Faryion Wardrip killed five young women in North Texas between December 1984 and May 1986. Four of the deaths were in and around Wichita Falls, and the fifth was in Fort Worth. For years only one of them was solved. In May 1986, days after he suffocated Tina Kimbrew in her apartment, Wardrip called the police from a motel in Galveston and confessed to her killing. He pleaded guilty to murder, was sentenced to 35 years, and was released in December 1997. The other four cases stayed open, worked separately by three agencies that had no reason to think they were connected to each other, or to him.
In early 1999 an investigator for the Wichita County district attorney, John Little, picked up the old files and found Wardrip's name close to several of them. Wardrip was then living in the small town of Olney, working at a door and screen factory, singing in a church choir and recently married. Little followed him for days and finally took a coffee cup Wardrip had thrown away. DNA from the cup matched evidence from the killings of Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs. After his arrest Wardrip confessed to those two killings, to the killing of Ellen Blau, and to a Fort Worth killing that no one had linked to him, the death of Debra Taylor. He pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Terry Sims, and a jury in Denton sentenced him to death in November 1999. Life sentences for the other three followed. His death sentence has been in the federal courts for most of the time since. A federal judge first set it aside in 2010, the Fifth Circuit reinstated it in 2020, and in May 2026 the district court denied his remaining claims.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice gives Wardrip's date of birth as March 6, 1959. The Dallas Observer, in a long account of the case by Carlton Stowers, wrote that he was born in Marion, Indiana, and dropped out of high school there. TDCJ records his highest grade completed as the eleventh, and school records introduced at his 1999 trial, described in a 2008 federal magistrate's report, showed he did not attend past the eleventh grade and earned mostly C and D grades.
Military records described in the same report show that he enlisted in 1978, was charged with 54 unexcused absences in 1979, and was discharged in 1980 under less than honorable conditions. The Observer reported that he was discharged dishonorably for marijuana use and that he later made false claims about his military service and about his schooling.
By the mid-1980s he was living in Wichita Falls. TDCJ lists his prior occupations as clerk, orderly and laborer. He worked at the hospital where Toni Gibbs was a nurse, according to the Observer. He was married in those years. The Observer described the marriage as violent and said it ended in divorce in 1986, and his former wife's account of physical abuse was filed by the state in the federal habeas case. Wardrip later blamed his crimes on drug abuse, as the Fifth Circuit noted in 2020, and in his 1999 statement about Terry Sims he said he had been on heavy drugs.
In federal court Wardrip's lawyers raised the question of an abusive childhood. In a letter to his trial lawyer he said his father had beaten him. The 2008 magistrate's report records that his sister and one of his brothers denied any abuse, and that a former sister-in-law said another brother had described abuse. The magistrate wrote that the court could not determine whether it had happened.
Terry Sims was 20. She was a student at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls and worked as a technical assistant at Bethania Regional Health Care Center, according to the Observer. On the night of December 20, 1984, she and a friend finished their hospital shifts at about 11:15 p.m., and the friend dropped her off at about 12:30 a.m. on December 21, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals recorded. The Observer wrote that she was staying that night at the home of a female co-worker.
When the friend came back at about 7:15 that morning she found the place in disarray, and Sims was found dead inside. The pathologist, Dr. Allen Stilwell, testified that she had been stabbed to death. The knife was never found.
The case belonged to the Wichita Falls Police Department. Barry Macha took office as Wichita County district attorney 10 days after Terry Sims was killed, the Observer reported. In 1999 her sister would credit the investigator who solved it.
Toni Gibbs was a nurse at Wichita General Hospital who worked nights. She had divorced her husband. Stowers wrote that his own wife had known her through a college sorority. Gibbs disappeared in January 1985. Her car was found abandoned, and her body was found on February 15, 1985, in Archer County, near Wichita Falls. She had been stabbed.
Because she was found across the county line, her case went to the Archer County sheriff. A suspect, D.L., was charged and tried in Archer County. According to the Observer, he was a 24-year-old who worked at a nightclub Gibbs went to, had talked about a romantic interest in her, and seemed to know facts about her disappearance that had not been made public. The jury could not reach a verdict; the Observer reported that it stood 11 to 1 for acquittal. Many people in the area went on believing he had killed her. He died in a car accident in 1993. In 1996 a DNA test compared evidence preserved from the Gibbs case with his blood sample and showed he was not the source. The Gibbs case was reopened but stalled.
