Gary Sterling was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of John Carty
According to court documents Gary Sterling would kidnap 72 year old John Carty and 52 year old Deloris June Smith. Both of the victims would be beaten to death
While in custody for two other murders, William and Leroy Porter, Gary Sterling would confess to the murders of Carty and Smith
Gary Sterling would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Gary Sterling would be executed by lethal injection on August 10 2005
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Gary Sterling FAQ
When Was Gary Sterling Executed
Gary Sterling was executed on August 10 2005
Gary Sterling Case
Arrested for fatally beating a pair of elderly brothers at their home near Hillsboro, Gary Sterling had a surprise for authorities. He led them to the bodies of two more slaying victims, a woman and another man.
Sterling, now 38, was 20 when he was taken into custody. He pleaded guilty in exchange for two life prison terms the weekend before his capital murder trial was to begin in Hill County for the 1988 bludgeoning deaths of the Porter brothers, William, 72, and Leroy, 71. The brothers were killed in Pelham, which straddles the Hill and Navarro county lines about 35 miles northeast of Waco.
Prosecutors in Navarro County, where Sterling led police to a rural grassy area and the body of John Carty, tried him for fatally beating the 72-year-old man over the head with a bumper jack and stealing his car, a TV, a shotgun and a lantern. Jurors who convicted him at his capital murder trial in Corsicana in 1989 decided he should be put to death. His lethal injection, scheduled for this evening, would be the 11th of the year in Texas, the nation’s most active capital punishment state.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, on a 7-0 vote Monday, rejected a clemency petition and a request for a reprieve. Sterling’s lawyers were in the courts Tuesday to try to block the execution. “Physically, he’s the most dangerous person I’ve ever seen in jail in my life,” said Pat Batchelor, the former Navarro County district attorney who prosecuted Sterling. “He was muscles on top of muscles, a really scary person.”
Batchelor and Hill County Sheriff Brent Button remembered Sterling as the man who trashed items in the jail in Hill County. “He was a real problem in jail and had a lot of violent tendencies and attacked the staff,” Button said Tuesday. “He tore up some things we didn’t think could be tore up. It was a fairly new jail at the time, and we had some items in the jail that were supposed to be indestructible, and he destroyed them.” Prison records show he has not been a serious problem since arriving on death row in February 1989.
Authorities think he also was responsible for the beating death of Delores Smith, 52, a friend of Carty’s whose purse and glasses were found at Sterling’s home. He took deputies to her body the day after leading them to Carty’s remains but never was tried for her slaying.
Sterling, who declined to speak with reporters in the weeks preceding his scheduled punishment, apparently knew all four victims. Button said Tuesday that the motive for the slayings was robbery to get money to buy crack cocaine.
He managed to evade police the night the Porter brothers were killed in May 1988, when they spotted him stripping a car that belonged to Leroy Porter. He was caught the next day when officers, acting on a tip, found him hiding in the attic of his home in Blooming Grove, a town of about 800 some 15 miles west of Corsicana.
In earlier appeals, Sterling’s lawyers said his intent to kill Carty wasn’t clear because he didn’t bring a deadly weapon with him, that he only struck Carty once and wasn’t sure if Carty was breathing after he was hit. State lawyers responded that he used the bumper jack as a deadly weapon and that he dragged his victim’s body 100 feet from the road, through two barbed wire fences, so it wouldn’t be discovered. They also said if Sterling only wanted to rob Carty, there wasn’t any need to bash in the man’s head with the jack.
A previous appeal focused on comments from a juror at his trial who was portrayed as racist for using an epithet to describe black people. The juror was white; Sterling is black.
At least seven other inmates have executions scheduled, including Robert Shields, set to die Aug. 23 for the 1994 slaying of a suburban Houston woman during a burglary of her Galveston County home.
http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/sterling978.htm