On July 21, 1997, Kimberly McCarthy, thirty-six, knocked on the door of her next-door neighbor in Lancaster, a suburb south of Dallas, and asked to borrow some sugar. Dorothy Booth, seventy-one, a retired psychology professor, let her in. McCarthy stabbed her five times with a butcher knife and hit her in the face with a candelabrum, then cut off her left ring finger while she was still alive to get her diamond wedding ring. She took Booth's purse, went home and cleaned herself up. The next morning, dressed for work, she drove Booth's white Mercedes station wagon to a crack house, handed over the keys and asked for crack. She pawned the ring for two hundred dollars and used Booth's credit cards at least four times that day. Traces of Booth's blood were found in her house.
McCarthy had been a therapist at a nursing home before crack took hold of her. She had been married to Aaron Michaels, later a founder of the New Black Panther Party; they had separated before the killing, and he testified on her behalf. In a written confession after her arrest she blamed two drug dealers who, she said, had been at her house when her money ran out and had asked if she knew anyone they could rob. There was no evidence that either man existed.
Booth was not the first. In December 1988 two elderly women in Dallas County had been killed in their homes. Maggie Harding, eighty-one, was a longtime friend of McCarthy's mother, who had helped organize McCarthy's wedding and let her store furniture at her house. Jettie Lucas, eighty-five, was a distant relative. Harding was stabbed and beaten with a metal meat tenderizer; Lucas was beaten with a claw hammer and stabbed. Both women's purses and credit cards were taken. DNA evidence tied McCarthy to both killings. She was indicted for them but never tried, and prosecutors presented the evidence at her sentencing instead. She denied any part in them.
A Dallas County jury convicted her of capital murder in November 1998, and on November 24 she was sentenced to death. In 2001 an appeals court ordered a new trial because her confession had been obtained illegally. On November 1, 2002, a second jury reached the same verdict. Her later appeals argued that black jurors had been excluded; one of the twelve at her retrial was black, and her trial lawyers had not objected. In January 2013 she was hours from execution when a Dallas judge delayed it.
She was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on June 26, 2013, and pronounced dead at 6:37 p.m., twenty minutes after the pentobarbital was started. She was fifty-two. It was the five hundredth execution in Texas since the state resumed them in 1982, and she was the first woman put to death in the United States in almost three years. Booth's family said the number meant nothing to them. "The only significance for us is that Kimberly McCarthy, because of her crack cocaine addiction or her sociopathic personality, deprived us of Dorothy Booth," said her godson, Randy Browning.