In the death chamber at Huntsville it is the warden who asks whether the prisoner has a last statement. Whatever follows, a paragraph, a sentence or the single word "No," is written down and posted by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on a page of its own. The department keeps one for every person the state has executed since it resumed executions in 1982. When the list was last updated, at the end of January 2026, it ran to 597 names.
The waits are long. By the department’s own figures, the average time on death row before execution in Texas is 11.22 years. The shortest wait was 252 days, for Joe Gonzales of Potter County, executed in September 1996. The longest was 11,575 days, for David Lee Powell of Travis County, executed in June 2010. Three men were 24 when they died. The oldest, Carl Buntion of Harris County, was 78 when he was put to death in April 2022. On average, then, a condemned Texan has had more than a decade to decide what to say.
Some of the men and women in that file killed more than once, in separate crimes spread over months or years. Many did not. What they said at the end, read one case at a time, is quieter and odder than the familiar lists of famous last words.
The Texas file opens with Charlie Brooks Jr., execution number 1. He was put to death on December 7, 1982, for the kidnapping and murder of a Fort Worth auto mechanic in Tarrant County. Texas had adopted lethal injection in 1977, and Brooks, who was 40, was the first person on whom the state used it. His page carries two texts. The first is labeled a statement to the media, and it is the testimony of a convert to Islam: "I, at this very moment, have absolutely no fear of what may happen to this body." The second is labeled simply as spoken. It affirms his faith, tells someone he loves them and closes with two words: "Be strong."
Lisa Coleman was executed on September 17, 2014, for the 2004 death of a nine-year-old boy in Tarrant County. She spent part of her statement on the other women under sentence of death: "The girls on the row, I love them and keep their heads up."
Billie Wayne Coble was 70 when he was executed on February 28, 2019, for killing his estranged wife’s parents and brother near Waco in 1989. A jury had sentenced him to death in 1990; a federal appeals court overturned the sentence in 2007, and a second jury imposed it again in 2008. The Texas Tribune reported that prison data made him the oldest person Texas had executed in the modern era, a mark later passed. Asked for a statement, he answered, in the department’s transcription, "Yes Sir, that will be five Dollars," and then told the people he had invited that he loved them, one after another. What happened in the viewing room was not a brawl among the witnesses. His son pounded on the window of the death chamber, and after an exchange with officers he and another relative were removed and arrested, the Tribune reported.
Rosendo Rodriguez III, executed on March 27, 2018, for the 2005 murder of a 29-year-old woman in Lubbock, used part of his statement to allege that officials had covered up that "thousands were wrongfully convicted," and he told the state: "The state may have my body but not my soul."
Some of the condemned use the moment to deny the crime. Cary Kerr, executed on May 3, 2011, for the 2001 murder of a 34-year-old woman in Tarrant County, addressed the state directly: "To the State of Texas, I am an innocent man." He followed it with advice, "Never trust a court-appointed attorney," and with a demand, "Check that DNA, check Scott."
Roy Pippin, executed on March 29, 2007, in a Harris County case, turned his statement into an indictment. He spoke to the jurors who had convicted him and then to his trial judge and the prosecutor, whom he accused of cheating to win the case. "I charge each and every one of you with the murder of an innocent man," he said. He named the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the federal courts, the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court, and told them they would answer to their Maker.
Kenneth McDuff had already been sentenced to death once before Texas executed him. In 1966 he was condemned in a Tarrant County case in which three teenagers were killed near Fort Worth; the sentence was commuted to life after the United States Supreme Court struck down the country’s death penalty laws in 1972, and he was paroled in 1989. Within three years of his release he had abducted and killed two more women, Melissa Northrup and Colleen Reed, and he was returned to death row on capital murder convictions in both cases. Investigators linked him to other deaths for which he was never tried. He was executed on November 17, 1998, at 52, execution number 161. His statement is eight words long: "I’m ready to be released. Release me."
Angel Maturino Resendiz, a drifter who rode freight trains across the country and crossed the Mexican border again and again, was convicted of one killing, the 1998 capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton near Houston, after a jury rejected his insanity defense. Investigators linked him to a string of other killings near rail lines between 1986 and 1999, none of which went to trial in Texas. He was executed on June 27, 2006, at 45, execution number 368. He turned to the relatives of his victims and asked for their forgiveness: "I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me." He went on: "I know I allowed the devil to rule my life," and, "I deserve what I am getting."
Tommy Lynn Sells was convicted of the capital murder of Kaylene Harris, 13, who was killed near Del Rio on New Year’s Eve 1999, and later pleaded guilty to the murder of nine-year-old Mary Bea Perez in San Antonio. He confessed to many more killings across the country; investigators accepted some of those accounts and doubted others. Texas executed him on April 3, 2014, at 49, execution number 513. His page holds a single line: "This inmate declined to make a last statement."
