Texas: executions resume

HUNTSVILLE, Texas – A man convicted of murdering three people during a night of robberies more than 13 years ago in Fort Worth was put to death Wednesday evening in the nation's first execution of the year.

In a brief final statement, Curtis Moore, 40, thanked a woman who administers to the spiritual needs of death row inmates.

"I want to thank you for all the beautiful years of friendship and ministry," he told Irene Wilcox as she watched through a window a few feet from him. Moore never acknowledged a man who survived his attacks or five relatives of the three who died.

He was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m.

He exhausted his appeals in the courts and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier this week refused a clemency petition that said he could be mentally retarded and ineligible for the death penalty. Courts earlier rejected similar mental retardation claims.

Moore was the first of six prisoners scheduled to die this month in Texas, the nation's most active death penalty state.

He was condemned for the fatal shootings of Roderick Moore, 24, who was not related to him, and Roderick Moore's girlfriend, LaTanya Boone, 21, both of Fort Worth. The two were found shot to death in a roadside ditch across from a Fort Worth elementary school in November 1995.

That same night, firefighters summoned to put out a car fire found Darrel Hoyle, 21, of Fort Worth, and Henry Truevillian Jr., 20, of Forest Hill, shot and burned.

Truevillian, robbed of $5, was dead. Hoyle, robbed of $150, survived and helped lead police to the arrest of Moore and his nephew, Anthony Moore, then 17.

Testimony at Curtis Moore's trial showed the shootings followed a drug ripoff, that he doused Hoyle and Truevillian with gasoline and ignited them as they were bound and in the trunk of a car.

Moore blamed his nephew, who pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in exchange for two life prison terms, for the slayings and contended he tried to rescue the victims from the burning car. But he acknowledged holding them at gunpoint and ordering them hogtied and stuffed into the trunk of the car.

Source: Associated Press, January 15, 2009