According to court documents Willie Washington would enter a grocery store where he was handed food stamps and money. Washington would pull out a gun and shot Kiflemariam Tareh and another employee with Kiflemariam Tareh dying from his injuries
Willie Washington would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
A federal appeals court on Wednesday sided with Texas death row inmate Willie Washington, bouncing the decades-old case back to a lower court in light of ongoing claims of bad lawyering.
The Harris County man was out on parole in 1985 when he was arrested for a double shooting in a Houston grocery store, where he gunned down Kiflemariam Tareh and wounded Yemane Kidane.
The then-36-year-old was arrested after returning to the scene with stolen money still in his pocket, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records.
Since his death sentence in 1986, Washington has been fighting his case, most recently by alleging deficient legal representation earlier in the judicial process.
“We see at least a debatable merit in these claims,” the court wrote this week. One of Washington’s ineffective assistance of counsel claims dings his trial lawyers for failing to challenge the selection of an all-white jury, despite notes about race on prosecutors’ jury questionnaires
He also faulted his trial lawyers for failing to uncover potentially mitigating evidence that could have warded off a death sentence – and he faulted his later appeals attorneys for not noticing the trial lawyers’ apparent oversights.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that Washington’s claims at least merited another look, vacating the lower court’s ruling and sending the case back for further discovery and an evidentiary hearing.
According to court documents Lucky Ward would murder Reita Long and Charlie Rodriguez weeks apart. Ward is also suspected of at least three other murders
Lucky Ward would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Lucky Ward Photos
Lucky Ward Now
Name
Ward, Lucky
TDCJ Number
999621
Date of Birth
11/01/1964
Date Received
03/13/2020
Age (when Received)
55
Education Level (Highest Grade Completed)
7th
Date of Offense
09/13/2010 and 09/30/2010
Age (at the time of Offense)
44
County
Harris
Race
Black
Gender
Male
Hair Color
Black
Height (in Feet and Inches)
6′ 3″
Weight (in Pounds)
229
Eye Color
Brown
Native County
Brazoria
Native State
Texas
Lucky Ward Case
A Houston serial killer was sentenced to death by a Harris County jury for his role in the strangulation of four people.
After five hours of deliberation, the jury decided Lucky Ward’s fate after he was convicted of strangling two people and is believed to have strangled two others in the Houston area as far back as 1985.
“Jurors had the courage to look at all the evidence, give a voice to the victims, and declare that he was the worst of the worst,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “Ward tortured and brutalized his victims with no mercy.”
The jury rejected the other option of a life sentence and agreed that Ward, 55, would have been a continuing threat to society.
Ward was convicted of capital murder for the deaths of Reita Long and Charlie Rodriguez in September 2010. Long and Rodriguez were found dead within weeks of each other. Prosecutors said one victim was found dead on the steps of a Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart building and the other was covered in a blanket in a north Houston home.
Prosecutors also believed Ward was tied to the deaths of 51-year-old Myra Ical and Carol E. Flood, 62, in 2010. They said he was also tied to the strangulation of Birdell Louis in 1985.
“What we have here is a serial killer,” said Prosecutor Colleen Barnett said. “The circumstances are indeed horrific.”
Prosecutors told the jurors how Ward had committed a series of crimes that date back to at least 1979. In one crime, prosecutors said he raped an 83-year-old woman in Brazoria County and he was sentenced to more than two decades in prison.
In 2018, while Ward was awaiting trial for capital murder, prosecutors said he was charged after being caught with a shank while in the Harris County jail.
According to court documents Faryion Wardrip was just released from prison, where he served time for murder, when his killing spree would begin in Wichita Falls in 1984. Over the next three years Wardrip would murder five women: Terry Sims, 20; Toni Gibbs, 23; Debra Taylor, 25; Ellen Bau, 21, and Tina Kimbrew, 21.