Anthony Allen Shore, a Houston tow truck driver, was identified in 2003 when DNA taken from him after an unrelated plea matched evidence from the 1992 killing of Maria del Carmen Estrada. He confessed to her murder and to the killings of three girls, Laurie Tremblay, Diana Rebollar and Dana Sanchez, between 1986 and 1995. He was convicted of capital murder only for Estrada’s death; the other killings were proved at the punishment phase of his trial but never charged. On January 18, 2018, in the first execution in the United States that year, he spoke to the families: "No amount of words could ever undo what I’ve done." He said he would die with a clear conscience, and he finished with a word to the warden: "I’m ready warden." He was 55, execution number 546.
Ted Bundy was convicted of three murders, all in Florida: those of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, killed in Tallahassee in January 1978, and of Kimberly Leach, 12, of Lake City, who disappeared the following month. In the last days of his life he confessed to detectives from the western states to killings there for which he had never been tried. He spent his final night with a Methodist minister, called his mother twice and refused a last breakfast. On the morning of January 24, 1989, he was strapped into the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke. Asked by the superintendent for his last words, he said, "I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends." He was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. He was 42.
Gerald Stano, a short-order cook from the Daytona Beach area, confessed to dozens of killings after his arrest in 1980 and was convicted of first-degree murder in four Florida counties. For years his lawyers argued that many of those confessions were false and that a detective had fed him details; state and federal judges heard the claims and rejected them. He went to the electric chair at Starke on March 23, 1998. The Associated Press and CBS News reported that he made no final statement.
Aileen Wuornos was convicted of six first-degree murders, one at trial and five on pleas, for shooting men who had picked her up on Florida highways in 1989 and 1990. She fired her lawyers, dropped her appeals and asked to be executed. On October 9, 2002, she declined a last meal and asked only for coffee. Before 32 witnesses she spoke from the gurney about "sailing with the Rock," a reference to Christ, Knight Ridder explained, and promised to return "like Independence Day with Jesus," with a "big mothership." She was pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m., six minutes after the injection began. She was 46.
Danny Rolling pleaded guilty in 1994 to the murders of five college students in Gainesville over four days in August 1990. He was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 25, 2006. Asked for a last statement, he sang. Witnesses and prison officials described it, the Associated Press reported, as what sounded like a hymn, and it lasted about two minutes. He seemed to keep singing after officials switched off the microphone, and stopped shortly before he died. He was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m.
Bobby Joe Long pleaded guilty in 1985 to eight counts of first-degree murder in Hillsborough County, under an agreement that spared him the death penalty in every case but one, the murder of Michelle Simms. He spent more than three decades on death row. On May 23, 2019, in the first execution under Governor Ron DeSantis, he was asked whether he had a final statement. He said no, and kept his eyes closed. He was pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m., at 65.
John Wayne Gacy was convicted of 33 murders, the young men and boys he killed near Chicago between 1972 and 1978. Illinois executed him by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center early on May 10, 1994. A clog in the tubing delayed the procedure, and he was pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m. The state’s corrections director, Howard Peters, gave the official account of what he said: that taking his life would not compensate for the loss of the others, and that this was the state murdering him. It was Peters’s account that the Associated Press printed that morning.
Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who was convicted of eight murders, was executed in Missouri for one of them: the 1977 shooting of Gerald Gordon, 42, a father of three, outside a synagogue in the St. Louis area. The execution, at the state prison in Bonne Terre on November 20, 2013, began more than six hours late and was Missouri’s first with a single dose of pentobarbital. He was pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m. He declined to make a final statement.
Carl Panzram was convicted of one murder, that of Robert G. Warnke, a 47-year-old laundry foreman at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, and a veteran who had served in Cuba with the Rough Riders. Warnke was killed in the prison laundry on June 20, 1929. Panzram was sentenced to hang and was executed at Leavenworth on September 5, 1930, the Federal Bureau of Prisons records. The insult to the hangman often quoted as his last words does not appear in the Bureau’s account, which records only the sentence and the hanging.
Gary Gilmore killed two young men in two robberies in Utah County in July 1976: Max Jensen, 24, a law student from Orem, and Bennie Bushnell, 26, who managed a motel in Provo. He was sentenced to death for Bushnell’s murder and confessed to Jensen’s. On January 17, 1977, he was bound to a chair at Utah State Prison and shot by a firing squad, the first person executed in the United States in nearly ten years, the Deseret News reported at the time. His last words were "Let’s do it." The phrase outlived him in an unexpected place. Dan Wieden, the advertising man who wrote Nike’s slogan in 1988, said in a 2015 interview with Dezeen that he had taken Gilmore’s line, disliked it, and changed it to "Just do it."
