Christopher Black was executed by the State of Texas for a triple murder
According to court documents Christopher Black was upset that his marriage ended. He would go to the home of his estranged wife and murder her, their daughter and her granddaughter: 36-year-old Gwendolyn Black, 5-month-old daughter, Christina Marie Black, 17-month-old step granddaughter, Katrese Houston
Christopher Black was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Christopher Black would be executed by lethal injection on July 9 2003
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When Was Christopher Black Executed
Christopher Black was executed on July 9 2003
Christopher Black Case
A retired Army sergeant was executed Wednesday evening for murdering his 17-month-old step-granddaughter in a 1998 massacre in which his wife and 5-month-old daughter also were gunned down. Asked by the warden if he wanted to make a final statement, Christopher Black Sr., said no. As the drugs began flowing, he made a groaning sigh and was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m., seven minutes later.
Black was convicted of killing Katrease Houston at the Killeen home of his estranged wife Gwendolyn Black, the toddler’s grandmother. Katrease was found slumped in a high chair. She had been shot five times in the chest. Her grandmother was shot 10 times. Black’s daughter, Christina Marie, was shot once. “I ran out of bullets,” Black told a 911 operator he called after the Feb. 7, 1998, attack.
Black is the 18th condemned Texas inmate to receive lethal injection this year and the second in as many weeks. Two more are set to die later this month. The U.S. Supreme Court in April refused to consider Black’s appeal and no additional appeals were made, his lawyer, Jack Hurley, said.
Black bought a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol the day before the shooting. He mailed cassette tapes to relatives explaining plans to kill his 36-year-old wife and anyone else in the house. The tapes were timed to arrive after the shooting. The couple had married just over three years earlier but relatives said Gwendolyn Black, who worked as an elementary school teacher in nearby Copperas Cove after leaving the Army, was seeking a divorce because she received little help from her husband with the children and he had moved out of town to take a security job. Police who responded to 911 calls from Black and neighbors found him unarmed and holding his daughter to his chest. “We approached him and he said he wasn’t going to put the baby down on the cold ground,” officer Eric Bradley said. “As I reached up to grab the baby from him, he said: ‘I want to kiss my baby.’ I said go ahead. “As I pulled the baby toward me, the baby’s head kind of just rolled to the left. … The eyes were open, fixed, no pulse, no respiration, no nothing.”
It took a jury in Killeen 15 minutes to convict Black of capital murder of Katrease. In Texas, murder of a child under the age of 6 can be a death penalty case and the same jury deliberated about seven hours before deciding his punishment. “I don’t recall a case that was any more aggravated or any more vicious in the way the crime was committed and the consequences,” Lon Curtis, the former assistant district attorney in Bell County who prosecuted Black, said this week. “The image of that baby, the little girl, slumped over in her high chair with five rounds in the chest. … I wish I hadn’t been reminded of that.”
Black declined to speak from death row with reporters. “My days are long and sad,” he wrote on a Web site where inmates seek pen pals. “I do not want romance or money, the only thing that I want is a friend.” “He made his choices,” Bradley said. “And that’s where he’s at.”
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/1987714