Faryion Wardrip would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Faryion Wardrip Photos
Faryion Wardrip Now
Name
Wardrip, Faryion Edward
TDCJ Number
999331
Date of Birth
03/06/1959
Date Received
11/09/1999
Age (when Received)
40
Education Level (Highest Grade Completed)
11
Date of Offense
12/21/1984
Age (at the time of Offense)
25
County
Denton (on change of venue from Wichita)
Race
White
Gender
Male
Hair Color
Brown
Height (in Feet and Inches)
6′ 5″
Weight (in Pounds)
202
Eye Color
Blue
Native County
Washington
Native State
Indiana
Faryion Wardrip Case
A serial killer in Texas who has been on death row for more than 20 years for the murders of five young women has had his appeal to review his sentence denied by the U.S. Supreme Court after he claimed his public defender was ineffective and negligent in presenting his case.
Faryion Wardrip, 62, was convicted in 1999 in the deaths of four women in a 16-month span, starting in Wichita Falls, in 1984. He had been freed on parole after confessing to the murder of another woman
His murdered victims were Terry Sims, 20; Toni Gibbs, 23; Debra Taylor, 25; Ellen Bau, 21, and Tina Kimbrew, 21.
In September 2020, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s ruling granting a rehearing on the capital punishment sentence. He had petitioned for the rehearing from that court on the basis that his good conduct while in prison was not given enough consideration in the punishment phase.
The Fifth Circuit rejected his claim for good behavior but admitted both it and the lower court did not address one part of his argument, thus he is entitled for that issue to be settled by the lower court, and granted his petition for a rehearing.
However, instead of proceeding to federal district court, Wardrip’s defense took its case to the Supreme Court.
Now that the nation’s highest court has rejected his appeal, which was rooted in his argument that he had inept council, Faryion Wardrip has the option to take his case back to federal district court to consider his claim about good conduct
In December 21, 1984, Wardrip’s first victim, Terry Sims, 23, a Midwestern State University student and part-time EKG specialist at what was then Bethania Hospital, was at a Christmas party and then was supposed to go to a a co-worker’s home to study and spend the night.
Unexpectedly, Liza Boone, the co-worker, received a call to return to the hospital to work the midnight shift. She drove Sims to her residence and gave Sims the key to her apartment, dropping her off at approximately 12:30 am.
The following morning, the co-worker found Sims lying in a pool of blood after she was sexually assaulted and stabbed several times.
It was later determined that while Boone was away at work, Sims had heard Wardrip causing a disturbance and went outside to investigate. Wardrip lunged at Sims and she ran back into the apartment and locked the door. Wardip targeted Sims for ‘no apparent reason’ and broke the door down after she locked him out.
At the time of the incident, though, authorities were not able to track a suspect. Little did they know that the young woman’s death would be the first in a series of killings that went undiscovered for years.
Gibbs disappeared on January 19, 1985, while employed at Wichita General Hospital. Wardrip came across Gibbs at about six a.m., after he had been out walking all night.
He knew Gibbs because she was a registered nurse at the same hospital where he worked as an orderly. Gibbs offered Wardrip a ride and after he got in her car, he began hurling her around and screaming at her. He then forced Gibbs to drive down an isolated dirt road to a field
Two days after her abduction, her car was found within a few miles of the hospital. On February 15, utility workers found her naked body in a field at the southwest corner of West Jentsch Road and Highway 281 in Archer County, one mile south of the Wichita county line, a day after she would have turned 24.
Gibbs had been sexually assaulted and stabbed. Gibbs had a total of eight stab wounds: three to her back, three to her chest, and two defensive wounds on her left forearm and thumb.
Two months after he murdered Toni Gibbs, Wardrip traveled to Fort Worth with the intention of looking for a job. In Fort Worth he met Taylor in the early morning hours of March 24, 1985, while at a bar.
Taylor had been at the bar with her husband but he left early because he was tired.
Debra remained at the bar where Faryion Wardrip approached her and asked her to dance. She accepted his request and the two spent time together in the club.
He then asked to drive her home, which she agreed to. While outside, Wardrip attempted to make sexual advances, which were rejected by Taylor. This infuriated Wardrip and he killed Taylor, leaving her body at a construction site in east Fort Worth.
