Allen Janecka was executed by the State of Texas for a triple murder
According to court documents Allen Janecka would murder John and Diana Wanstrath in their home, along with their 14-month-old son Kevin. Initially police thought that the deaths were a murder suicide however they would focus on Diana’s brother Markham Duff-Smith who would benefit from the deaths. Soon they would figure out that Markham Duff-Smith had hired someone to murder the Wanstrath family
Allen Janecka would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Allen Janecka would be executed by lethal injection on July 24 2003
Allen Janecka Photos
Allen Janecka FAQ
When Was Allen Janecka Executed
Allen Janecka was executed on July 24 2003
Allen Janecka Case
Remorseful and prayerful in the waning seconds of his life, Allen Wayne Janecka was executed Thursday for the 1979 murder of a 14-month-old boy in an inheritance scheme that shocked Houston and fooled medical examiners. “For many years I have done things my way, which has caused a lot of pain to me, my family and many others,” Janecka said as he lay on the death chamber gurney. “Today I have come to realize that for peace and happiness, one has to do things God’s way.” He exhaled deeply three times as the lethal injection took effect. He was pronounced dead 16 minutes later.
Janecka, who spent 22 years on death row, was the 20th prisoner put to death in Texas this year. He was the second inmate executed in connection with the slayings of Houston toddler Kevin Wanstrath and his parents, Diana and John Wanstrath.
Markham Duff-Smith, Diana Wanstrath’s brother, was executed in 1993, moments after admitting for the first time to a role in those killings and the 1975 slaying of his mother, Gertrude Duff-Smith Zabolio. Recruited by a middle man, Janecka was the “hit man” who erased Duff-Smith’s four immediate family members in return for a few thousand dollars, according to testimony. The scheme was designed for Duff-Smith, an investor, to inherit the bulk of his family’s $800,000 estate.
In contrast to Duff-Smith, Janecka confessed multiple times in the past two decades, once telling police that he “took care of the little one.” The boy was shot in the head while surrounded by stuffed animals in his crib. The Harris County medical examiner’s office concluded that Diana Wanstrath had shot her husband and only child with a pistol, then killed herself, although no gun was found in the Wanstrath home. The agency also had issued a suicide ruling years earlier in Zabolio’s death.
Skeptical of the rulings, Houston police homicide detective Johnny Bonds pieced together evidence pointing to Duff-Smith as the mastermind. Bonds’ work became the focus of a book, The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit. Bonds, now a Harris County district attorney’s investigator, witnessed the execution Thursday, the first one he had seen, at the invitation of a distant relative of the Wanstraths. “Relief,” Bonds said, describing his thoughts as he left the death house at the Walls prison unit. “Twenty-four years waiting for this to happen. I’m glad it’s over.”
Janecka’s sister, Valerie, and brother, Kevin, along with friends and spiritual advisers, witnessed the execution and had no comment afterward. Janecka, who thanked prison chaplains in his last remarks, considered the execution his release from prison, said prison spokesman Larry Fitzgerald, who had spoken with him earlier. Soon after the witnesses arrived, Janecka nodded assuredly at his relatives and friends. “God bless everyone here today,” he said. Quoting the words of Jesus on the cross, he said, “Oh, Lord, into your hands I commend my spirit,” then added, “Thy will be done.”
Janecka, a former choirboy and high school athlete from Weimar, was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1981. A state appeals court threw out the conviction several years later, saying Janecka’s indictment should have named Walter Waldhauser Jr. as the person who hired him to kill. That would have allowed Janecka’s lawyers to take a different approach to evidence about Waldhauser, the court said.
Janecka was convicted and sentenced to death in his 1993 retrial, during which his lawyers suggested that Waldhauser had fired the bullet that killed the Wanstrath child. Waldhauser plea-bargained for a 30-year sentence. He was paroled after nine years, changed his name to Michael Davis and now is serving a lengthy sentence for an unrelated theft conviction.
In Janecka’s last round of appeals, his lawyer said evidence from the .22-caliber bullet that killed Kevin Wanstrath may have been botched before the retrial by the Houston Police Department crime lab, whose mistakes in other cases mushroomed into a scandal this year. Defense lawyer Richard Ellis argued that, regardless of Janecka’s confessions, the execution should have been postponed pending tests to show whether mistakes were made on ballistics evidence. Like previous defense lawyers, Ellis left open the possibility that Waldhauser was the real killer. The final appeals were rejected as late as midday Thursday, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the execution.
The lawyer also sought clemency from the state Board of Pardons and Paroles, citing Janecka’s record of good behavior behind bars. He was said to have rededicated himself to Catholicism. Family members asked the jury for mercy in his 1993 trial, saying Janecka had been abused by his father. He previously had been convicted of burglary.
Also present at the execution were two relatives of Keith Farmer, killed in a 1970s confrontation over a drug deal. Though never charged in the case, Janecka was part of a scheme to rob Farmer, Bonds said.
A few hours before his execution, Janecka amiably offered a correction to a Sunday article in the Houston Chronicle. Based on one of the newspaper’s reports that documented his relatives’ testimony in the 1993 trial, the article stated that Janecka was named “Mr. Football” in high school. But Fitzgerald said Janecka told him his correct title was “Mr. Baseball” and that the true winner of the football title more than 30 years ago might be upset at the discrepancy.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2011271
