Kimberly McCarthy was executed in Texas on June 26, 2013 for the murder of her next-door neighbour. She was linked to three killings and convicted of one, and her execution was the five hundredth carried out in Texas since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
She was born in 1961 and was addicted to crack cocaine. Dorothy Booth, seventy-one, who lived next door to her in Lancaster, in Dallas County, was stabbed and beaten to death on July 21, 1997; McCarthy took her purse and her wedding ring. Two other women, Maggie Harding, eighty-one, and Jettie Lucas, eighty-five, had been killed in December 1988, and the state connected her to both, using them at the sentencing stage rather than charging them.
She was arrested the day after the Booth killing and sentenced to death on November 24, 1998. That sentence was reversed in 2001 and she was resentenced to death on November 1, 2002. Her appeals included an argument that black jurors had been excluded from her jury; eleven of the twelve who sentenced her were white. She was the thirteenth woman executed in the United States since 1976.
The entry is flagged because she holds one murder conviction against three attributed killings.