James Clark was executed by the State of Texas for two murders
According to court documents James Clark and his accomplice were recently released from prison and decided to find someone to rob. The two would come upon two teenagers, Shari Catherine Crews and Jesus Garza, the female would be sexually assaulted before both were shot and killed
James Clark would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
James Clark would be executed by lethal injection on April 11 2007
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When Was James Clark Executed
James Clark was executed on April 11 2007
James Clark Case
Denton County Sheriff’s Cpl. Virginia Nichols walked as close to the edge of the white sandy beach as she could that June evening in 1993 and looked at the fallen tree lying across Clear Creek. The slender body of a girl was floating there, tangled in the branches.
Nichols was the first officer on the scene of a reported deceased person. Officers from several agencies soon joined her as word spread of the horrific crime committed just off FM428 north of Denton. “She just had her arms wrapped around that log. Her hair was flowing all around. You couldn’t see the wounds in the back of her head, and I thought she must have drowned,” Nichols said. “We brought her over to the beach, and I noticed her bra was tied around one arm. When we turned her over, we all stepped back and gasped. Nobody said a word for what seemed like an eternity. I told them, ‘OK, we have a homicide here; we need more people.’”
The discovery of the body of Shari Catherine “Cari” Crews, 17, a look of abject horror frozen on her beautiful face around the exit wound of a load of buckshot, was the first step in the process of justice for James Clark Jr., convicted of raping and murdering her and also accused of shooting to death her friend, Jesus Garza, 16.
Clark is scheduled to take the final steps in the justice process today on his way to the execution chamber in the Walls Unit in Huntsville.
With his appeal rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, James Clark has little hope of avoiding death by lethal injection, save for a commutation to a life sentence by Gov. Rick Perry. Clark declined an interview for this story and his attorney, James Rasmussen, could not be reached for comment.
A gleaming tribute
The June 7, 1993, murders at Clear Creek off FM428 north of Denton horrified area residents, and law enforcement officers who worked the case say it is one they will never forget. Nichols, now a detective with the Denton Police Department, said the awful handiwork of James Lee Clark Jr. haunts her still. “I’m glad he’s finally getting his time to die,” Nichols said. “It’s been too long coming.” Cari Crews was a popular junior at Ryan High School. She was a straight-A student and excelled at piano. She volunteered with the Denton Humane Society and had been elected president of the campus chapter of Amnesty International for her coming senior year.
Jesus Garza
Jesus Garza was an athlete who played both football and baseball for Ryan as a sophomore. He was interested in art, and the two met in an art class the semester before they died. According to court documents, Clark was born in Caddo Parish, La. His biological father vanished the day he found out Clark’s mother was pregnant. Clark told a psychologist hired for an appeals hearing that he drank his first beer when he was 7 years old and that by 13, he was frequently drunk. He was regularly smoking pot by the time he was 13 or 14, according to testimony.
He mowed lawns to obtain money to buy marijuana. He admitted to the psychologist that he also huffed paint and gasoline and sometimes used methamphetamine and cocaine when he could get the money to buy them. One of his favorite types of buildings to burglarize, he said during that interview, was a church, because churches were empty for long periods of time and often contained cash from the last offering.
James Clark
Clark repeated two grades before dropping out of formal education in the ninth grade, according to records. At 15, he was sent to the Gainesville State School, a state reformatory for boys and girls, for theft. After his release at 18, his mother would have nothing more to do with him, according to the court records. Later he went to prison on burglary charges, and that’s where he met James Richard Brown.
Brown grew up in Carrollton and also was incarcerated for burglary when the two men met. After their releases, both came to live in a decrepit trailer at a mobile home park in Aubrey. The two had stolen a shotgun and a rifle in vehicle burglaries and were looking for someone to rob when they came across the teens at Clear Creek that night. The part of Clear Creek that runs along FM428 north of Denton was a popular teen hangout at the time. The two teens drove there about midnight and were accosted by Clark, who was 25, and Brown, who was 22. Brown later was convicted of robbery for his part in the crime and sentenced to 20 years.
Denton police were involved first. James Clark and Brown arrived at a Denton convenience store in the early morning hours looking for medical help. Brown’s leg had almost been severed above the knee by a shotgun blast, and he was in danger of bleeding to death. Denton Detective Margaret Yarbrough didn’t believe the shaggy, dirty fellows’ story of being robbed and alerted other officers that the men likely had committed some crime themselves. Later that day, both teens’ mothers reported them missing in Denton, and officers were working to find them when the bodies were discovered.
Sheriff Benny Parkey was a Denton police detective at that time. He was intimately involved in the case, interviewing Brown in the hospital and assisting with James Clark’s arrest at a trailer in Aubrey. Parkey said it is time that justice is done for the teens who were terrorized before being shot in the head and thrown in the creek. “The execution by lethal injection is much more humane than the inhumanities these kids suffered that night,” Parkey said.
That part of Clear Creek is in unincorporated Denton County, so the murder cases were the responsibility of the sheriff’s office. Investigator Danny Brown was lead investigator for the sheriff’s office, but Texas Ranger Kyle Dean soon became case manager. Danny Brown said he and Dean didn’t sleep for days as the case quickly unfolded and they hustled to get arrest and search warrants swiftly but with such accuracy they would stand up under scrutiny in court.
