Jones had expressed "cause reasonable people to question her ability to have decided Mr. Chester's case impartially." State lawyers called the filing "clearly a desperate, 11th-hour delay tactic," and said eleven state and federal judges had rejected Chester's claim while only one state judge and one federal judge had found merit in it. On June 11, Jones denied the recusal motion. The same day, over her dissent, the panel sent the matter to a new panel. Judge Dennis wrote that the execution should be postponed so the new judges had time, because "Chester's execution, of course, will moot those issues and any constitutional injury to his rights will be irreparable."
On June 12 the new panel, Judges W. Eugene Davis, Edith Brown Clement and Stephen Higginson, denied the motions. "We perceive no injustice, nor any incorrectness, in affirmance of the district court's order denying habeas relief," it wrote. The Supreme Court denied a final petition that day. Chester's lawyers did not contest his guilt.
Several dozen Port Arthur police officers and firefighters traveled to Huntsville and gathered outside the Walls Unit. Members of Ryman's family watched from a witness room, and Cheryl DeLeon's sister had said she would be there too. In his final statement Chester spoke to Ryman's relatives. "I just want to say I don't want you to have hate in your heart for me because I took your loved one," he said. "I know it doesn't mean anything. I told the truth because I feel like you should know who killed your loved one." He said that "Elroy Chester wasn't a bad man" and added: "A lot of people say I didn't commit those murders. I really did it."
He told the warden to proceed. He was given a lethal dose of pentobarbital, hummed what sounded like a hymn, and was pronounced dead at 7:04 p.m., twenty-seven minutes later. He was the seventh person executed in Texas in 2013 and the 499th since the state resumed executions in 1982. By the TDCJ's date of birth he was forty-three; the AP gave his age as forty-four.
"After 15 years, it's a long time coming," Barry Ryman said afterward. "It's not complete closure. Our brother's still not here. The other victims are not here." Kim Chiasson said she would not say the execution brought closure. "Justice has been done," she said. "His reign of terror is over." Port Arthur Police Chief Mark Blanton, who had been one of the responding officers during the killings, said: "In my 37 years as a policeman, I've never met a man so evil in my life."
Chester was charged over the deaths of Sepeda, Stallings, DeLeon and Bolden, but he was never tried on any of them, the Beaumont Enterprise reported in 2012. In November 2011 the paper reported that a scheduled hearing on those cases had been canceled and that they would stay on hold until his appeals in the Ryman case were exhausted. The execution ended them. In law his only conviction is for Ryman's murder. The other four killings rest on his confessions, which he repeated in the death chamber, and on the ballistics and other evidence described in news reports and the court record, none of which was tested at a trial.
The killing changed the Ryman family. Ryman's son, sixteen at the time, would not talk about it and for years refused to enter the house where his father died, Barry Ryman told the Enterprise; he died of a heroin overdose at twenty-six. "Our family was shattered," Barry Ryman wrote. "Billy's key dynamic (accepting everyone and helping anyone) was gone and no one could replace it." Ryman's daughter lives in Liberty Hill, and he has two grandchildren he never met, his sister said in 2018. His nieces, she said then, had families of their own and were doing well. In December 2014 two survivors of the February 1998 attack told their story on the Lifetime Movie Network series I Survived.
The fire department kept his name. Its highest honor at its annual awards is the Willie A. Ryman Medal of Valor. Station 5 carries an emblem with his initials, WAR, and an aardvark, after a tattoo he had in honor of a relative's military squadron. A fire truck he used to drive bears his name. In 2016 firefighters and local businesses started the Willie A. Ryman III Memorial Scholarship for children of Port Arthur firefighters. "I think it's a real testament to what he meant to Port Arthur and his fellow firefighters," Barry Ryman said at the first fundraiser.
The legal standard used against Chester did not last. On March 28, 2017, in Moore v. Texas, a Houston case, the Supreme Court held that the Court of Criminal Appeals had erred by relying on the Briseno factors, which it called "an outlier" that created "an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed." The opinion does not mention Chester, whose case had ended four years earlier, and there is no way to know whether it would have changed his outcome.
