Tony Walker was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder
According to court documents Tony Walker would go to the home of a neighbor. Walker would attack the two elderly victims: 82 year old Willie Simmons and 66 year old Virginia Simmons. Walker would sexually assault Virginia Simmons and would then beat both victims to death
Tony Walker would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Tony Walker would be executed by lethal injection on September 10 2002
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When Was Tony Walker Executed
Tony Walker was executed on September 10 2002
Tony Walker Case
A tear running down his face, a northeast Texas man convicted of raping and fatally beating a 66-year-old woman in an attack where her husband also was killed was executed Tuesday evening. In a brief final statement, Tony Lee Walker said goodbye to a friend in Switzerland, who he identified as Diego, and another in England, who he called Wild Flower. “I love you and will never forget you,” Walker said. “And to my family,” he said, choking back tears, “nothing.”
As the drugs began flowing, Walker started saying the Lord’s Prayer, reaching the words “thy kingdom come” when he stopped. He looked at a chaplain standing at his feet and said, “help me, chaplain.” The chaplain continued saying the prayer as Walker gasped and sputtered several times. After Walker stopped breathing, a tear ran out of his right eye and down the side of his face. He was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m., eight minutes after the drugs began flowing. In a written statement, Walker said he was sorry for the crime and asked the victim’s family if they “can find it in their hearts to forgive me, but if not I will understand.”
Walker, 36, was high on crack cocaine and armed with pieces of railroad tie about the size of a baseball bat when he clubbed Virginia Simmons and her husband, Willie “Bo” Simmons, 81, at their Daingerfield home the night of May 23, 1992. Walker lived nearby and knew the victims. He confessed to police a couple of days later after his bloody shirt and other items from the crime scene were found in a wooded area between his home and the Simmons’ home.
Walker, condemned for the woman’s death, was the 24th person to be put to death in Texas this year and the first of five scheduled to die this month. “If you’re going to confess to murder, that’s probably bad enough, but when you put the details in that he did, that’s what got him the death penalty,” said Richard Townsend, the former Morris County district attorney who prosecuted Walker. “He talked about doing things like sexually assaulting the elderly woman, then getting a beer in the kitchen and drinking a beer and trying to sexually assault her again when she was dead. “He went into detail that made him look like a monster.”
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected a commutation request by a 17-0 vote. No 11th-hour appeals were filed in the courts. “There are simply no meritorious issues we could urge in good faith,” his lawyer, Buck Files Jr., said. “After five years and nine or 10 months, I have no more rabbits to pull out of the hat.”
Files said he had hoped to spend time with Walker on Tuesday and offered to arrange transportation for Walker’s wife to visit her husband in prison in the hours before his lethal injection, but Walker declined to see either of them. “As he put it, he didn’t see any point to it,” Files said.
Evidence showed that earlier on the evening of the killings, Walker was at the Simmons’ house to purchase a beer and paid the couple 50 cents for it. When he returned, Bo Simmons let him in, presumably because he wanted another beer. Daingerfield was a dry community and the Simmons’ house was a place he knew he could get a drink, authorities said. In the attack, the wood ties broke from the force of the blows. Evidence showed he then grabbed a walking cane, which also broke, to continue the attack.
At his trial, Walker disputed his confession, testifying other men with him were responsible for the slayings although he did not deny the rape. Evidence, however, showed Walker was alone. “He gave the worst confession I ever read, easily nailing himself to the wall,” Townsend said. On an anti-death penalty Web site, Walker, who refused to speak with reporters in the weeks before his scheduled punishment, wrote to a supporter in 1998 urging people purchase his wood craft products, such as clocks and jewelry boxes. “I have always been infatuated, working with wood,” he said in the letter.
Walker also was convicted in 1978 of a murder in Dallas, where he was with others pulling a store robbery where a person was killed. He received a five-year prison term but was discharged on early release after serving a little more than two years.