When Debra failed to return home by the next morning, she was reported missing by her husband. Her body was found by two construction workers on March 29, 1985
On September 20, 1985, Wardrip abducted Blau in Wichita Falls. The kidnapping occurred as Blau was walking alone to her vehicle after leaving her evening job as a waitress. She was also a student at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls. Wardrip forced Blau to drive to a secluded area, where he eventually killed her by strangulation before breaking her neck
Leaving her body in the secluded area, he drove her car back into Wichita Falls and abandoned it along with her purse. Her blood was also discovered on the inside of the vehicle. A county road crew employee found Blau’s body in a field in Wichita County on October 10, 1985.
On May 6, 1986, Wardrip killed Kimbrew, a waitress he had recently befriended. He went to her apartment and suffocated her with a pillow because she ‘reminded him of his ex-wife’.
Three days later, Faryion Wardrip called police in Galveston, Texas, confessing to the crime.
He was sentenced to 35 years in prison but given parole in 1997.
After his release, Wardrip moved to Olney – 142 miles northwest of Dallas – and married and was even an active member in the community’s church.
He was required to wear an ankle bracelet, allowing authorities to constantly track his location; he was restricted to movements for work, home and church.
Meanwhile, investigators had still not tied all the cases together. Barry Macha, who was was elected district attorney shortly before Sims was killed, inherited the case as well as the four others.
‘I still think about Terry and her family. It was a horrific case,’ Macha told Time Record News, adding that he still is in contact with the families of the victims.
In 1999, Macha officially reopened all the cold case murders and assigned investigator John Little to do the groundwork.
Both law enforcement officials established that the killings weren’t random and that there we some connections between the victims and Wardrip. At the time, Wardrip had known Blau, who was living near Sims. Wardrip worked at Bethania Hospital, where Gibbs was also working.
And thanks to the forensic preservations of the victim’s DNAs, Macha’s team were able to knock out some potential suspects.
Wardrip’s DNA, however, had not been collected when he became a person of interest to them.
So, Little was charged with the task to get it and he did it the most subtle way possible.
The detective went to the factory where Wardrip was recently hired, approached him during his coffee break and asked him for the paper cup he had drank out of so he could spit tobacco into it. Little kept the cup as evidence.
The DNA from the cup was later identified as a match with evidence found on Sims and Gibbs. Wardrip was arrested on Valentine’s Day in 1999.
He later confessed to killing Sims, Gibbs, Blau, before surprisingly admitting to investigators that he murdered Taylor.
Later in 1999, Wardrip was sentenced to death by lethal injection in Kimbrew’s murder and was given three life sentences for the other murders. Despite appeals, Wardrip is still on death row after 22 years.
As of Monday, no execution date for Faryion Wardrip had been set.
According to court documents Richard Vasquez would strike four year old Miranda Lopez several times. He would send the little girl outside of the home and he took a nap. Later that same day Miranda Lopez would fall off a step stool and lose consciousness and would be rushed to the hospital where she died. An autopsy would show the little girl had been sexually assaulted and beaten
Richard Vasquz would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Richard Vasquez Photos
Richard Vasquez Now
Name
Vasquez, Richard
TDCJ Number
999319
Date of Birth
04/17/1979
Date Received
06/24/1999
Age (when Received)
20
Education Level (Highest Grade Completed)
9
Date of Offense
03/05/1998
Age (at the time of Offense)
18
County
Nueces
Race
Hispanic
Gender
Male
Hair Color
Black
Height (in Feet and Inches)
5′ 9″
Weight (in Pounds)
180
Eye Color
Brown
Native County
Nueces
Native State
Texas
Richard Vasquez Case
A federal appeals court has upheld the death sentence of a Corpus Christi man condemned for the 1998 fatal beating of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter.
In its ruling, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was critical of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for deciding earlier that attorneys at the 1999 trial of Richard Vasquez did an acceptable job during the trial’s punishment phase
“It was objectively unreasonable for the state court to conclude that Vasquez’s trial counsel’s performance was constitutionally sound,” the New Orleans-based court said in a decision posted late Wednesday.
The federal judges, however, said Vasquez wasn’t prejudiced by his attorney’s “deficient performance,” that his appeals lawyers didn’t prove the lower court’s prejudice determination was unreasonable and affirmed a Nueces County jury’s decision that Vasquez should die.
Vasquez’s appeals lawyers argued that his trial attorneys did little investigation to show jurors mitigating evidence that could have led them to decide he should get life in prison rather than death.
