Robert Anderson was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of five year old Audra Ann Reeves
According to court documents Robert Anderson would kidnap five year old Audra Ann Reeves. He attempted to sexually assault the little girl before he would drown her. He would put her body into a cooler and dropped it into a garbage can
Robert Anderson would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Robert Anderson would be executed by lethal injection on July 20 2006
Robert Anderson Photos
Robert Anderson FAQ
When Was Robert Anderson Executed
Robert Anderson was executed on July 20 2006
Robert Anderson Case
Every time Grace Lawson sees a little girl with blonde hair, images of her granddaughter, Audra Reeves, come to her mind. The images usually are of Audra doing one of her favorite things – picking flowers – and giving them to the ones she loved, like Lawson and her father, Clarence Reeves Jr. “She’d bring them to me and her dad and say, ‘Aren’t they pretty? Aren’t they pretty?'” Lawson said Tuesday from her home in Brownwood. “She was just happy always had a little smile, she was just a beautiful little girl.”
Thoughts of the last time Lawson saw Audra, however, bring on darker feelings. “I felt guilty because they had come through here and she wanted to stay with me, and I said, ‘No, you go on and visit with daddy,'” Lawson said. “And she was up there exactly one week” when she was brutally killed. Audra’s life ended after she bore the callous brunt of Robert James Anderson’s brutal, savage fury in June 1992. Anderson admitted to ravaging the 5-year-old girl in his Amarillo home. He abducted her as she walked home from a San Jacinto park. He sexually assaulted her, beat her with a pipe, a stool and his hand, stabbed her with a paring knife and a barbecue fork despite the little girl’s pleas for mercy and then drowned her. Anderson was convicted and sentenced to death for Audra’s murder and is scheduled to face lethal injection as punishment at 6 p.m. today in Huntsville. Lawson said she will drive to Huntsville this morning to watch Anderson get his due and hopefully begin to close the trying 14-year wait for justice to be served. “I’m not a violent person at all, but I am looking forward to this closure knowing that he is going to die for what he did,” she said. The family has had to endure the trial – during and after which Lawson said she “couldn’t eat or sleep for a while because of it” – and years of state and federal court appeals, which always jolted them back to the gruesome details of Audra’s death.
Lawson said she always had the nagging worry that as long as Anderson was alive, other children were in danger. “We had him, but there was still the possibility that he could escape or what have you, and if he did this to another child it would have killed us,” she said.
Anderson not only stilled Audra’s voice but obliterated the family, Lawson said. Audra’s father thinks about the details of her death constantly and was determined to “get to” Anderson any way he could. The thoughts, she said, led him down a spiral of alcoholism and driving while intoxicated convictions, and he is now serving time in prison. Audra’s mother also has served time in prison for stabbing someone, Lawson said. Memories of the summer of 1992 still tears up everyone too much to dwell on, which is why Lawson said she hopes Anderson’s execution will open a new chapter for the family.
Lawson admits that she hasn’t forgiven Anderson and probably never will. And if the closure she hopes for doesn’t come when Anderson expires tonight, Lawson said she plans to do a lot of praying. “I have like a weight,” Lawson said. “It feels like you’re heavy inside and I’m hoping it will disappear, and that I’ll feel lighter, like there’s not a load on me.”