Chief Justice John Roberts transferred the misconduct complaint against Judge Jones to the Judicial Council of the D.C. Circuit on the day of the execution. On August 12, 2014, the council dismissed it. Its special committee found that a Chester matter had been "impending" in the Fifth Circuit at the time of the lecture, but that what Jones said about it closely tracked her published opinion and did not amount to misconduct.
Proven by conviction: the capital murder of Willie Ryman III during a burglary on February 6, 1998, to which Chester pleaded guilty. The sexual assaults that night and the shots at Marcia Sharp were part of the undisputed facts at his punishment trial and were tied to him by DNA and witness testimony.
Confessed and charged, never tried: the killings of John Henry Sepeda, Etta Mae Stallings, Cheryl DeLeon and Albert Bolden Jr. The AP reported ballistics matches between his gun and those deaths; the court opinions rely on his confessions. Sources disagree on how many killings he admitted at first (two or four besides Ryman's) and on how Cheryl DeLeon died.
Reported but not documented case by case in the sources found: the rape of a ten-year-old girl, the other non-fatal shootings, and the figure of twenty-five burglaries, which comes from authorities quoted by the AP. Chester's claim at trial that "home-boys" were with him during some killings was never supported; the TDCJ lists no co-defendants, and the courts found that he acted alone.
Disputed in court: whether he was intellectually disabled. The Texas courts accepted that his IQ scores met the first part of the test, and the State's own expert agreed that his 1987 scores would ordinarily support a diagnosis of mild mental retardation, but the courts found he had not proved deficits in adaptive behavior. One state judge and one federal appellate judge dissented. The Supreme Court later rejected the standard used to reach that finding, in another man's case.
June 14, 1969: Elroy Chester born (TDCJ record).
1977-1983: Port Arthur schools test his IQ at 69, 59 and 77; he is classed as learning disabled.
1987: Enters Texas prison at 18 on burglary sentences; IQ 69, Vineland score 57; placed in the Mentally Retarded Offender Program.
February 13, 1990: Paroled to Jefferson County.
About 1992: Works at Luby's with Cheryl DeLeon.
January 11, 1994: Returned to prison as a parole violator.
March 21, 1997: Released on mandatory supervision.
September 20, 1997: John Henry Sepeda, 78, killed during a burglary.
November 15, 1997: Etta Mae Stallings, 87, killed during a burglary.
November 20, 1997: Cheryl DeLeon, 40, killed outside the house where she was staying.
December 21, 1997: Albert Bolden Jr., 35, killed in a vacant house.
February 6, 1998: Willie Ryman III, 38, killed; his nieces raped; shots fired at Marcia Sharp.
February 1998: Chester arrested at his father's house; tries to reach a hidden loaded gun while shackled.
August 1998: Pleads guilty to capital murder; jury returns death in 12 minutes.
September 26, 1998: Received on death row.
January 26, 2000: Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
May 31, 2000: First state habeas application denied.
June 20, 2002: Atkins v. Virginia decided while his federal petition is pending.
February 26, 2003: Fifth Circuit dismisses the federal petition without prejudice for state Atkins proceedings.
November 2004: Second state application, claiming mental retardation, filed.
February 28, 2007: Court of Criminal Appeals denies the Atkins claim.
October 17, 2007: Supreme Court declines review.
April 28, 2008: Federal district court denies habeas relief.
December 30, 2011: Fifth Circuit affirms, 2-1.
October 29, 2012: Supreme Court denies review.
December 11, 2012: Execution set for April 24, 2013; later moved to June 12.
February 20, 2013: Judge Jones's lecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
June 4-12, 2013: Recusal and stay motions; a new panel denies them; the Supreme Court denies a final petition.
June 12, 2013: Chester executed at Huntsville at 7:04 p.m.
August 12, 2014: D.C. Circuit Judicial Council dismisses the complaint against Judge Jones.
December 2014: Survivors tell their story on Lifetime's I Survived.
2016: Willie A. Ryman III Memorial Scholarship founded.
March 28, 2017: Moore v. Texas rejects the Briseno factors.