Texas Performs 32nd Execution of the Year

A man convicted of killing his parents and sister in a 1988 knife attack was executed by lethal injection Wednesday in Texas, which leads the nation in capital punishment.

Jeffery Caldwell, 37, was the sixth inmate put to death this month and the 32nd this year in the state. He maintained his innocence to the end. “I still to this day scream out that I did not kill them,” he said in a final statement.

Police said Caldwell hit his victims in the head with a hammer, stabbed them in the heart, then stuffed their bodies in the motor home parked outside their Dallas home on July 25, 1988. He initially told investigators he accidentally killed them after they refused to give him money for insulin. He later blamed the killings on drug dealers.

Caldwell was the 231st person executed in Texas since the state resumed the death penalty in 1982. Of those, 144 have been performed since Gov. George W. Bush, now the Republican presidential nominee, took office in January 1995.

Also Wednesday, Russel W. Burket, 32, was executed in Virginia for crushing the skulls of his neighbor and her young daughter.