HUNTSVILLE, Texas — His voice wavering, condemned killer Terry Lee Hankins sought forgiveness in the seconds before he was put to death for killing his stepchildren, who were among five relatives he acknowledged murdering.
"I am sorry for what I've done and for all the pain and suffering my actions caused," Hankins, 34, said Tuesday evening as he received lethal injection. "Jesus is Lord. All glory to God."
Eleven minutes later, he was pronounced dead.
Hankins took responsibility for fatally shooting his two stepchildren — 12-year-old Devin Galley and 11-year-old Ashley Mason — as they slept eight years ago at their home in Mansfield, southeast of Fort Worth. Their mother and Hankins' estranged wife, Tammy, 34, also was gunned down with a .45-caliber pistol at the mobile home.
"I didn't come here to witness his death," Linda Sheets, whose daughter and grandchildren were killed, said after learning the execution had taken place.
She waited inside the prison in Huntsville but declined to witness.
"I don't want to see in my mind the picture of him dying," she said. "I want the picture of my daughter and my grandchildren — plus, the fact you have to understand, he also was my son-in-law. Whether I liked him or I didn't, he was still my son-in-law."
Sheets became worried in August 2001 when her daughter didn't report for work at an Arlington Burger King she managed and her children failed to show up at school. She went to her daughter's home and found the victims.
Police immediately suspected Terry Hankins because they repeatedly had been summoned to the home in recent months for domestic disturbances, fighting, and breaking and entering. He was tracked down to his girlfriend's apartment in Arlington, where his slain wife's car was parked. Then he held off SWAT officers for five hours before surrendering.
The investigation of the three murders turned even more macabre when Hankins disclosed to police that nearly a year earlier he'd also killed his father and his half-sister, whom he'd impregnated twice. The decomposing body of Earnie Hankins, 55, was found in a recliner at his trailer home and was surrounded by air fresheners. The remains of half-sister Pearl "Sissy" Stevenstar, 20, were found stuffed in a plastic ice chest that had been left at the elder Hankins' auto repair shop.
The lethal injection, the 16th this year in the nation's most active death penalty state, was the 200th of Gov. Rick Perry's administration, prompting renewed criticism from capital punishment opponents who said they would stage protests focusing on the numerical milestone. In Huntsville, about three dozen people — about twice the usual number — gathered down the street from the prison where the execution was carried out.
Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle said the governor, "like most Texans," believed capital punishment was appropriate "for those who commit the most heinous crimes."
Overall, the execution was the 439th since Texas resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982.
No last-minute appeals on Hankins' behalf were filed in the courts, which earlier had rejected attempts to put off his punishment. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles also rejected a clemency request.
"To be honest, with his record and the crimes he committed, I don't think there are very many juries, much less very many people on the Board of Pardons and Paroles, that are going to be swayed toward commutation or a life sentence," said William Harris, Hankins' appeals lawyer.
Like his estranged wife and stepchildren, Hankins' father also had been shot. Stevenstar was determined to have been fatally beaten with a jack stand.
"When you think about what he did, when you sit and really think about it, it was really horrible," said Sheila Wynn, the assistant Tarrant County district attorney who prosecuted Hankins for capital murder. "It was one of those cases, the more you learned, it was all bad."
Before his arrest, Hankins had told people he'd sent Stevenstar to a home for pregnant mentally challenged women and that his father had moved out of state.
He did not testify at his trial, but police found a note Hankins wrote on a bank envelope.
"I guess to sum it all up, I'm guilty of murder, incest, hatred, fraud, theft, jealousy, envy," he wrote.
In a diary recovered by officers, Hankins wrote he had become a "non-caring monster" and rambled about his troubled childhood with a divorced inattentive father and two stepmothers who molested him and taught him sex acts.
"I just didn't like myself," he wrote.
At least five other Texas inmates have execution dates in coming weeks. Scheduled to die next, on July 16, is Kenneth Mosley for the 1997 shooting death of a Dallas-area police officer during a bank robbery.
Source: Houston Chronicle.com, June 3, 2009
