District Judge Postpones Texas Woman’s Execution -… fb.me/2k4ekfuyU
— KALB News Channel 5 (@KALBtv5) January 29, 2013
On Tuesday, Kimberly McCarthy is scheduled to become the first woman in two years to die by lethal injection in the United States, the punishment for killing her elderly Lancaster neighbor more than a decade ago.
According to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, McCarthy will be the 13th woman to be executed since 1976, the year the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty.
On July 21, 1997, McCarthy lured her way into Dorothy Booth’s home next door by asking to borrow a cup of sugar. At her trial, investigators presented evidence that McCarthy beat the 71-year-old woman with a candelabra, and then cut off her finger to steal her wedding ring.
“Of course Dorothy Booth opened her door. It was her neighbor coming over,” said Dallas County prosecutor Shelly O’Brien Yeatts. “She entered her home and stabbed her five times and killed her.”
McCarthy, a college graduate who worked as an occupational therapist, was addicted to crack cocaine.
“Immediately after the murder, she hocked the wedding ring… went to a pawn shop and hocked it, and went to a crack house and tried to buy crack. She was a crack addict,” Yeatts said.
“I think when she’s off dope she’s probably a pretty good person,” he said. “I believe now, as I did then, that in the penitentiary, Kim would be absolutely no danger to anyone.”
McCarthy declined to speak with reporters as her execution date neared.
Evidence showed that McCarthy called Booth to borrow a cup of sugar. When she came to pick it up, McCarthy attacked Booth, including forcing the woman’s hand to a chopping block so she could cut off her finger to remove her wedding ring.
“I remember the pain and agony that poor woman lived through before McCarthy delivered the final stab wounds,” former Dallas County assistant district attorney Greg Davis recalled last week.
Blood DNA evidence also tied McCarthy to the December 1988 slayings of 81-year-old Maggie Harding and 85-year-old Jettie Lucas. Harding was stabbed and beaten with a meat tenderizer, while Lucas was beaten with both sides of a claw hammer and stabbed.
McCarthy, who denied any involvement in the attacks, was indicted but not tried for those slayings.
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