Analysis
by Barbara Kirwin, Ph.D.
Texas
v. Tucker
Karla
Faye Tucker was a "bad girl", a prostitute from the
other side of the tracks who drank and did drugs. In 1984, she
was convicted of the brutal murders of her ex-lover, Jerry Lynn
Dean, and his girlfriend, Deborah Thornton, and sentenced to death.
Tucker readily admitted that she and her then boyfriend, Daniel
Ryan Garrett, took a pickax and hacked the couple to death while
they were sleeping. Far from exhibiting remorse, she even boasted
from the stand that she experienced an orgasm with every blow.
While
on death row, Tucker underwent a religious conversion. Her new
found religion and her spotless prison record made it impossible
to believe that she was the same person who had committed a brutal
double-murder 15 years earlier. She became her own best advocate,
pleading for her life in prison press conferences and interviews
from death row. These confessions, masterful constructions of
revisionist history, have the sole purpose of engendering sympathy,
proving to the public that she is repentant and reformed.
However, to me these Mea Culpa Admissions have a
contrived and stagy feel. Karla Faye delivers them with the same
vacant, wide-eyed unflinching gaze with which she could have approached
her sleeping victims. If one analyzes the content of Tuckers
message, never once does she accept personal responsibility for
her actions. She talks over, around, and about responsibility
without ever coming close to accepting the enormity of her crime
or the blame she should shoulder. "Unfortunately, I just
didnt think about the people who were hurt. I was still
too much in the game, the game of the crazy life. I was still
doing drugs. It was so unreal to me so unreal."
Although
Tucker acknowledges that she knows what she did was wrong, she
blames it on drugs. She distances herself from the murder -- as
if it were done by someone else. Tucker manifests little emotional
connection or empathy for her victims suffering and the
pain she has caused their families. All discussion is delivered
with the identical flatness with which she described her climaxes
with each blow of the pickax.
Tucker
was an excitement addict, a personality with such a fragile sense
of self that she craved stimulation from drugs, sex, violence
and ultimately murder just to feel alive. Once on death row, Tuckers
duality emerged. She became religious, but it was expressed in
lifeless, superficial pieties. Unfortunately, this rhetoric won
Tucker legions of sincere and well-meaning supporters. In her
new celebrity status on death row, Tucker commanded center stage.
She held court to a fleet of television, magazine and newspaper
reporters.
Although
Karla Faye Tucker had some powerful and vociferous supporters,
her final plea for clemency was denied by Gov. George Bush. On
Feb. 3, 1998, she became the first woman to be executed in Texas
since the Civil War. At some level, I think Tucker might have
been accepting of her execution. After all, she went out with
a dramatic finale, surrounded by crowds of adoring mourners (even
a martyr to some), securing a place in history.