Two of the names most often attached to death row last words belong elsewhere. Jeffrey Dahmer was never on death row: Wisconsin has no death penalty. He was serving multiple life terms when another inmate attacked him at the Columbia Correctional Center in Portage on November 28, 1994, and he died of head injuries, United Press International reported.
Timothy McVeigh, convicted for the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, which killed 168 people, was executed by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 11, 2001, the first federal execution since 1963. He made no final spoken statement. Instead he left a handwritten copy of "Invictus," a Victorian poem by William Ernest Henley. The closing lines, which ABC News printed as the end of his written statement, are Henley’s, not his.
The Texas file is not simply a transcript. It is what the prison system has chosen to make public, and the rule changed in 2019 because of one execution.
John William King was executed on April 24, 2019, for the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., a Black man, in Jasper. When the warden asked whether he had last words, he said no. Afterward the prison system released a statement he had prepared in writing: "Capital Punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment." Byrd’s sister, who watched the execution, said King "showed no remorse then and showed no remorse tonight." He was not the first condemned Texan to say nothing in the chamber and have a written statement released afterward, the Associated Press reported, but the release of his drew a protest.
State Senator John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat, wrote to prison officials that if an inmate "has something to say to the public or victims, let him or her say it when they are strapped to the gurney." The department’s executive director, Bryan Collier, then announced that written statements would be "inventoried with their belongings" after an execution, and that only words spoken in the chamber would be relayed to the public. It was the second change to execution-day practice that month; earlier in April the state had stopped allowing clergy into the death chamber. Whitmire had done something similar once before. In 2011 Lawrence Russell Brewer, also condemned for Byrd’s killing, ordered an elaborate final meal that prison officials said he did not eat, and Whitmire’s outrage over it led Texas to end the practice of letting the condemned choose their last meal.
So the last statement in Texas is now strictly a spoken one, delivered strapped to a gurney, to a warden’s question, before witnesses on both sides of the glass. Some of the people in the file used it to apologize, some to accuse, some to sing, and some to say nothing at all. Charlie Brooks Jr., the first, ended with "Be strong." Kenneth McDuff asked to be released. Tommy Lynn Sells, given the same chance decades after Brooks, let it pass, and his page says only that he declined.
• June 20, 1929: Robert G. Warnke is killed at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
• September 5, 1930: Carl Panzram is hanged at Leavenworth.
• July 1976: Gary Gilmore kills Max Jensen and Bennie Bushnell in Utah County.
• January 17, 1977: Gilmore is executed by firing squad at Utah State Prison.
• 1977: Texas adopts lethal injection.
• December 7, 1982: Charlie Brooks Jr. becomes the first person executed by lethal injection in Texas.
• January 24, 1989: Ted Bundy is executed in the electric chair at Starke, Florida.
• May 10, 1994: John Wayne Gacy is executed at Stateville Correctional Center, Illinois.
• November 28, 1994: Jeffrey Dahmer dies after an attack by another inmate in a Wisconsin prison.
• March 23, 1998: Gerald Stano is executed in Florida.
• November 17, 1998: Kenneth McDuff is executed in Texas.
• June 11, 2001: Timothy McVeigh is executed at Terre Haute, Indiana.
• October 9, 2002: Aileen Wuornos is executed in Florida.
• June 27, 2006: Angel Maturino Resendiz is executed in Texas.
• October 25, 2006: Danny Rolling is executed in Florida.
• March 29, 2007: Roy Pippin is executed in Texas.
• June 15, 2010: David Lee Powell is executed in Texas after 11,575 days on death row.
• May 3, 2011: Cary Kerr is executed in Texas.
• 2011: Texas ends chosen last meals after Lawrence Russell Brewer’s request.
• November 20, 2013: Joseph Paul Franklin is executed in Missouri.
• April 3, 2014: Tommy Lynn Sells is executed in Texas.
• September 17, 2014: Lisa Coleman is executed in Texas.
• January 18, 2018: Anthony Allen Shore is executed in Texas.
• March 27, 2018: Rosendo Rodriguez III is executed in Texas.
• February 28, 2019: Billie Wayne Coble is executed in Texas at 70.
• April 24, 2019: John William King is executed in Texas.
• April 2019: Texas stops releasing written final statements.
• May 23, 2019: Bobby Joe Long is executed in Florida.
• April 21, 2022: Carl Buntion, 78, becomes the oldest person executed in Texas.
• January 29, 2026: the Texas executed-offender list stands at 597.