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# 131 / 2010-01-31 Hank Skinner Execution SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOF TOPS!
“NO” CRIMINAL “JUSTICE” CASE SHOULD BE CLOSED AS LONG AS EVIDENCE IS AVAILABLE! Especially DNA TEST
Click here to:EMAIL TEXAS PARDONS & PAROLE BOARD
Write, Call, Fax before February 4, 2010 Board Meeting
February 4, 2010
BOARD MEETING
10:00 AM
8610 Shoal Creek Blvd. Building 7W, Room 112
Austin, TX
and
Austin H. O.
2101 E. Ben White #1-A
Austin, Texas 78741
Phone: (512) 462-3502
Fax: (512) 445-0157
ADD Your COMMENTS:_______________________________________________
ENOUGH-is-ENOUGH!
STOP-the-INSANITY!
REFORM or OUT THE DOOR!
TX- Hank Skinner: Case Open: The Investigation
January 28, 2010
Case Open
by Brandi Grissom
Twila Busby was Hank Skinner's soul mate. "We just fell together. We just
clicked, man," he says. The two were hardly apart after they met at an
Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They would kiss in public and cuddled up on the couch to watch thrillers. They were "sick in love," Skinner says through a telephone receiver behind a Plexiglas window on Texas' death row unit in Livingston.
A jury found that Skinner was so sick in love that, in a jealous rage, he
strangled Busby, bashed in her head and face with an axe handle and then
stabbed to death her two mentally disabled adult sons on New Years Eve 1993.He was sentenced to death for the three murders. His execution is scheduled for February 24.
The 47-year-old doesn't deny he was in the small house in the tiny West Texas town of Pampa on the night of the murders or that the blood on his clothes that night belonged to 41-year-old Busby and her sons. But Skinner and his lawyers say there's no way he could have killed anyone; he was so loaded on vodka and pills that he was nearly comatose. They argue that his appointed trial attorney, a former district attorney who had previously prosecuted him for theft and assault, failed to adequately investigate other potential suspects. They insist Texas is about to execute an innocent man - and the state has evidence that could prove it.
The night of the murders, police collected, among other items, clippings from Busby's broken fingernails, a rape kit, two knives from the crime scene, a bloodstained dishtowel and a man's windbreaker with sweat and hair on it, but most of it has never been DNA-tested. During Skinner's trial, prosecutors tested some blood and hair from the scene, but not the fingernails, rape kit, knives, towel or windbreaker. Over the last decade, the state has fought Skinner in court to keep it that way. Prosecutors in Gray County and lawyers for the Texas Attorney General's Office say Skinner had his chance at trial to test the evidence, but he declined, and the jury spoke; now it's time for him to face the consequences. "It's already been handled," Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer says. She's the third DA in Pampa to deal with Skinner, who has sued her in federal court seeking to force release of the DNA. "He doesn't need to keep trying it over and over and over again. It's already been handled."
Skinner's execution date approaches as Texas faces renewed scrutiny of its
famously busy death row and the science used to convict the accused. Since
1973, just 11 death row inmates have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, while more than 440 have been put to death. The New Yorker last year touched off a national debate about how many of those killed might have been innocent by posthumously profiling Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 after a jury convicted him of killing his three young children by arson in 1991. Before Willingham was executed,according to the story, the state ignored expert reports contending that the fire may have been accidental and calling the method used to prove that it was arson "junk science." A Texas Observer story earlier this month revealed that a psychologist the state has relied on to test the mental capacity of more than a dozen death row inmates used faulty methods to boost IQ scores so the men could meet the legal standard for the death penalty. And in Dallas County, maverick District Attorney Craig Watkins has launched a Conviction Integrity Unit that has reviewed more than 400 cases in which DNA from the crime scene was still available to be tested and has discovered at least 15 wrongful convictions.