The attorneys said Vasquez’s trial lawyers never spoke with his parents, didn’t hire a mitigation specialist but instead hired an investigator with no experience in collecting mitigating evidence in capital murder cases.
According to the court opinion, “had Vasquez’s trial attorneys undertaken even a rudimentary investigation of Vasquez’s family and social history, they would have unearthed a frightening portrait of addiction and destruction
Among the evidence not presented to jurors was that Vasquez’s drug-addicted father taught his son how to use and sell heroin, took him along on drug runs and robberies, and that he began using marijuana at age 10 and was addicted to cocaine and heroin by age 13. His mother lived with a drug dealer who also provided him with drugs.
Vasquez was 18 when authorities said he fatally beat 4-year-old Miranda Lopez in the head because his girlfriend — the child’s mother and also a drug addict — wouldn’t tell him where she had hidden some cocaine. Evidence also showed the child had been severely sexually assaulted before she died and that cocaine levels in the child’s blood were double the lethal amount for an adult.
Vasquez called 911 to report the girl unconscious and told paramedics she fell from a stool while brushing her teeth and hit her head on the floor. He became a suspect after the nature of her injuries became more clear
In a second Texas death row case before the court, judges allowed 44-year-old Virgilio Maldonado, a Mexican national, to try to show he’s mentally impaired and can’t be executed for killing a man during a robbery in Houston 15 years ago.
Maldonado, from the western Mexican state of Michoacan, already had a record, including a bank robbery and another slaying, when he was condemned for the shooting death of Cruz Saucedo. Prosecutors said Saucedo was killed for marijuana, money and a gun.
The mental impairment issue previously was rejected by a state court after an evidentiary hearing. The federal appeals court now will hold its own hearing. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled mentally impaired people can’t be put to death.
The appeals court also rejected Maldonado’s appeal of a lower court ruling refusing his claim that he improperly was denied legal protections entitled to foreign nationals under the Vienna Convention.
According to court documents Fidencio Valdez would shoot and kill Ralph Tucker during a drug deal gone bad. A week later following an altercation Fidencio Valdez would murder Julio Barrios
Fidencio Valdez would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Fidencio Valdez Photos
Fidencio Valdez Now
Name
Valdez, Fidencio
TDCJ Number
999594
Date of Birth
05/30/1979
Date Received
07/24/2014
Age (when Received)
35
Education Level (Highest Grade Completed)
11
Date of Offense
12/10/2010
Age (at the time of Offense)
31
County
El Paso
Race
Hispanic
Gender
Male
Hair Color
Black
Height (in Feet and Inches)
6′ 1″
Weight (in Pounds)
231
Eye Color
Brown
Native County
El Paso
Native State
Texas
Fidencio Valdez Case
The prospective juror questioning process began on Monday in the trial of Fidencio Valdez, 34, who is charged with capital murder in the shooting death of Ralph Tucker, 51, on Thanksgiving Day 2010, and in the shooting death of Julio Barrios, 18, on Dec. 10, 2010.
Jury selection in state death penalty cases usually begin with a jury “papering” process in which hundreds of jurors are summoned to the courthouse to fill out an extensive questionnaire. The papering process in Valdez’s trial began in October.
A second jury pool is then selected based on the questionnaire, and prospective jurors are called into court one by one to answer another round of questions by defense attorneys, prosecutors and the judge presiding over the case.
El Paso County sheriff’s deputies arrested Valdez, whose nickname is “Filo” and an allegedly a member of the Barrio Azteca gang, in connection with Tucker’s death at a strip club, Sal’s Lounge, in the 11400 block of Gateway East near Horizon City. Three other people — Louis Michael Capano, Santiago De Leon Jr. and Priscilla Chavez — also were arrested in connection with Tucker’s death
Deputies alleged two men entered the strip club before 3 a.m. Thanksgiving Day wearing black ski masks, black clothes and gloves and carrying handguns. They fired several shots and attempted to rob the club’s employees. When Tucker charged at the men with a bar stool, one of the men shot Tucker in the neck.
Trial dates for Chavez and De Leon are pending. Capano was found mentally incompetent to stand trial.
