Patrick Knight was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder
According to court documents Patrick Knight and an accomplice and waited for Walter and Mary Ann Werner. The couple were tied up and the next day forced to make withdrawals from various ATMs. The couple were driven to a remote location where they were both fatally shot
Patrick Knight would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Patrick Knight was executed by lethal injection on June 26 2007
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When Was Patrick Knight Executed
Patrick Knight was executed on June 26 2007
Patrick Knight Case
Condemned prisoner Patrick Knight picked a tough room and a tough crowd to deliver a joke. Then he died with no funny joke, near tears and no laughter.
“I said I was going to tell a joke,” he said Tuesday evening, strapped to the Texas death chamber gurney for lethal injection for abducting and killing an Amarillo-area couple almost 16 years ago. “Death has set me free. That’s the biggest joke. I deserve this.”
His voice wavering and appearing to hold back tears, he thanked God for his friends and made a plea on behalf of fellow inmates he said were innocent. “And the other joke is that I am not Patrick Bryan Knight and y’all can’t stop this execution now,” he added. “Go ahead. I’m finished.”
Nine minutes later, he was pronounced dead, making him the 18th inmate executed this year in the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.
Randall County Sheriff Joel Richardson witnessed Knight’s execution and was chief deputy in the Texas Panhandle county in 1991 when Knight was arrested for capital murder for the slayings of Walter Werner, 58, and his 56-year-old wife, Mary Ann. “It puzzled me a little bit,” he said of Knight’s final comments. “It wasn’t much of a joke. I don’t know of anything Patrick Knight has done since 1991 that I consider funny.”
He and Texas prison officials also disputed Knight’s identity claim, insisting they used fingerprints to ensure the inmate was Knight. “This evening’s execution brought an end to an almost 16-year nightmare for a family,” Richardson said. “Patrick Knight started that nightmare. “Mary and Walter Werner will not be brought back because of anything that happened here tonight, but Patrick Knight certainly won’t be able to do this to anybody else again… And despite all the hype about his joke, it turns out he’s not much of a comedian. He’s simply an executed cold-blooded killer.”
Knight’s told prison officials Tuesday when he arrived at the death house he received as many as 1,300 jokes by mail and from a friend who had set up an Internet site for him that was dubbed “Dead Man Laughing.” The effort was intended to boost the morale on Texas’ death row, he said.
“I don’t think his point was to trivialize it,” said his attorney, Paul Mansur, who met with Knight last week. “They’ve had 17 executions and we’re in the 25th week of the year. They see these people go and these are people they know and communicate with. They have a camaraderie together. So it’s really just for them.” At least 13 other convicted murderers have death dates in the coming months, including two in July and five each in August and September.
Knight’s appeals were exhausted and Mansur made no last-day court attempts to block the lethal injection. The U.S. Supreme Court in February refused to review Knight’s case and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles turned down a clemency request. “I’m not trying to disrespect anyone,” Knight insisted in an interview last week. “I know I’m not innocent.”
The Werners lived next door to Knight, who lived in a trailer and was on probation for burglary at the time of the slayings. When the couple arrived home from work Aug. 26, 1991, they found Knight and a friend, Robert Bradfield, waiting inside for them. They were held captive, then were bound, gagged, blindfolded and taken in their own van to a spot about four miles away where they were forced to kneel on the ground. Each was shot in the back of the head and their bodies were left in a ditch.
When police investigating their disappearance questioned him, he initially denied involvement, but later confessed and led authorities to the bodies.
Knight said he was young and immature, drunk and high on drugs and didn’t remember much about the slayings. The Werners had complained to him about loud music and loud cars. “I regret so much because they were such good people,” said Knight, who grew up in Slidell, La., and was known in prison as the “Insane Cajun.”
His accomplice Bradfield, who was 19 at the time, is serving a pair of life sentences.
Scheduled to die next — on July 10 — is Rolando Ruiz, the convicted triggerman in a murder-for-hire insurance scheme that left a San Antonio woman dead in 1992.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/4923687.html