In Skinner's case, attorneys argue that prosecutors selectively used DNA
testing to put a potentially innocent man on death row, and that the state is manipulating a 2001 law that allows post-conviction DNA testing to keep him on the path to the death chamber. "The case against him is not open and shut, it's not ironclad," says attorney Rob Owen, co-director of the University of Texas at Austin's Capital Punishment Clinic. "And in a reasonable system, we ought to go the extra mile to rule out the possibility that he is an innocent man before going forward with the execution."
New Year's Nightmare
Skinner and Busby had plans that New Year's Eve. They were supposed to go to a
friend's house together, but Skinner got his celebration started early. By the
time the friend stopped by the house to get them, Skinner was already passed
out on the couch. He was so intoxicated from a codeine and vodka cocktail that
even when the friend yanked repeatedly on his arm and hollered at him, Skinner
didn't budge.
So Busby went without him. Friends at the party said Busby's intoxicated
uncle, Robert Donnell, began stalking her there. The two had a predatory
incestuous relationship, according to several people who have testified in
Skinner's case. A private investigator who looked into Donnell's past found a
long criminal history, including convictions for vehicle theft, embezzlement
and burglary. He had served prison time, usually carried a large knife and
told stories about having killed a man in a pool hall fight in Oklahoma.
Busby's friends described him as "scary" and said she had called them several
times over the years to protect her from his frightening advances.
Agitated by Donnell's come-ons at the party, Busby left for home - the last
time anyone admits to having seen Busby alive. Donnell left the party shortly
after, witnesses said, and there has never been a full accounting of his
whereabouts that night.
Neighbors called police just before midnight when Busby's 22-year-old son,
Elwin "Scooter" Caler, showed up on their porch in his underwear, bleeding
from multiple stab wounds. Police followed a trail of blood back to Busby's
house and walked in on a grisly scene. She was sprawled on the living room
floor, her face and head beaten to a pulp; blood was splattered across the
room. Her other son, 20-year-old Randy Busby, lay dead in his bunk bed,
stabbed three times in the back.
Immediately, Gray County Sheriff Randy Stubblefield identified Skinner as the
primary suspect. He sent deputies to look for him in the attic and called in a
dog to sniff out a crawl space below the house. They arrested him blocks away
hiding at a frightened former girlfriend's house, blood on his clothes, a deep
gash in his hand.
The State's Case
Andrea Reed, the ex-girlfriend, was the state's star witness during the 1995
murder trial in Fort Worth (it was moved because of the presumably prejudicial
attention the crime received in Pampa). Reed said Skinner was an alcoholic and
a drug user. A recovering addict herself, she had sponsored him and Busby in
AA but tried to stay away from Skinner, she said, because he had fallen off
the wagon.
The night of the murders, she told jurors, Skinner showed up at her trailer
house banging on the front door, intoxicated and disoriented, with blood on
his clothes and his hand cut. He told her he had been shot in the gut and
stabbed in the shoulder, chest and arm. He ordered her to stitch up his hand,
she said, and threatened to kill her if she called the police. "I told him the
only thing I had was fishing line. And he had to get the fishing line, and I
brought the Ambesol to deaden it," Reed testified. "And he kept heating and
bending needles."
As Reed attempted to stitch his wound, Skinner told her wild stories about how
he'd gotten injured. First he said he had been drinking vodka and smoking
crack with Busby when "some Mexicans" came to the front door brandishing
knives. At another point in the more than three hours he spent at her house,
Skinner told Reed that he had caught Busby in bed with her ex-husband. He
started to tell yet another story about a man breaking into the house, Reed
said, but he didn't finish that one. Then, after swearing her to secrecy,
Skinner told Reed he thought he had killed Busby. "He said he thought he had
kicked her to death," she told the jury.
John Mann, then the Gray County District Attorney, showed jurors DNA testing
on blood that covered swaths of Skinner's clothes, and on blood and hair from
Randy Busby's bedding and body. The DNA put Skinner in the house at the time
of the murders. His bloody palm prints were also found at the scene.
