A man accused of masterminding the slayings of his mother and three other relatives to get his hands on the family fortune was executed Tuesday in Texas, confessing at the very last moment.
In Georgia, an inmate was put to death in the electric chair late Monday for killing a fellow soldier by putting him in the trunk of a taxi and pushing the car into a watery pit.In Huntsville, Texas, 46-year-old Markham Duff-Smith cleared his conscience just before he died by injection.
"I am the low sinner of sinners. I am responsible for the '75 and '79 cases," he said as he lay on a gurney, needles in his arms.
Duff-Smith was convicted of arranging the murder of his adoptive mother, Gertrude Duff-Smith Zabolio, at her home in Houston's exclusive River Oaks neighborhood in 1975. He was found guilty of paying $10,000 to Allen Wayne Janecka to strangle Mrs. Zabolio, 57, and make her death look like a suicide.
Authorities said Duff-Smith eventually squandered his $90,000 inheritance and in 1979 sought out Janecka again to kill his adoptive sister, her husband and their teenage son so he could collect up to $500,000 of their inheritance.
Duff-Smith was charged but never tried in those slayings, and until Tuesday, he had denied any role in the crime.
In Georgia, Thomas Dean Stevens, 36, was put to death at the state prison at Jackson for killing Roger Honeycutt, a soldier who was moonlighting as a cab driver. Honeycutt was robbed of $16, sodomized and locked in the trunk of his cab. He drowned when Stevens and another man pushed the car into the pit.