Michael Lee Lockhart killed three people in five months across three states, and three states sentenced him to death for it. Windy Gallagher, sixteen, was raped and stabbed at Griffith, Indiana on October 13, 1987. Jennifer Colhouer, fourteen, was raped and stabbed at Land O’ Lakes, Florida on January 20, 1988. Officer Paul Hulsey Jr of the Beaumont police was shot dead during an arrest in Texas on March 22, 1988.
He was caught by accident, and the accident is worth the telling. A purse he snatched in Chicago was recovered and returned to its owner, who opened it and found a second purse inside, belonging to a girl already murdered in Indiana. Nothing about the investigation had pointed at him until then.
Indiana convicted him of Windy Gallagher’s murder and sentenced him to death. He then pleaded guilty in Florida to Jennifer Colhouer’s murder and received a second death sentence. Texas convicted him of the capital murder of Officer Hulsey and sentenced him to death a third time. During the Texas trial he jumped from a third-floor courthouse window and was recaptured.
At one stage he claimed to have killed twenty-nine people. He later withdrew the claim and accepted only the three, and the three are what the record carries; the larger figure was never tested anywhere and this archive does not adopt it.
Texas executed him by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit on December 9, 1997, aged thirty-seven. He was still under sentence of death in Indiana and Florida at the time. Condemned by three states and put to death by the one that had convicted him last.