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Post by SoulTrainOz on Jul 18, 2006 23:52:49 GMT -5
ThursdayBy Michael Smith, The Amarillo Globe-News Nightmares of little Audra Reeves' face so plagued Robert James Anderson that he told a federal judge during a 2004 hearing that he wanted to waive all of his appeals and be executed. The state is on schedule to grant Anderson's wish at 6 p.m. Thursday in Huntsville, when he will be executed for the brutal June 9, 1992, slaying of 5-year-old Reeves. So far, as he said he wouldn't, Anderson has not filed any federal appeals to block his execution. "We don't anticipate any filings at this point," said Tom Kelley, a spokesman with the Texas Attorney General's Office. Anderson, now 40, admitted to Amarillo police to abducting Reeves as she walked home from a nearby park after Anderson had an argument with his ex-wife, according to court records. Anderson sexually assaulted the girl, choked her, beat her with his hand and several objects then drowned her after telling her to wash off her blood. He then stuffed Reeves' body in a Styrofoam cooler and dumped the cooler in a Dumpster in the 400 block of South Tennessee Street. He was arrested when a neighbor identified him as the man seen pushing the cooler through the area in a grocery cart. A Potter County jury convicted Anderson and sentenced him to death in 1993. Anderson then journeyed through the state and federal appeals processes and met roadblocks at each juncture. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Anderson's conviction in 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his case in 1997 and the state criminal appeals court again denied Anderson's request for a retrial in 1999. In 2004, Anderson sought to waive all further federal appeals. After Anderson was deemed mentally competent to waive his appeals, he dismissed his appeal with the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005. Anderson will be the 16th offender to be executed this year in Texas and the seventh executed offender from Potter County since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice records. source : The Amarillo Globe-News www.amarillo.com/stories/071806/new_5140382.shtml
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Post by SoulTrainOz on Jul 21, 2006 1:47:33 GMT -5
5-year-old's killer looking forward to execution
Condemned inmate Robert Anderson freely acknowledges a horrific crime in Amarillo that left a 5-year-old girl dead and earned him a trip tonight to the Texas death chamber.
"There was nobody else, just me," Anderson says of the abduction and slaying of Audra Reeves nearly 14 years ago. "She was totally an innocent victim."
Anderson, 40, whose history of sexual offenses involving children began as a teenager, asked that no additional appeals be filed on his behalf to try to halt the 16th execution this year in Texas and the 2nd in as many days in the nation's busiest capital punishment state.
On Wednesday, a San Antonio man, Mauriceo Brown, 31, was executed for the 1996 shooting death of a 25-year-old man, Michael LaHood Jr., during a botched robbery on the driveway of Lahood's San Antonio home.
"The only way I want this stopped is if they give a moratorium to the death penalty," Anderson said earlier this month in an interview outside death row at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice near Livingston.
"I'm actually looking forward to dying. I've made peace with the Lord and I'm trying to make peace with my family. And I have tried to make apologies with the victim's family over the years with no responses. I didn't expect them to respond."
The girl, who lived with her mother in Florida and had just arrived in Amarillo days earlier to spend the summer with her father, was playing outside June 9, 1992, when Anderson snatched her as she walked by his Amarillo home.
"It was a messed-up day," Anderson said from death row. "A lot of things went wrong."
An argument earlier that day with his wife of about eight months set him off, he said.
"The whole day revolved around the fight," he said. "She stormed out of the house and said when she returned she didn't want to find me."
According to court records and Anderson's confession, he forced the girl to accompany him into the house and tried to rape her, then choked her and beat her with a footstool. When he discovered she still was alive, he drowned her in a bathtub. He stuffed her body into a large foam cooler, pushed the cooler down the street in a grocery cart and dumped it in a trash bin.
An Amarillo jury took less than 15 minutes to come back with a guilty verdict and less than 30 minutes with the death penalty.
"By far, it was absolutely the worst thing a little girl could ever go
through," Chuck Slaughter, the Potter County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Anderson, said this week. "If there's anybody out there who deserves the punishment he received from a jury, it would be Robert Anderson."
A neighbor discovered the body in the cooler and gave police a description of the man seen wheeling the shopping cart toward the garbage container. Anderson was apprehended a few blocks away as he was walking back toward home.
"The whole day had slipped my mind," Anderson said. "For an hour or so, I didn't understand what the cops were asking me. Then suddenly, it just snapped. The whole day came into focus.
"Everything came flooding back, all at once. It took less than 45 minutes to get 3 statements from me."
Anderson was found to be mentally competent despite having visions of what he said were angels, demons and repeated visits to his cell by his young victim on the anniversary of her death.
"She showed up this year and smiled at me and told me I was coming home," he said. "That was really weird."
Anderson, as a teenager in Tulsa, Okla., he'd been in and out of centers "for deviant behavior," as he described them, to deal with his obsession for young girls.
"My whole life is a regret," he said. "I made bad choices all the way up and down as far back as age 10... I should have been in prison when I was 15."
In 1998, Anderson survived an attack by a fellow death row inmate who stabbed him 67 times with a shank. Anderson said the attack was the result of race-related prison gang extortion efforts and not related to his crime.
Next week, Allen Bridgers, 35, from Norfolk, Va., is set to die on Tuesday for fatally shooting a woman at her home in Tyler and stealing her car.
(source: Associated Press)
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Post by SoulTrainOz on Jul 22, 2006 6:40:31 GMT -5
Inmate executed for slaying of 5-year-old girl
Child sex offender Robert Anderson apologized in a voice choking with emotion before he was executed today for abducting and killing a 5-year-old girl in Amarillo 14 years ago.
"I am sorry for the pain I have caused you,'' Anderson told the
grandmother of his victim. "I have regretted this for a long time. I am sorry.
"I only ask that you remember the Lord because he remembers us and he forgives us if we ask him.''
Anderson also apologized to his family for "the pain of all the years and for putting you through all the things we had to go through.''
As the lethal drugs began taking effect, Anderson muttered a prayer. 8 minutes later at 6:19 p.m. CDT, he was pronounced dead.
Anderson, 40, had acknowledged the horrific slaying of Audra Reeves and asked that no new appeals be filed to try to block his execution.
"The only way I want this stopped is if they give a moratorium to the death penalty,'' Anderson had said in a recent death row interview where he took sole responsibility for the girl's murder.
"There was nobody else, just me,'' he said. "She was totally an innocent victim.''
Anderson had a history of sexual offenses involving children that began as a teenager in Tulsa, Okla., and said he'd been in and out of centers "for deviant behavior,'' as he described them, to deal with his obsession for young girls.
"My whole life is a regret,'' he said, adding that he looked forward to dying. "I should have been in prison when I was 15.'' Audra lived with her mother in Live Oak, Fla., and had just arrived in Amarillo days earlier to spend the summer with her father. She was playing outside on June 9, 1992, when Anderson snatched her as she walked by his Amarillo home.
"It was a messed-up day,'' Anderson said. "A lot of things went wrong.''
An argument earlier that day with his wife of about eight months set him off, he said.
"The whole day revolved around the fight,'' he said. "She stormed out of the house and said when she returned she didn't want to find me.''
According to court records and Anderson's confession, he forced the girl to accompany him into the house and tried to rape her, then choked her and beat her with a footstool. When he discovered she still was alive, he drowned her in a bathtub. He stuffed her body into a large foam cooler, pushed the cooler down the street in a grocery cart and dumped it in a trash bin.
Anderson was apprehended a few blocks away as he was walking back toward home.
A neighbor had discovered the body in the cooler and identified him as the man seen wheeling the shopping cart toward the garbage container. Detectives searching his home found a piece of the girl's hair barrette in a bathroom trash can. The other piece was in the ice chest.
An Amarillo jury took less than 15 minutes to return a guilty verdict and less than 30 minutes to determine Anderson should die.
"By far, it was absolutely the worst thing a little girl could ever go
through,'' Chuck Slaughter, the Potter County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Anderson, said this week. ``If there's anybody out there who deserves the punishment he received from a jury, it would be Robert Anderson.''
Anderson was found to be mentally competent despite having visions of what he said were angels, demons and repeated visits to his cell by his young victim on the anniversary of her death.
"She showed up this year and smiled at me and told me I was coming home,'' he said. "That was really weird.'' In 1998, Anderson survived an attack by a fellow death row inmate who stabbed him 67 times with a shank. Anderson said the attack was the result of race-related prison gang extortion efforts and not related to his crime.
On Wednesday, a San Antonio man, 31-year-old Mauriceo Brown, was executed for the 1996 shooting death of Michael LaHood Jr., 25, during a botched robbery on the driveway of LaHood's San Antonio home.
Next week, Allen Bridgers, 35, from Norfolk, Va., is set to die Tuesday for fatally shooting a woman at her home in Tyler and stealing her car.
Anderson becomes the 16th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Texas and the 371st overall since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1982. Anderson becomes the 132nd condemned inmate to be put to death in Texas since Rick Perry became Governor in 2001.
Anderson becomes the 30th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1034th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.
(sources: Associated Press & Rick Halperin)
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Post by SoulTrainOz on Jul 22, 2006 6:44:27 GMT -5
Grandma hopes to find closure
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."
(source: The Amarillo Globe-News)
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Post by SoulTrainOz on Jul 26, 2006 7:23:40 GMT -5
Child killer receives justice
Death penalty is sometimes only option
Even the most ardent capital punishment opponents would have a hard time defending Robert Anderson.
Anderson was executed Thursday for the brutal murder of a 5-year-old girl in Amarillo in June 1992.
The details of the crime are startling and mind-boggling.
Anderson abducted the girl as she walked by his home, then sexually assaulted her, choked her, hit her with a footstool and drowned her in a bathtub. He then threw her dead body in a foam cooler and dumped it in a trash bin.
Remember, this was a 5-year-old girl.
Before his execution, Anderson admitted to the crime and said he was "looking forward to dying. I've made peace with the Lord . . ."
For Anderson's sake, we hope that is so.
A higher power can deal with Anderson's heavenly judgment.
According to the U.S. justice system, Anderson deserved the ultimate form of punishment.
Anderson's execution had nothing to do with deterrence or revenge.
It was justice.
(source: Editorial, The Amarillo Globe-News)
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