Texas executes man who fatally stabbed teenage twins

A Texas man convicted of fatal knife attacks on 16-year-old twin girls more than three decades ago was executed Tuesday night. Garcia Glenn White was pronounced dead at 6:56 p.m. CDT after a chemical injection at the state prison in Huntsville, the AP reports. He was convicted of the murders of Annette and Bernette Edwards in December 1989. The bodies of the twin girls and their mother, Bonita Edwards, were found in their Houston apartment. White, 61, was the sixth inmate to be executed in the United States in the past 11 days. His execution took place shortly after the USA. The Supreme Court rejected requests to intervene without comment.

Testimony revealed that White, a former college football player who later worked as a fry cook, went to the girls’ home in Houston to smoke crack with their mother, Bonita, who was also fatally stabbed. When the girls came out of their room to see what had happened, White attacked them. There was evidence that White had broken open the locked door to the girls’ bedroom. Authorities later said he was linked to the deaths of a convenience store owner and another woman.

• “Garcia Glenn White committed five murders in three separate transactions and two of his victims were teenage girls. “This is the type of case for which the death penalty was intended,” said Josh Reiss, head of the post-conviction writs division at Harris District Attorney’s Office in Houston, making comments before the execution.

• White’s lawyers unsuccessfully appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution after lower courts rejected requests for a stay. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Friday rejected White’s request to commute his death sentence to a lesser sentence or to grant him a 30-day reprieve. His lawyers argued that the Texas Supreme Court of Criminal Appeals had refused to accept “medical evidence and strong factual evidence” showing that White was mentally disabled.
• The deaths of the twin girls and their mother remained unsolved for about six years until White confessed to the murders 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 store. Police said White also confessed to fatally beating another woman, Greta Williams, in 1989.

(More Texas stories.)