Dale Scheanette was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Wendie Prescott
According to court documents the body of Christine Vu was found dead in her bathtub. The woman had been sexually assaulted and bound with duct tape. The murder would go unsolved
The body of Wendie Prescott would be found the same way as Christine Vu. Police found a ton of evidence however it would take years to find the Bathtub Killer
Dale Scheanette was finally arrested when the FBI was able to link him to the two murders
Dale Scheanette was convicted of the Wendie Prescott murder and sentenced to death
Dale Scheanette would be executed by lethal injection on February 10 2009
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Dale Scheanette FAQ
When Was Dale Scheanette Executed
Dale Scheanette was executed on February 10 2009
Dale Scheanette Case
A Louisiana man whose slayings terrorized a suburban Dallas-Fort Worth area and earned him the nickname the “Bathtub Killer” quietly went to his death.
Dale Devon Scheanette, 35, said from the death chamber gurney Tuesday evening that “no cases ever tried have been error free.” He repeated the comment. “No cases are error free,” he said, then told the warden standing next to him to proceed. Nine minutes later, Scheanette was pronounced dead.
He was condemned for killing an Arlington woman, Wendie Prescott, was charged with the slaying of a second woman and was blamed for the rapes of at least five other women. His signature murders occurred at the same apartment complex in Arlington in 1996 with his victims found in half-filled bathtubs, strangled, raped and bound with duct tape. Prescott, 22, was killed on Christmas Eve in 1996. Scheanette was charged but not tried for killing Christine Vu, 25, three months earlier.
Relatives of each woman were among the witnesses to Scheanette’s lethal injection. They declined to speak with reporters. The execution was the seventh this year in Texas. Another is set for Thursday evening in the nation’s most active death penalty state.
Scheanette acted as his own lawyer in late appeals. His sister, acting on his behalf, filed a three-page handwritten motion Tuesday seeking a reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court. It was turned down less than an hour before he was taken to the death chamber.
The slayings went unsolved for more than three years because detectives couldn’t match a fingerprint at the murder scenes to anyone. Finally, in 1999, Scheanette was arrested for a burglary outside Dallas and his prints entered into a criminal database were tied to the killings. DNA then strengthened the confirmations and also pointed to his involvement in the other rapes.
“He personifies evil,” said Greg Miller, the Tarrant County district attorney who prosecuted Scheanette in 2003. “I’ve been doing this 35, 36 years. I’ve had others who have killed and done bad things. But he’s at the top of the list.” Prosecutors and defense lawyers said it was uncertain what set Scheanette off. Evidence showed that at some time before the Prescott and Vu killings, the native of Ouachita Parish in northern Louisiana had lived at the apartment complex where both women lived and died.
Scheanette declined to speak with reporters as his execution date neared. At his trial, lawyers tried to show the evidence was insufficient to convict him. “We brought in his family to show he had a pretty good family unit and that he got along well,” said J.R. Molina, his trial attorney. “The DNA evidence, the fingerprint evidence that came in, were very strong. Several other instances of burglary, break-ins and rapes that he committed, that was pretty strong evidence to show to a jury.”
Prescott’s aunt and uncle, concerned when she failed to show up for a shopping trip with her sister, went to her apartment and found her dead.
After jurors convicted him of capital murder for the Prescott slaying, prosecutors in the punishment phase of the trial called to the witness stand five women who testified how they were beaten, threatened and raped by Scheanette. “I am convinced that testimony of those five women was very therapeutic for them,” Miller said, describing the women as crying and hugging one another after leaving the witness stand. “It was a pretty moving event. … It was a miracle he didn’t kill any of the other women.”
Miller, however, said he was left to wonder how many others Scheanette may have raped or killed. “The possibility certainly exists,” said Tommy LeNoir, the Arlington homicide detective who investigated the slayings. “I will tell you this, without reservation, that the right person is in this position, that the person who took the lives of these two ladies, I have absolutely no reservation that the person responsible is Dale Scheanette.”
On Thursday, another inmate linked to multiple slayings and rapes was set to die. Johnny Ray Johnson, 51, was convicted of the 1995 rape-slaying of Leah Joette Smith, whose head was slammed repeatedly into a cement street curb in Houston after she refused to have sex with him.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6257425.html
