Kenneth Granviel was a serial rapist and serial killer who would be executed by the State of Texas for seven murders
According to court documents Kenneth Granviel would go into a home where he would sexually assault a woman before murdering her and four others: Laura McClendon, her 19-year-old sister Linda, 24-year-old cousin Martha, and two children, Steven and Natasha, both 2-year-olds.
Kenneth Granviel would later sexually assault and murder Betty Williams and Vera Hill
Kenneth Granviel would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Kenneth Granviel would be executed by lethal injection on February 27 1996
Kenneth Granviel Photos
Kenneth Granviel Case
A man who confessed to killing seven people, including a 2-year-old girl, by stabbing them with a butcher knife in two murderous rampages more than 21 years ago, was executed here this evening.
The man, Kenneth Granviel, 45, was executed by injection for the fatal stabbing of the girl. He had tied and gagged her and four members of her family, then stabbed them all with a butcher knife.
Mr. Granviel, a former machinist, declined to give a last statement. He was pronounced dead at 6:20 P.M., eight minutes after the lethal drugs began flowing into his arms.
Defense lawyers argued that Mr. Granviel should not have been executed because he was mentally incompetent and because the state failed to provide for a defense psychiatrist at his trial, at which he raised an insanity defense.
He was tried only for the murder of 2-year-old Natasha McClendon, who was stabbed to death along with her mother and three other relatives in Fort Worth on Oct. 7, 1974.
Mr. Granviel, a family friend, said he could not stop himself from killing Natasha. “I could see it happening, but there was nothing I could do about it,” he testified. “I could see myself stabbing this little girl I used to play with, I used to buy candy for.”
He surrendered to the police on Feb. 8, 1975, after raping a woman and abducting another and holding several people hostage at a house in Fort Worth. He later admitted killing two female friends who had been raped and stabbed with a knife.
Mr. Granviel, who spent 20 years and three months on death row, was the longest-serving condemned inmate in Texas to be executed.
He was originally scheduled to become the state’s first prisoner to be executed by lethal injection in September 1977. The date was blocked as lawyers challenged the constitutionality of the then-new execution method. Since then, 105 convicted killers have been executed in Texas
