Officer Paul Douglas Hulsey Jr. had no idea who was in the motel room. He was thirty years old, a Beaumont, Texas, patrolman and the son of a former police chief of nearby Orange, and on March 22, 1988, he had gone after a red Chevrolet Corvette with Florida plates that came streaking through town. By one account he chased it, lost it, and tracked it down again to a motel; by another he was working a report of stolen plates on a car parked outside. Either way he found the room the driver was in and knocked on the door.
The man behind it was wanted for the murders of two teenage girls in two other states. Hulsey did not know that, and nobody had told Beaumont police that the car thief they were looking for had already disemboweled a sixteen-year-old in Indiana and a fourteen-year-old in Florida. The Corvette had been stolen from a car salesman. Its driver had come in from Louisiana and was heading for California.
Hulsey was shot during the arrest. Lockhart's own later account was that he punched the officer, took his gun and shot him, then shot him a second time before he left; press reports at the execution said Hulsey was shot three times, and one account names the weapon as a .357 Magnum. The officers who followed found him dead on the floor of the room. He was the first Beaumont officer killed in the line of duty in sixty-eight years.
A bulletin went out for the Corvette. About thirty minutes later officers across Orange County were chasing it at high speed, knowing only that a fellow officer had been shot, not yet his name. Lockhart crashed and was taken. Evidence of the other killings was in the car with him. "I wasn't going out looking to kill no Beaumont policeman," he said years later. "He was just checking me out."
That arrest is how Texas came to own the case, and it is why Texas is the state that killed him.
Michael Lee Lockhart was a drifter. He was born at Walbridge, Ohio, on September 30, 1960, is usually placed in Toledo, and had a robbery conviction in Wyoming behind him. People who knew him described a smooth talker. He lived on theft and moved between states in stolen sports cars.
What he did to the two girls he did the same way both times: he knocked on the front door and asked to use the telephone. There was no sign of forced entry at either house.
Windy Gallagher was sixteen and lived in Griffith, Indiana. On October 13, 1987, she wrote in her journal that it was going to be a no worries day. That evening she let a stranger in to use the phone. Her sister found her afterward, lying on a bed with her hands tied behind her back. She had been raped, stabbed twenty-one times, and disemboweled.
Lockhart had woken up in a motel that morning. He described his state of mind without much feeling: his first thought had been that it was a perfect day to die, he was suicidal, and if he was going to die then he was going to kill somebody too.
Three weeks later, on November 7 and 8, he sexually assaulted his own former wife in Toledo. She survived.
Jennifer Colhouer was fourteen and lived at Land O' Lakes, Florida. On January 20, 1988, she let him in. She was raped, strangled, bound and disemboweled, and she was found still wearing her socks and her sneakers.
Her brother Jeremy found her. He was eight. He had come home from an outing to pick up his shin pads for soccer practice.
Asked later what had been in his head that morning, Lockhart said he had woken up and thought he had to go out and get himself one.
He robbed a bank in Baton Rouge on March 21 and was in Beaumont the next day.
All three states tried him, and Texas went first. He was indicted for capital murder in Jefferson County, and on an agreed motion the trial was moved to Bexar County, in San Antonio. During that trial Lockhart bolted from the courtroom and threw himself out of a third-floor courthouse window. He did not get away. The Bexar County jury convicted him of capital murder and he was sentenced to death.
Eight months later an Indiana jury sentenced him to death for Windy Gallagher. In December 1989 a judge at Dade City, Florida, gave him a third death sentence after he pleaded guilty to killing Jennifer Colhouer.
Very few people have ever been under sentence of death in three states at the same time.
At one point he claimed to have killed more than two dozen people, and one report put his highest figure at twenty-nine. He later withdrew it and maintained for his last years that he had killed three. None of the larger figure was ever tested in a court, and the number in circulation varies with whoever is repeating it.
A retracted boast is one thing. A named fourth case is another. Kathy Hobbs was sixteen when she was abducted in Las Vegas in 1987, and her case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in 1989. Lockhart was a suspect in her murder and was never charged; the case has since been listed as solved. Investigators credited him with other killings of teenage girls and considered him a possible suspect in more, and nothing came of any of it.
On death row he said he had become religious and felt remorse, and that he would not blame his childhood for the lives he had taken. "I don't think I could have stopped," he said the week before he died. "I was fortunate to get caught." He also talked about the officer he shot in the motel room. "The man was doing his job," he said. "And I'm responsible for his murder."
Texas executed him by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit on December 9, 1997. He was thirty-seven, the thirty-seventh prisoner Texas put to death that year, and he was still under sentence of death in Indiana and in Florida. His last meal was a double-meat cheeseburger, French fries and a Coca-Cola.
In the chamber he acknowledged all three killings. He turned his head toward five members of the victims' families a few feet away and said, "I am deeply sorry," and by one account told them, "It is my hope my death will give you some kind of comfort." His recorded last statement thanked the prison staff: "A lot of people view what is happening here as evil, but I want you to know that I found love and compassion here." It ended, "That's all, Warden. I'm ready."
Nearly a hundred Beaumont police officers had come to Huntsville, and they applauded and cheered as the witnesses came out. "We're not here to celebrate an execution, but to pay respect to the victims and the families of the victims," said a detective, Jimmy Carpenter. Paul Hulsey Sr. had watched his son's killer die. "After all these years of waiting, it's finally happened," he said. "Forgiveness is not in my vocabulary." Lockhart is buried at the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville.