AP: Texas

05/18/2005

By MICHAEL GRACZYK  / Associated Press

A twice-convicted robber from Louisiana was executed Wednesday evening for the fatal stabbing of his children's 84-year-old babysitter during a robbery.

Bryan Wolfe expressed love to relatives and friends who were watching through a window a few feet away, telling them he appreciated their support.

"I will be OK," Wolfe said. "I am at peace with all of this and I won't have to wake up in prison any more."

"I totally surrender to the Lord."

As the drugs began taking effect, Wolfe gasped slightly several times and turned his head toward the witnesses, his eyes open. A sister on the other side of the window also began gasping for air and had to be carried from the death house.

Wolfe was pronounced dead at 6:31 p.m., 10 minutes after the lethal dose began.

Wolfe, 44, was on parole from Louisiana and had fled a work-release program when he was arrested for the 1992 slaying of Bertha Lemell at the woman's home in Beaumont. Lemell had been stabbed 26 times. Around $40 was believed taken from the woman's change purse, which also had contained some black-eyed peas she carried for good luck.

Wolfe's lethal injection was the seventh this year in Texas, the nation's most active death penalty state. Another execution was set for Thursday.

The U.S. Supreme Court this week refused to review Wolfe's case, and no late legal efforts to block the punishment were attempted.

"There's really nothing we can do," said his appeals lawyer, Michael Jamail.

Earlier appeals contended Wolfe's court-appointed trial lawyer was incompetent and ill-prepared to address the then relatively new DNA technology authorities used to link Wolfe to the killing.

Wolfe, from Houma, La., was seen in Lemell's neighborhood shortly before and after the slaying, according to court documents. When he was picked up by police two days later, he had deep cuts on his right hand. He said they were from a broken beer bottle. Authorities believed he cut himself with the knife while he was stabbing the woman.

DNA from blood samples on a door knob, the floor and towels at Lemell's house, plus on the black coin purse and a knife found at the scene, matched Wolfe's DNA.

Wolfe had been to prison after confessing to an armed robbery in Louisiana while serving in the Army in 1983, then another robbery in Houma in 1989. He blamed marijuana and cocaine for his crimes.

He was released from a Louisiana prison in 1991 after one year of a three-year sentence. Court records showed he absconded from a work-release center. Less than three months later, Lemell was killed. She had been watching his two children while his wife worked.

"He didn't have a very good past, and it was just a truly despicable crime," said Ed Shettle, the Jefferson County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Wolfe. "If you are going to steal something, money from somebody who knows you and you don't want to get caught, what are you going to do? You are going to murder them. And that's what he did."

Leo Lemell, the slain woman's 80-year-old cousin, said the years since Wolfe was given the death penalty have been difficult.

"It always frustrates you when something runs on and on and on," he said. "They need to get it over with one way or another."

On Thursday, condemned prisoner Richard Cartwright, 31, was set to go to the death chamber for the 1996 robbery and fatal shooting of a man in Corpus Christi.

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On the Net:

Texas Department of Criminal Justice execution schedule http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/scheduledexecutions.htm