Jackie Wilson was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of five year old Lottie Margaret Rhodes
According to court documents Jackie Wilson would kidnap Lottie Margaret Rhodes who would later be sexually assaulted and murdered
Jackie Wilson was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Jackie Wilson would be executed on May 4 2006 by lethal injection
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When Was Jackie Wilson Executed
Jackie Wilson was executed on May 4 2006
Jackie Wilson Case
His tattooed arms strapped to a gurney, Jackie Barron Wilson used his last words Thursday night to deny that he had kidnapped, raped and killed 5-year-old Maggie Rhodes of Arlington. Wilson, 40, said he hopes, “all these people here will find the one who did this damn crime. I am going home to be with God.” During a minute-long speech before the state executed him for the murder of the Roark Elementary kindergartner, it was the only time he acknowledged the Rhodes family.
Maggie’s mother, Toni Rhodes, watched Wilson die through reinforced glass, along with her brother and sister and two police officers who worked the case. “I know he’s lying and that he did do it,” Toni Rhodes said later. “If that’s how he wanted to go, then that’s his choice.”
After being given the lethal injection, Wilson’s breathing slowed and he gasped, “I love you,” to family members before he gurgled and began to fade. His wife, Maria, and two family members cried and recited the Lord’s Prayer. Wilson was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. His last meal was a cheeseburger, onion rings, Coke and a whole onion.
Mike Bosillo, the lead Arlington detective on the case 18 years ago, said Wilson looked at him and smirked as he denied, for the last time, that he killed Maggie. “I expected him to behave this way,” Bosillo said. “Jackie Barron Wilson faced his death the same way he lived his life — as a coward.”
Wilson was convicted of capital murder in 1989, but his conviction was overturned by an appeals court because of a procedural violation. He was convicted again in 1994 and sentenced to die.
In a 1993 interview with The Associated Press, Wilson denied being the killer. Authorities said Wilson’s fingerprints were found on both sides of broken glass at the scene of the kidnapping; his DNA was on Maggie’s clothes; her DNA was found on the inside and outside of the car he was driving; and a rare tire on the car matched a track on Maggie’s body. “I’m not going to die for something I didn’t do,” Wilson said in 1993. “This is kind of hard for me to believe.” Last week Wilson declined an interview request from the Star-Telegram.
Jim Greenwell, an Arlington police officer who was a crime scene investigator on the case, attended the execution and said he wasn’t surprised at Wilson’s deathbed denial in the face of overwhelming evidence. “It was his pattern. He lied then, he lied today, and I’m going to assume that’s how he lived his whole life,” Greenwell said.
Wilson’s attorney, Robin Norris of El Paso, said his client had a tough childhood, including physical abuse, and had witnessed the murder of his baby sitter. Norris filed a request for a new punishment hearing because evidence of those possibly mitigating factors was not presented at trial. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected that request Monday.
A federal claim filed by the anti-death penalty Innocence Network, which claimed that lethal injection is cruel and unusual because the drugs mask horrible pain, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon.
Wilson — who knew Maggie because he had lived in the same apartment complex and was a friend of her baby sitter — broke a window at the ground-floor apartment where the girl slept early Nov. 30, 1988, police said. Wilson snatched her from her bed and drove her from the Arlington Village Apartments near Abram Street and Texas 360 to a field near an abandoned road in Grand Prairie, police said.
Wilson sexually assaulted Maggie and killed her by driving a red Mercury Cougar over her as he fled, police said. Maggie’s body was found hours later by a truck driver. She would have turned 23 on Sunday. Rhodes, who bowed her head during Wilson’s final moments, said she was talking to Maggie. “I said, ‘You’re free. You can go,'” Rhodes said. “And then I thanked God for the strength to stand there.”
Wilson was the eighth Texas inmate executed this year and the 363rd since executions resumed in 1982.
