Texas Executes Danny Bible, the Ice Pick Killer, for the 1979 Murder of Inez Deaton
Bible, 66, went to his death in a wheelchair after the Supreme Court rejected his last appeal, which argued his veins could not take a lethal injection.
Published
Danny Bible had nothing to say at the end. On the evening of Wednesday, June 27, 2018, in the death chamber at Huntsville, Texas, the state injected the 66-year-old with a lethal dose of pentobarbital at 6:17 p.m., and fifteen minutes later he was pronounced dead. He made no final statement. He had come to the gurney in a wheelchair, and he was executed for a murder committed almost forty years before.
Inez Deaton was 20, the mother of a toddler and a friend of Bible's cousin. In May 1979 she walked into the Harris County house of Bible's uncle, where he was staying, and according to his later confession he raped her, stabbed her to death with an ice pick, put her body in a garbage bag and left it in a field near a deserted car wash. He fled Texas when she was found. For about two decades her killing went unsolved.
It was solved by accident, in another state. In 1998 Bible was arrested in Louisiana in a rape case, and during interrogation, court records say, he confessed to that rape, to Deaton's murder and to the 1983 killings of three people, among them his former sister-in-law. He had already served a prison sentence for one of the 1983 murders and been paroled. Louisiana gave him life without parole for the rape. Texas tried him for Deaton's murder and sentenced him to death in 2003, and the press called him the ice pick killer.
His last fight was over his own body. Bible had heart and lung disease and Parkinson's, and his lawyers argued that his veins were so damaged that the needles might not go in, raising the risk of a botched or aborted execution; they proposed a firing squad or nitrogen gas instead. The state parole board unanimously rejected clemency, and the U.S. Supreme Court turned down his final appeal about half an hour before the execution was due to begin. The IVs went into his hands rather than his arms, and the Houston Chronicle reported that he trembled and muttered "burning" and "it hurts" before he lost consciousness.
Larry Lance, the brother of Pamela Hudgins, another of Bible's murder victims, watched him die. "We are glad to have witnessed him draw his last breath," he said. Bible's appellate lawyer said he had accepted responsibility for Deaton's murder even as he fought the sentence. He was the seventh person Texas executed that year.
What this story covers. It draws on The Texas Tribune's report of June 27, 2018, which cites the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and court records; the TDCJ records themselves were not reopened for this story. Bible's admissions to the 1983 killings come from his confession as described in court records, and only one of those murders had led to a conviction.