Debra Taylor was 26 and the mother of two children, according to the Observer. She was found in Fort Worth on March 29, 1985, the Court of Criminal Appeals recorded. She died of manual strangulation. Wardrip had been staying in Fort Worth at the time, and he later said he had met her at a bar there. Her death was handled by Fort Worth police, and nothing connected it to Wichita Falls until Wardrip described it himself in February 1999. Investigators then concluded that she was killed before Ellen Blau.
Ellen Blau was 21. She had moved to Texas from Connecticut, studied at Midwestern State University and worked as a waitress, according to the Observer. She disappeared from a convenience store parking lot in 1985. On October 10, 1985, a county worker found her body in Wichita County. Her remains had decomposed so far that the medical examiner could record only "undetermined homicidal violence" as the cause of death, the Court of Criminal Appeals noted. The Wichita County sheriff's office handled her case.
Tina Kimbrew was 21. She came from Vernon, Texas, and worked as a bartender and waitress at a local hotel, according to the Observer. She knew Wardrip; he later told her mother, "She was my friend." She was found suffocated in her apartment in Wichita Falls on May 6, 1986.
After Kimbrew's death Wardrip drove to Galveston. The Observer reported that he walked the beach for two days and bought a knife, then called a Galveston police sergeant from his motel and said he wanted to confess. "I just wanted to come here and see the ocean before I killed myself," he told the sergeant, as the Observer quoted him. The Court of Criminal Appeals described the same events more briefly: he checked into a beachfront hotel and threatened suicide by telephone, which led police to him. The Fifth Circuit wrote that he surrendered to Galveston police and confessed only to the Kimbrew murder.
He pleaded guilty to murdering Tina Kimbrew and was sentenced to 35 years. He began serving the sentence in December 1986. Nothing in his confession tied him, at the time, to the deaths of Terry Sims, Toni Gibbs, Debra Taylor or Ellen Blau. The Observer reported that the Kimbrew case had been treated as unrelated to the other killings. Three different agencies, the Wichita Falls police, the Wichita County sheriff and the Archer County sheriff, were each working one of the Wichita Falls area cases, and no link among them was made.
Wardrip spent about 11 years in the Texas prison system. His disciplinary record, introduced by the state at his 1999 trial, showed two infractions in that time, for creating a disturbance and for fighting without a weapon. Records later gathered for his federal habeas case showed that he took classes in art, horticulture and construction, took special education classes, passed the GED, and wrote sports articles as a unit reporter for a monthly prison newsletter. The parties to the federal case also agreed that a TDCJ fundraiser was held in 1992 for a local boy who needed an organ transplant; a prison sergeant disputed that Wardrip took part in it. A former inmate interviewed by the district attorney's office called him a con man with an anger problem.
Tina Kimbrew's parents took part in a TDCJ Victim Services program that let crime victims meet the offender, with both sides' agreement, the Observer reported. The meeting took place about 11 years after the sentence, when his release had become likely, and lasted five hours. Wardrip said he had wanted to meet her father to tell him how sorry he was. At the end her father offered him his help, and told him to call if he found himself headed for trouble again after his release.
TDCJ records that Wardrip was released on mandatory supervision on December 11, 1997. The federal courts describe the release as parole; the 2026 district court order says he had served about ten years and seven months.
After his release Wardrip settled in Olney, Texas. The Observer reported that his father helped him get a job at a door and screen manufacturer there. He sang in the choir and taught Sunday school at a Church of Christ congregation, married a woman he met at the church, told co-workers that he planned to study for the ministry, and gave them false accounts of why he had been in prison. His employer and his parole officer later testified for him at his 1999 trial about his good conduct on parole. He wore an ankle monitor as a condition of release, the Observer reported.
By the late 1990s the three Wichita Falls area cases had gone more than a decade without an arrest. According to the Observer, Barry Macha had long been troubled that cases so well known locally might go unsolved during his career, had privately driven past the places linked to them, and had come to suspect that the killer had ties to one small part of the city. In late 1998 he gave the three files to John Little, one of his investigators, and told him, "See if you can find anything that's been overlooked."
Little had grown up in Wichita Falls and had worked as a bricklayer. He joined the district attorney's investigative staff in 1993, at age 30, after failing a police academy eye examination, the Observer reported. He would serve as the office's chief investigator for more than 25 years, according to KAUZ, the Wichita Falls television station.
