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Georgia Executes Tracy Housel Despite Pleas From Tony Blair and European Diplomats

The Bermuda-born trucker held British and U.S. citizenship. He was put to death for the 1985 murder of Jean Drew, the end of a two-month crime spree across four states.

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Illustration of a closed steel door at the end of a prison corridor, with a bench and a wall phone. Not an actual scene from the case.

Britain's prime minister asked Georgia to spare him, and the BBC broadcast news of his death live. On March 12, 2002, Tracy Lee Housel was executed for the 1985 murder of Jean Drew.

Housel, 43, was pronounced dead at 7:28 p.m. at the state prison in Jackson, 11 minutes after the lethal injection began. Born in the British territory of Bermuda, he held both British and U.S. citizenship. Tony Blair had asked the Georgia parole board to commute the sentence to life in prison, as had the Law Society of England and Wales, members of Parliament and diplomats from other European Union countries. The board refused on March 11, and on the day of the execution the Georgia Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene. Before he died, Housel apologized and told his friends and family, "Take care of yourselves. May God be with you all."

Drew, 46, a Lawrenceville mother, met Housel at a truck stop on Interstate 85 in Gwinnett County in the early hours of April 7, 1985. He killed her and left her body in a vacant lot on Beaver Ruin Road, then drove her car to Daytona Beach, Florida, where he was arrested using her credit cards. He pleaded guilty to her murder and was sentenced to death in Gwinnett County in 1986.

At the sentencing hearing, prosecutors presented Drew's murder as the end of a two-month spree. In a recorded statement to a Gwinnett County detective, Housel admitted killing a Texas truck driver, Troy Smith, in February 1985. The jury also heard that he had attacked a man in Iowa with a knife and left him for dead, and had sexually assaulted a woman in New Jersey; both survived and testified against him. He was never prosecuted for any of those crimes.

His lawyers argued that his trial lawyer had failed him and that the jury never heard about his head injuries and hypoglycemia. A federal appeals court rejected those claims in 2001.

Court records and news reports spell the victim's first name both Jean and Jeanne.

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