Hilton Crawford was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Samuel McKay Everett
According to court documents Hilton Crawford would kidnap twelve year old Samuel McKay Everett. Crawford would demand $500,000 for the return of the child. Samuel McKay Everett would be murdered and his body would be found days later
Hilton Crawford would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Hilton Crawford would be executed by lethal injection on July 2 2003
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When Was Hilton Crawford Executed
Hilton Crawford was executed on July 2 2003
Hilton Crawford Case
Convicted child-killer Hilton Crawford asked his victim’s mother for forgiveness shortly before he was put to death here Wednesday. But he wouldn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, bring himself even to mention the name of McKay Everett, the Conroe 12-year-old he kidnapped and murdered in 1995. It was an omission that Paulette Everett Norman attributed to Crawford’s desire, even at the end of his life, to distance himself from his crime. “I’m not surprised he didn’t refer to McKay,” she told reporters. “He always referred to him (in his 1996 trial) as `the boy.’ ” She added that she couldn’t begin “to understand the criminal mind.”
The 64-year-old Crawford was labeled at one point in his trial as “the most hated man in Montgomery County” for his cold-blooded bludgeoning and shooting of the only child of Carl and Paulette Everett, her then-married name. The failed kidnap plot was intended to enable Crawford to pay off personal debts, but the scheme fell apart before the Everetts could take steps to meet the $500,000 ransom demand that was to have produced the payoff. The crime shocked the region because of its brutality and the betrayal of trust that was at its heart. The onetime friend and neighbor of the Everetts was known as “Uncle Hilty” to his young victim, but Crawford didn’t directly mention his victim in his final words.
The execution by injection was deferred for two minutes while Crawford offered a last statement that included thanks to supporters during his stay on death row at the state prison in Livingston. But he also turned his head to the side on the gurney that held him in order to face Norman to say, “I want to ask Paulette for forgiveness from your heart. One day I hope you will. It is a tragedy for my family and your family. I am sorry.” Norman told reporters later that she found Crawford’s words meaningless, and she declined to speculate that his allusion to “My special angel, I love you” might have been intended to refer to her son. “His gesture doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said, adding that the forgiveness he asked for “is God’s job.” She said his remarks represented “a form of detachment” by Crawford.
The ex-lawman, second-oldest convict to be executed by injection in the state of Texas, was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m., about eight minutes after the lethal chemicals began to be administered in the small green-painted death chamber inside the Walls prison unit here. His final words reflected the return to religion he earlier had said he achieved after arriving on death row after his capital murder conviction in 1996. “May God pass me over to the Kingdom’s shore softly and gently,” he said. “I am ready.” He also said he thanked “the Lord Jesus Christ for the years I have spent on death row. They have been a blessing in my life.”
Norman was shaken but appeared relieved that the long wait for Wednesday’s ending was done. “I had dreams that McKay would grow into a man with a servant spirit,” she said. “That dream was shattered by those whose dream was simply to reduce debt. Today was a most sobering, somber experience, and one I do not really understand.” The slaying of McKay Everett reverberated for years afterward in large and small ways across Montgomery County. The most notable outgrowth of the tragedy was Norman’s founding of an organization devoted to child safety and protection issues that bears her son’s name.
Crawford was condemned to death in 1996 by a Walker County jury that took only one hour to find him guilty of McKay’s murder. Prosecutors showed how the onetime Beaumont cop and Jefferson County deputy was deeply in debt and hoped to get $500,000 from the Everetts in exchange for the safe return of their son. Authorities said Crawford’s bind was the result of high living, gambling losses and a refusal to dial back his family’s lifestyle. His claim was that he owed money to friends who had lent him an estimated $450,000 to cover payrolls for employees at the security business he had sold to unreliable buyers.
Prosecutors were able to show jurors how he had used his family friendship with the Everetts to persuade McKay, left home alone while his parents went to a business function, to open the front door to his house and admit him on the evening of Sept. 12, 1995. They were told how he grabbed the youngster, stuffed him in the trunk of his Chrysler and sped away into the night to Louisiana, where he stopped in a swamp off Interstate 10 to beat and then shoot the boy.
Hilton Crawford confessed to involvement in the crime after five days of questioning following his return to Conroe, and he even gave details about where to find McKay’s body. But he accused a man named Remington, whom he had met at a Louisiana horse track, of being the killer. Authorities rejected the claim after finding that the composite drawing of Remington that Crawford helped to create actually resembled a wrecker driver whom he had tried unsuccessfully to enlist in the scheme. The driver, not implicated in the crime, came forward after Crawford’s arrest and told how the two had chatted at a horse track about Crawford’s interest in finding someone to “babysit” a youngster for a while.
Crawford’s execution was the 17th in Texas this year and 306th since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982. Three other executions are scheduled this month.