Reading the Blau file, Little came across a neighbor of hers named Faryion Wardrip, whom a co-worker had described as having "given me the creeps." From there he found other links. Wardrip had worked at the hospital where Toni Gibbs worked, at a restaurant near the place where Ellen Blau worked, and had lived in an apartment about a block and a half from where Terry Sims was killed. Little also learned that Wardrip had been convicted of murdering Tina Kimbrew and had recently been paroled. KAUZ later summed up his work as finding a previously unknown link between a convicted killer on parole and two unsolved Wichita Falls murders.
The Wichita Falls area cases had something the Kimbrew case did not: biological evidence from the Sims and Gibbs cases had been preserved, and in 1996 testing of the Gibbs evidence had already cleared D.L. What Little lacked was a sample from Wardrip. According to the Observer, investigators decided against seeking one by subpoena, which would have warned him, and instead set out to collect something he had thrown away.
Little followed Wardrip around Olney for five days without a chance. On the sixth day he waited at a laundromat across the road from the factory. Wardrip came out on his morning break, spent it with his wife in the parking lot, and dropped his coffee cup into a trash barrel. Little walked over. "Hey, buddy," he said, as the Observer told it, "you got a cup I can borrow?" Wardrip told him to help himself. That afternoon Little delivered the cup to GeneScreen, a forensic laboratory in Dallas. KAUZ, in its 2018 report on Little's death, said he had followed Wardrip for days, spending weeks away from his family, before he collected the cup.
At GeneScreen the laboratory supervisor, Judy Floyd, ran tests on the cup and on evidence swabs from the Sims and Gibbs cases. The following week she reported that Wardrip could not be excluded as the source of the DNA in either case. Macha noted that less than a month had passed since Little began work on the files.
On February 13, 1999, Wardrip was asked to come to the district attorney's office, on the pretext of a discussion about removing his ankle monitor, the Observer reported. Little and an Archer County investigator questioned him. He told them nothing useful about Ellen Blau, and he denied the killings. "I got nothing to hide," he said, according to the Observer. "I didn't do this." He was arrested on capital murder charges in the deaths of Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs.
He learned of the DNA results only the next day. He then asked to speak with Little. In a recorded interview he confessed to killing Terry Sims, Toni Gibbs and Ellen Blau. Then he told the investigators there was another. "It ain't here," he said, as the Observer quoted him. "This one's in Fort Worth." He described meeting a 26-year-old mother of two in a bar there while he was staying in the city, and killing her. That was Debra Taylor, whose death had never been tied to the Wichita Falls area cases. Wardrip said he had seen his first wife's face during the killings, and that afterward he had thought, "Oh my God, what have I done?"
About Terry Sims he said he had been on heavy drugs, had ransacked the house and had stabbed her in a violent rage. He said he could not remember whether he had brought the knife or what he did with it, the Court of Criminal Appeals recorded. About Ellen Blau he admitted abducting her. About Debra Taylor he admitted strangling her. The Court of Criminal Appeals listed DNA from the Sims and Gibbs cases and a fingerprint found at the Sims scene as the physical evidence that matched him.
KAUZ reported in 2018 that Little confirmed Wardrip's DNA matched DNA from the two killings and that Wardrip confessed to two other murders after he was taken into custody. Little received an Investigator of the Year award for the case. "Without DNA," he told the Observer, "there would never have been a case." Terry Sims's sister answered that without John Little there would have been no case, and gave him a brick inscribed "Our Hero, John Little."
The capital murder indictment for the death of Terry Sims was filed in Wichita County. Wardrip's lawyer was John Curry, the Wichita County public defender. Curry moved to disqualify the trial judge, Robert Brotherton, who had earlier represented Wardrip's wife in a divorce and had represented an earlier suspect in one of the murders. A visiting judge held a hearing at which Brotherton testified under oath that his past work would not affect his impartiality, and he stayed on the case, the Fifth Circuit recorded.
Curry obtained a change of venue, and the case was tried in the 367th District Court in Denton County. He also litigated motions to suppress Wardrip's statements; the motions were denied after hearings in August 1999, and the trial court ruled the confessions admissible. Jury selection began on September 30, 1999, according to the 2008 federal magistrate's report.
According to the Observer, Wardrip then pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Terry Sims against his lawyer's advice. The plea meant the only question left for the jury was punishment: under Texas law it had to decide whether he acted deliberately, whether he would be a continuing threat to society, and whether anything in his life or character called for a life sentence instead of death.
