On the evening of April 7, 1987, a Harris County sheriff's deputy was sent to an apartment complex at 6126 West Mount Houston in response to a report of a possible shooting. Inside were the bodies of Adrian Newton, twenty-three, his son Alton, seven, and his daughter Farrah, twenty-one months, all shot with a .25 caliber handgun. Adrian's wife, Frances Elaine Newton, twenty-one, was arrested on April 22 and charged with capital murder. Prosecutors said she had killed her family to collect about one hundred thousand dollars in life insurance. She said she had not killed anyone, and she said it for the next eighteen years.
Her account was that the killer was connected to a drug dealer to whom Adrian owed fifteen hundred dollars. Neither the police, the prosecutors nor her court-appointed lawyer, Ron Mock, ever investigated it. Mock, whose clients made up a notable share of Texas death row, was later barred from capital cases and suspended. The case against her was circumstantial, and it rested heavily on a pistol matched to the killings by ballistics and on nitrite residue on her skirt. Her later lawyers pointed to a timeline that would have required her to kill three people, clean herself of every trace of blood and gunshot residue and drive to her cousin's house in under thirty minutes, and to indications that investigators had recovered a second gun at the scene that was never disclosed to the defense. She was convicted in October 1988 and sentenced to death.
The ballistics work had been done by the Houston police crime lab, which was later discredited for shoddy work that led to exonerations. With that in the background, and at the recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, Governor Rick Perry granted her a 120-day reprieve on December 1, 2004, a few hours before she was due to die, to allow retesting of the gun and the skirt. He said he saw no evidence of innocence. The retesting confirmed the pistol as the murder weapon. The skirt could not be retested: the state's original tests had destroyed the nitrite evidence, and it had been stored with the victims' clothing and cross-contaminated. The question of the second gun was never settled.
Her new lawyer, David Dow, asked the governor for a further thirty-day stay, and on September 13, 2005, the Supreme Court of the United States declined two appeals without dissent. She was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on September 14, 2005, aged forty, after more than seventeen years on death row. She made no final statement and requested no last meal. She was the third woman executed in Texas since executions resumed in 1982, after Karla Faye Tucker and Betty Lou Beets, and the first Black woman executed in the state since an enslaved woman named Lucy was hanged in Galveston County on March 5, 1858.