White sand from the creek side covered both ex-convicts, tying them to the murders, and James Richard Brown began talking to detectives from his hospital bed. He told them there was a second body under the waters of Clear Creek, and Garza was pulled from the creek about midnight. Investigator Danny Brown has not worked a case before or since that affected him as much, he said. He shot many of the crime scene photos of the dead teens, and he will never forget their faces. “Those were the hardest pictures I’ve ever taken,” he said.
The autopsy report showed Cari’s tear ducts were swollen from hours of crying before her death, he said. “I feel that two kids never got to know their lives. They were never given that opportunity,” he said. “Clark and Brown have made their own destinies.”
Dean was a new Ranger who had just been transferred to Denton. This was his first major case, and he still remembers it vividly. “It still is one of the most brutal I’ve seen,” Dean said. “I’m glad to see some resolution to it after all these years. This execution is proper under the laws of Texas. I hope it provides some closure for their families.”
DRC/Donna Fielder
James Richard Brown talks to a reporter in 2006 at the Wynn Unit in Huntsville, where he is serving a 20-year sentence. A jury in his capital murder case in the death of Jesus Garza instead found him guilty of robbery. Brown still could face capital murder charges in the death of Cari Crews. The night after the teens were found, Dean, Parkey, Nichols, Deputy Scott Haney and several other officers drove to the trailer James Clark and James Richard Brown shared in Aubrey. They pried open the door and rushed inside, guns drawn.
Nichols will never forget her first sight of JamesClark. He had barricaded the hallway with a table. “I remember Haney went in and there was a table in the way. He shoved it out of the way, and James Clark was there and he reached for a knife. Haney had his MP-5 trained on him,” she said. “Clark dropped the knife.” The officers read Clark his rights and handcuffed him. They put paper bags on his hands to preserve any evidence such as possible gunshot residue. “I remember he had on tiger-striped bikini underwear. We took him to jail like that,” Nichols remembers. “All the neighbors were standing around in the yard watching when we took him away. He was public enemy No. 1.”
In the end, Brown and James Clark both admitted to being at Clear Creek that night. They told evolving stories that started with the lie of watching Garza shoot Crews and ended with similar tales of the murders. The difference was each said the other one did the shooting. Both were charged with capital murder. Clark was convicted and sentenced to death for Crews’ murder in 1994. He never was tried for Garza’s death. Brown’s trial for Garza’s murder was delayed because of his injured leg, which he said happened because he tried to keep Clark from committing the murders.
Brown looked young and defenseless as he sat at the defense table in a wheelchair. All of his taped statements professed his sorrow at the murders and his attempts to stop them. Jurors found him guilty of robbery and sentenced him to 20 years. He has been eligible for parole twice but the parole board has denied it.
Brown said in a prison interview in March 2006 that he expects to serve every day of his sentence. He understands why the victims’ family members were upset that he wasn’t convicted of murder, he said in the interview. He is sorry that his actions caused so much suffering, he said, still insisting that Clark shot him because he tried to stop the murders.
Brown could still be tried for Crews’ death. He has nightmares about execution, he said. “I dream,” Brown said. “I dream about that night. But more, I dream of being executed. I dream about it in great detail. I dream about the gurney and being tied down. I dream about the needle. I dream about dying.”
Clark’s trial took three months in 1994. Sheriff’s Sgt. Roger Dunham was assigned to transport Clark back and forth to trial and his jail cell. After he was found guilty and Judge Sam Houston pronounced the death sentence, Dunham took Clark back to the holding cell behind the courtroom. “While I was unlocking the cage door, I noticed him getting weak in the knees,” Dunham said. “I helped him into the cell and onto the bench in there, and then I slammed the door shut and opened the little window. I watched him to make sure he didn’t try to hurt himself. I could hear him crying. It was the first emotion I’d seen in him in the 17 weeks I’d been with him. He was a dead man walking. He’d come to the realization that this thing was really going to happen.”
Denton County was done with Clark that night. Dunham left for Huntsville with him at 2 a.m. the next day. When he reached the prison, the guards shackled Clark and led him into the building. “Two buses from Houston had just arrived and there must have been 150 guys in different stages of getting booked in,” he said. “A lot of them were buck naked. The guards said, ‘Death row inmate. Everybody face the wall.’ And every man in there turned his back on Clark and he walked down that long hall with a guard on each side of him. I’ll always remember he got part of the way down the hall and he turned around, twisted around all bent over and raised his shackled hands and waved at me. I thought, he’ll never leave this place alive.”
Dunham, now retired in Arkansas, returned two years ago to testify in a hearing to determine whether Clark was too mentally retarded to understand why he was being put to death after a Supreme Court decision in another case made that an issue. Dunham testified that Clark was not retarded, that he took notes during his trial and directed his defense attorneys in what he wanted them to do.
Judge Lee Gabriel ruled that Clark was fit for execution, and state and federal appeals courts have upheld that ruling. Dunham said it’s time justice was done for Cari Crews and Jesus Garza. “I’m happy that he finally is getting what is due him,” Dunham said. “He can meet his maker and explain it to him.”
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