The state presented evidence on all five killings. The Fifth Circuit noted that the jury heard graphic details of each, and the 2026 district court order said the evidence included Wardrip's recorded confessions to all five murders, along with his own claims of remorse, an abusive childhood and intoxication. Witnesses for the state included Terry Sims's friend, the pathologist Dr. Allen Stilwell, and Judy Floyd of GeneScreen, who testified that the chance of a random match was about one in 3.23 quadrillion, the Observer reported. The state introduced his 1986 Kimbrew conviction and his prison records, which showed two disciplinary infractions in 11 years, and evidence that he had left school and been discharged from military service for his conduct and absences. Tina Kimbrew's father and another member of her family testified in rebuttal.
Curry called two witnesses, Wardrip's employer in Olney and his parole officer, who described his good behavior on parole. His argument was that a man with so few disciplinary problems in 11 years would not be dangerous in prison. He did not present evidence about Wardrip's classes, GED or newsletter work, which he considered irrelevant to that argument. Investigator Dana Rice had drawn up a list of possible witnesses, but Curry later said Wardrip's family had no interest in helping him; a minister who had baptized Wardrip, and others from his church, were not called.
About an hour and a half into deliberations the jurors sent out a question: did "threat to society" mean society at large or prison society? The court answered that there was no specific definition. The jury was not told when Wardrip might become eligible for parole on a life sentence, which the magistrate later put at about 20 years. After five days of testimony, the Observer reported, the jury found that he had acted deliberately and would be a continuing threat, and that no mitigating circumstance called for a life sentence. Judgment was entered on November 5, 1999, and he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. TDCJ received him on death row on November 9, 1999.
The Observer reported that Wardrip went on to plead guilty in Archer County to murdering Toni Gibbs and received a life sentence. In Tarrant County he admitted killing Debra Taylor and received a second life sentence. In Wichita County he received a third life sentence, for the killing of Ellen Blau, with two days left in 1999. The Observer reported that the sentences were stacked, so that he would have to serve at least 60 years before he could be considered for parole even if he were never executed. KAUZ reported in 2014 that he had been sentenced to death for the Terry Sims murder and to life for the others.
"It's amazing," Macha told the Observer. "Absolutely amazing." Within a year, he said, the cases had gone from one arrest to four convictions.
Because he was sentenced to death, Wardrip's case went straight to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. He challenged only the sufficiency of the evidence on two of the jury's answers. On October 3, 2001, the court affirmed. On the question of deliberateness, it held for the first time that the issue could be reviewed for factual sufficiency, and found the evidence sufficient, pointing to the nature of the attack, his admitted anger and the possibility that he came armed. On future dangerousness, it held that the circumstances of the crime could be strong evidence on their own, and that the four later killings were relevant even though they came after the death of Terry Sims. His prison discipline and his military discharge also counted.
While the appeal was pending, in October 2000, Wardrip's state habeas lawyers filed an application raising seven claims that Curry had been ineffective, among them that he had failed to present evidence of Wardrip's prison record. The trial court refused an evidentiary hearing. In April 2001 Curry signed an affidavit explaining his strategy, and in June 2001 the court recommended that relief be denied, finding that Curry knew of Wardrip's good prison record and had made strategic choices. The Court of Criminal Appeals adopted those findings and denied relief in November 2001.
Wardrip filed a federal petition in the Northern District of Texas in December 2002. The magistrate judge granted an evidentiary hearing, held in 2006, at which Curry testified but could not recall many details of his decisions. On July 25, 2008, the magistrate recommended relief on the claim that Curry had failed to investigate and present Wardrip's record in prison: the classes, the GED and the newsletter writing. The magistrate found that the failure was not a reasonable strategy and that it had prejudiced Wardrip, given the jury's question about prison society and the lack of parole information. The magistrate recommended denying a separate claim about witnesses from his church and family, finding that Curry's failure to contact his family was deficient but that it had not been shown to matter.
On April 9, 2010, Senior U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish adopted the findings, except for the recommendation on resentencing. The court conditionally granted relief, vacated the death sentence, and ordered that Wardrip be released within 180 days unless the state began new sentencing proceedings or agreed to a life sentence. Texas appealed in May 2010 and obtained a stay.
