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 Tucker’s 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 didn’t 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, Tucker’s 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.