Texas executes serial killer linked to five murders found guilty of stabbing two 16-year-old girls to death in their Houston home

HOUSTON, Texas – A man convicted of fatal knife attacks on 16-year-old twin girls more than three decades ago was executed in Texas on Tuesday evening.

Garcia Glenn White was pronounced dead at 6:56 p.m. CDT after being given a chemical injection at the state prison in Huntsville. He was convicted of the murders of Annette and Bernette Edwards in December 1989. The bodies of the twin girls and their mother, Bonita Edwards, were found in their Houston apartment.

White, 61, was the sixth inmate executed in the United States in the past 11 days. His execution came after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected requests to intervene without comment.

While awaiting execution, White's final words were to apologize to the witnesses who were watching.

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“I want to apologize for all the wrongs I have done and for the pain I have caused,” he said from the death chamber just before the chemicals began to flow.

According to testimony, White went to the girls' home in Houston to smoke crack with their mother, Bonita, who was also fatally stabbed. When the girls came out of their room to see what had happened, White attacked them. There was evidence that White had broken open the locked door to the girls' bedroom. Authorities later said he was linked to the deaths of a convenience store owner and another woman.

“Garcia Glenn White committed five murders in three separate transactions, and two of his victims were teenage girls. “This is the type of case the death penalty was intended for,” said Josh Reiss, chief of the post-conviction writs division at the Harris County District Attorney's Office in Houston, speaking before the execution.

White's lawyers had unsuccessfully appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution after lower courts previously rejected requests for a stay. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Friday rejected White's request to commute his death sentence to a lesser sentence or to grant him a 30-day reprieve.

His lawyers argued that the Texas Supreme Court of Criminal Appeals refused to “accept medical evidence and strong factual evidence” proving that White was mentally incapacitated.

The Supreme Court banned the execution of mentally disabled people in 2002. However, it has given states some discretion in determining such disabilities. Justices have wrestled with the question of how much discretion they should allow.
White's lawyers also accused the Texas appeals court of not allowing his defense team to present evidence that could spare him a death sentence, including DNA evidence that another man was also at the crime scene and scientific evidence that would show that White “probably suffered from an illness.” Cocaine caused a psychotic breakdown during his actions.

White's lawyers also argued that he is entitled to a reconsideration of his death sentence. They claimed the Texas Court of Appeals had created a new system for sentencing in death penalty cases following a recent Supreme Court ruling in another death row case in Texas.

Patrick McCann, one of White's lawyers, said Tuesday that his client had spent his entire time in prison “working on becoming a better person.”

Attorneys for the Office of Federal Public Defenders for the Western District of Texas had also filed a petition with the Supreme Court seeking a stay, claiming White was being punished because McCann had previously failed to file a timely appeal on the mental disability issue. McCann said he is focused on doing the “best work” he can for White and will not “waste what little time I have fighting with other attorneys.”

In a filing with the Supreme Court, the Texas Attorney General's Office said White failed to provide evidence to support his claim of intellectual disability. It also said his claims that there was evidence of another person at the scene and that cocaine use influenced his actions had previously been rejected by the courts.

The deaths of the twin girls and their mother remained unsolved for about six years until White confessed to the murders after he was arrested in connection with the July 1995 death of grocer Hai Van Pham, who was fatally beaten during a robbery at his store. Police said White also confessed to fatally beating another woman, Greta Williams, in 1989.

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