While the appeal was pending, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Cullen v. Pinholster, which limits a federal court's use of evidence first presented in federal court when it reviews a state court's decision. On June 10, 2011, the Fifth Circuit vacated Judge Fish's judgment and sent the case back for reconsideration in light of that decision.
Two later Supreme Court decisions, Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler, opened a route for some ineffective-assistance claims that state habeas lawyers had failed to raise. Wardrip added claims that his trial investigator had a conflict of interest and that Judge Brotherton was biased. On April 22, 2014, Judge Fish stayed the federal case so that Wardrip could take those claims to the state courts first. On December 10, 2014, the Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed his new application as an abuse of the writ without reaching the merits. KAUZ reported the dismissal the next day.
Back in federal court, the magistrate judge recommended relief again on the prison-record claim on November 29, 2017, and found the other two claims outside the scope of the remand. Judge Fish adopted the recommendation on March 29, 2018, granted relief on the prison-record claim, and declined to certify the other claims for appeal.
Texas appealed again. On September 21, 2020, a Fifth Circuit panel reversed. Judge Southwick, writing for the court, held that the state habeas court had reasonably found that Curry conducted a reasonable investigation that made him aware of Wardrip's good conduct in prison, and had reasonably found that any further steps would not have changed the outcome. The court also refused to let him appeal the investigator and judge claims. Judge Higginbotham dissented on the prison-record claim. He would have upheld the grant of relief, reasoning that Wardrip's prison history was Curry's only mitigation strategy and that there was a reasonable probability that at least one juror would have voted for life. KAUZ reported the next day that the death sentence had been reinstated.
On rehearing, on February 26, 2021, the panel modified its decision. Wardrip had argued that the 2001 state decision was also an unreasonable application of Supreme Court precedent on ineffective counsel, an argument neither federal court had addressed. The panel sent the case back to the district court to decide that question, and expressed no view on it. The 2026 district court order records that the Supreme Court denied review in 2022.
On remand Wardrip filed a second amended petition seeking fresh review of his remaining ineffective-assistance claim. The magistrate judge recommended denying it. On May 19, 2026, in the case by then captioned Wardrip v. Guerrero after the current TDCJ director, Judge Fish adopted that recommendation in full and denied all relief. The court held that Wardrip had not shown prejudice under the deferential standard that federal law applies to state decisions, because his state habeas lawyers had alleged no facts and offered no evidence on prejudice, and that recent Supreme Court decisions, Shinn v. Ramirez and Shoop v. Twyford, barred further fact-finding in federal court. It held, in the alternative, that he had not shown prejudice even on fresh review. The jury had already heard a good deal of mitigating evidence, including his confessions, his remorse, his clean parole and prison records and his employment, and the court described the crimes as premeditated, planned and brutal. It also pointed to a statement it called "blatantly false," that he had never harmed anyone before the Kimbrew murder.
The court overruled the state's objections as well. It agreed with the magistrate that Curry's stated reasons for not looking into the prison record were "a rationalization, not a rationale." The court granted Wardrip a certificate of appealability, which allows an appeal to the Fifth Circuit, on two questions: whether Curry was ineffective in failing to investigate his background, especially his years in prison before the Sims arrest, and to present the mitigating evidence available; and whether he is entitled to equitable relief from Shinn and Shoop so that he can develop evidence in federal court because of his first state habeas lawyers' performance.
Wardrip is listed on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's roster of offenders on death row, last updated March 12, 2026, with TDCJ number 999331. KAUZ reported in 2014 that he was held at the Polunsky Unit near Livingston. As of the federal order of May 19, 2026, his death sentence stood, with an appeal open to him on the two certified issues.
The case changed what Wichita Falls knew about five deaths it had lived with since the mid-1980s. D.L., the man tried for the Gibbs killing, had died in 1993 with suspicion still attached to him; DNA testing in 1996 and Wardrip's confession in 1999 showed that the case against him had been wrong. The families of Terry Sims, Toni Gibbs and Ellen Blau learned who had killed them, and in Fort Worth Debra Taylor's death was tied for the first time to the Wichita Falls cases. The man Tina Kimbrew's parents had met in prison, and to whom her father had offered help, had killed four other women before her.
John Little was honored as investigator of the year for the case. He died on November 30, 2018, after a battle with cancer. A colleague in the district attorney's office, Dobie Kosub, called him tenacious and dedicated, and said he loved the office and the job. Carlton Stowers, who covered the case for the Dallas Observer, said in that piece that he was writing a book on it.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Tina Kimbrew (guilty plea, 1986) and the capital murder of Terry Sims (guilty plea and jury sentence, 1999; affirmed 2001). The sentence of death is still under federal review.
