Texas Executes Man Who Fatally Stabbed Teen Twins

A Texas man convicted of fatally stabbing twin 16-year-old girls more than three decades ago was executed on Tuesday evening. Garcia Glenn White was pronounced dead at 6:56pm CDT following a chemical injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, the AP reports. He was condemned for the December 1989 killings of Annette and Bernette Edwards. The bodies of the twin girls and their mother, Bonita Edwards, were found in their Houston apartment. White, 61, was the sixth inmate put to death in the US in the last 11 days. His execution took place shortly after the US. Supreme Court, without comment, declined requests to intervene.

Testimony showed that White, a former college football player who later worked as a fry cook, went to the girls' Houston home to smoke crack with their mother, Bonita, who was also fatally stabbed. When the girls came out of their room to see what happened, White attacked them. Evidence showed White broke down the locked door of the girls' bedroom. Authorities said he was later tied to the deaths of a grocery store owner and another woman.

• "Garcia Glenn White committed five murders in three different transactions and two of his victims were teenage girls. This is the type of case that the death penalty was intended for," said Josh Reiss, chief of the Post-Conviction Writs Division with the Harris County District Attorney's Office in Houston, in comments ahead of the execution.

• White's lawyers unsuccessfully appealed to the US Supreme Court to stop the execution after lower courts rejected petitions for a stay. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Friday denied White's request to commute his death sentence to a lesser penalty or to grant him a 30-day reprieve. His lawyers argued that Texas' top criminal appeals court has refused "to accept medical evidence and strong factual backing" showing White is intellectually disabled.
• The deaths of the twin girls and their mother went unsolved for about six years until White confessed to the killings after he was arrested in connection with the July 1995 death of grocery store owner Hai Van Pham, who was fatally beaten during a robbery at his business. Police said White also confessed to fatally beating another woman, Greta Williams, in 1989.

(More Texas stories.)