Though toxicology tests indicated Skinner had nearly lethal levels of drugs
and alcohol in his system, the prosecution argued the habitual user had enough
tolerance that he would have been capable of killing Busby and the boys. After
all, he had the physical strength to walk several blocks to hide out at Reed's
house and the mental clarity to keep her from calling the police.
The jury condemned Skinner to death in less than two hours.
"Hellfighters"
Skinner grew up in Virginia and moved to Pampa in 1981 after divorcing his
first wife. He wanted a clean start and had heard good things about the oil
business. "I'd seen ["Hellfighters"] with John Wayne, Boots and Coots, Red
Adair and all that, you know. And so, man, I wanted to come out here to
Texas," he says. A jack-of-all-trades, Skinner says he made good money doing
everything from welding to drywall and working on cars. He also did paralegal
work for a local criminal attorney, helping out friends who'd gotten tossed in
the clink. That, he says, is how he made enemies in the Pampa law enforcement
community.
Of course, his hard drinking and partying ways also caught the attention of
local officials. He had a history of committing petty crimes and had been
prosecuted for car theft and assault. "I look at everything as an opportunity,
and I live life like an adventure," Skinner says. "Somehow or another, man, I
irritate people with my lifestyle," Police turned to him as a suspect in the
murders because it was convenient, Skinner says, and "because I was a pain in
their ass."
Skinner contends he was unconscious on the couch, still reeling from the
effects of the liquor and the pills, when the murderer attacked his girlfriend
and her sons. His blood alcohol content was .24 - three times the legal level
of intoxication, .08. Toxicology tests showed Busby was also drunk at the time
of the murder and that she struggled mightily, breaking her fingernails as she
tried to fend of her attacker. And her boys, though mentally challenged, were
physically huge. Caler was more than six-feet tall and weighed more than 220
pounds; Skinner is only five-eight. "This whole case is nothing but a pack of
lies from the beginning to the end," Skinner says.
The way he tells it now, a bleeding and dying Caler managed to rouse him from
his chemical-induced lethargy, probably by splashing water in his face.
Startled, Skinner says he fell off the couch onto shards of glass from a light
fixture the killer broke while wielding the axe handle against Busby. That's
how he got the cut. "It hurt me so bad I jerked my hand back, and when I did I
fell the rest of the way," he says, displaying the scar on the palm of his
hand. "And when I was laying flat on the floor, that's when I saw my
girlfriend and what was done to her."
With the ailing Caler propping him up, Skinner says, he left the house to look
for help. Caler went to a nearby neighbor's house, while Skinner headed for
the party to get help from the men there. In his stupor, Skinner says he could
only walk a few steps before he would fall to the ground. Then he would crawl
and try to walk again, only to fall back down and crawl a little farther. He
only made it as far as Reed's house, he says.
Skinner says Reed helped him willingly that night and that he never threatened
her. And in a 1997 affidavit, Reed recanted her incriminating trial testimony.
She claimed she was intimidated into testifying against Skinner by the police,
who told her, she said, that she could face charges if she had helped him. She
said Skinner didn't threaten to kill her and was too intoxicated to carry out
such a threat or to have murdered three people. "I believe that his statement
about kicking Twila to death was just a drunken fantasy, like the other
violent stories that he told me to explain how he was injured," Reed wrote.
Skinner has always proclaimed his innocence, but state and federal courts have
rejected 15 years of his pleadings. Still, as his execution date draws near,
Skinner and his advocates continue to wage a legal fight for additional DNA
testing. Only then, they say, will Texas know whether Skinner or a third
person was the real killer. "They have no right to kill me," Skinner says,
"because I'm innocent, innocent, innocent."
- - - - -
Tomorrow: Journalism students to the rescue?
/ / / / /
Steve Hall
512.879.1675 (o)
512.627.3011 (c)
Skype: shall78711
shall@standdown.org
www.StandDown.org
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