Reported life sentences: the Dallas Observer and KAUZ report life sentences for the deaths of Toni Gibbs, Debra Taylor and Ellen Blau. The exact offense of conviction and the dates of those judgments were not reported in a court record.
How the DNA sample was obtained: the Dallas Observer and KAUZ describe the discarded coffee cup in detail. The 2026 federal order says, in its summary of the facts, that Wardrip gave a DNA sample as a condition of parole and that DNA testing then linked him to the Sims and Gibbs murders. The two accounts have not been reconciled in the reporting.
Release in 1997: TDCJ records release on mandatory supervision on December 11, 1997; the federal courts and the press call it parole. Time served is given as about 11 years (Fifth Circuit, Observer) and as about ten years and seven months (2026 district court order).
Terry Sims's death: the Court of Criminal Appeals records that a friend dropped her off at her residence, and the Observer that she was staying at a co-worker's home. TDCJ's summary says she was killed after she came outside and confronted him, which is not how the court described the events.
School and military service: TDCJ and school records put his last grade at the eleventh; the 2001 appellate opinion says he left in the twelfth grade and was discharged from the Army National Guard after six years. Military records described in 2008 show enlistment in 1978 and discharge in 1980. The 2008 report notes the mismatch.
Birthplace: Marion, Indiana, per the Dallas Observer; no court or official record confirms it.
The first link among the cases: KAUZ (2014) said a Wichita Falls detective linked Wardrip to Ellen Blau's murder through DNA on a paper cup. Other accounts say the investigator worked for the district attorney, and that the DNA matched the Sims and Gibbs cases; the Court of Criminal Appeals notes that Blau's remains were too decomposed even to fix a cause of death.
March 6, 1959: Faryion Edward Wardrip is born (TDCJ).
1978 to 1980: military enlistment, absences and discharge under less than honorable conditions.
December 21, 1984: Terry Sims, 20, is killed in Wichita Falls.
January 1985: Toni Gibbs disappears; she is found in Archer County on February 15, 1985.
March 29, 1985: Debra Taylor, 26, is found in Fort Worth.
October 10, 1985: Ellen Blau, 21, is found in Wichita County.
May 6, 1986: Tina Kimbrew, 21, is found in Wichita Falls.
May 1986: Wardrip calls Galveston police from a motel and confesses to the Kimbrew killing.
1986: pleads guilty to murdering Tina Kimbrew; 35 years. Begins serving his sentence in December 1986.
1993: D.L. dies in a car accident. John Little joins the district attorney's investigators.
1996: DNA testing excludes D.L. in the Gibbs case.
December 11, 1997: Wardrip is released from prison.
Late 1998: District Attorney Barry Macha assigns John Little to review the files.
Early 1999: Little collects Wardrip's discarded coffee cup in Olney; GeneScreen reports a match to the Sims and Gibbs evidence.
February 13, 1999: Wardrip is arrested. After learning of the DNA results he confesses to four killings, including that of Debra Taylor.
September 30, 1999: jury selection begins in Denton County.
November 5, 1999: judgment and death sentence for the capital murder of Terry Sims.
November 9, 1999: received on death row.
Late 1999: life sentences in the Gibbs, Taylor and Blau cases.
October 2000: state habeas application filed.
October 3, 2001: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
November 2001: state habeas relief denied.
December 2002: federal habeas petition filed.
July 25, 2008: magistrate recommends relief on the prison-record claim.
April 9, 2010: Judge Fish conditionally grants relief and vacates the death sentence.
June 10, 2011: Fifth Circuit vacates and remands after Cullen v. Pinholster.
April 22, 2014: federal case stayed for state proceedings.
December 10, 2014: Court of Criminal Appeals dismisses the new application as an abuse of the writ.
November 29, 2017: magistrate again recommends relief.
March 29, 2018: district court grants relief again.
November 30, 2018: John Little dies.
September 21, 2020: Fifth Circuit reverses; death sentence reinstated.
February 26, 2021: on rehearing, remand on one remaining question.
2022: Supreme Court denies review.
March 12, 2026: TDCJ death row list (latest update) includes Wardrip.
May 19, 2026: district court denies all relief and grants a certificate of appealability on two issues.