News

Texas Executes Dale Scheanette, Called the "Bathtub Killer," for the Christmas Eve 1996 Murder of Wendie Prescott

Scheanette was charged but never tried in the killing of a second woman at the same Arlington complex. A fingerprint cracked the case years later.

Published

Illustration of two empty folding chairs and candles on the grass across the street from a brick prison wall. Not an actual scene from the case.

Two 1996 killings at an Arlington, Texas, apartment complex went unsolved for more than three years. On February 10, 2009, Texas executed Dale Devon Scheanette, the "Bathtub Killer," for one of them.

Scheanette, 35, a Louisiana native, was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m. in Huntsville, nine minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow. "My only statement is that no cases ever tried have been error-free," he said. Six relatives of the two women watched. He was condemned for the Christmas Eve 1996 rape and murder of Wendie Prescott in her apartment, and was charged but never tried in the killing of Christine Vu three months earlier. A print found in Prescott's apartment was resubmitted to an FBI computer system in the summer of 2000 and matched to Scheanette, and DNA testing then matched him as well. A jury convicted him in January 2003, and at the punishment phase the state also tied him to five sexual assaults.

Acting as his own lawyer, Scheanette lost his final federal appeals the day before his execution, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7-0 against clemency. The U.S. Supreme Court turned down a last request less than an hour before he was scheduled to die. "He personifies evil," said Tarrant County District Attorney Greg Miller, who prosecuted him. Scheanette was the seventh inmate executed in Texas that year.

The Associated Press gave Wendie Prescott's age as 22, while the federal appeals court described her as a 20-year-old.

Sources