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Thread: Jerry Jurek - Texas

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    Jerry Jurek - Texas


    A photo of Wendy Adams, embedded on her headstone, preserves what she looked like the year she was killed.


    Jurek is shown at age 22, when he was arrested.


    February 27, 2016

    Convicted killer maintains innocence 4 decades later

    By Sara Sneath
    The Victoria Advocate

    Jerry Jurek's hair went gray in prison.

    But he still combs it back in the Elvis Presley-esque style popular 40 years ago when he was arrested. Once a slender man, he now has a round face and swollen fingers. His hands and arms are tattooed with the faded names of loved ones.

    Jurek has spent most of his life behind bars for murdering Wendy Adams, the 10-year-old daughter of a Cuero police officer.

    In 1974, Jurek was sentenced to death in the electric chair. He was 22 at the time. He's now 65.

    Questions over the fairness of Jurek's confessions ultimately won him a retrial. The 1982 trial ended early when the victim's family asked for a plea deal. Jurek was sentenced to life with parole.

    During the 1st trial and throughout the appeals process, Jurek's low IQ level was a topic of concern. Expert witnesses testified that he could not make change for a dollar or list the days of the week.

    His dimness made it difficult to comprehend the weight of his decision to not have an attorney present for his confessions and the consequences of his admissions, according to court documents.

    After the U.S. Supreme Court suspended capital punishment in 1972, the Texas Legislature passed a new death penalty law two months before Wendy's murder. And Jurek's would be the test case.

    Asked whether he was scared when given the death penalty, Jurek replied:

    "When they gave it to me, I just laughed in the judge's face, said how you all going to give me something that there ain't?"

    His reaction, a mixture of blissful ignorance and far-fetched bravado, was consistent throughout his interview with the Advocate.

    The Advocate interviewed Jurek at the Coffield Unit, a maximum security prison in Anderson County that houses more than 4,000 inmates. Jurek has spent most of his sentence there, accompanied by a handful of men who were on death row at the same time as him and also got reduced sentences.

    In a visitation wing near the entrance of the prison, a plexiglass window sandwiched between 2 panels of black metal mesh made it possible to see Jurek's blue eyes clearly. Jurek sat with his arms resting on a small table jutting out below the plexiglass. His hands clasped, the words "LOVE LIL SIS" tattooed on his knuckles.

    Jurek spoke with a twang that reflected his Louisiana birthplace. When asked a direct question, he often launched into wild stories about his childhood and perceived injustices done against him.

    He got the tattoo on his knuckles "on the streets" when he was 13 in honor of his 1st girlfriend, he said.

    "Her hair was that color," he said, pulling at the collar of his white prison uniform. She had pink eyes and, while she had poor eyesight in the daylight, she was an expert marksman at night.

    "You give her a .30-30 Winchester at night time, she'd strike matches with it. I used to laugh at her about that," he said, chuckling.

    Jurek's childhood love left him when she turned 13. But his luck turned around years later when a blind date's mother signed over the title for a Mustang Cobra to him.

    "She hands me the f --- title for this Mustang Cobra. I'm thinking she's playing with me," Jurek said. "She says, 'It's yours. You said you like it, don't you?' ... I said, 'No, you ain't giving me a $119,000 car without some kind of deal behind it.' She said, 'You took my baby out. It's yours.'"

    Unfortunately, the car was taken back by the woman's ex-husband, a Texas Ranger on the run for murder, he said.

    Jurek's detachment from reality also was noticeable in his confusion over names. When asked about Wendy Adams' family, he started talking about his wife's family.

    This was also a problem during his 2nd trial, when Jurek told the judge he did not want to be represented by Douglas Tinker, who was instrumental in getting Jurek the new trial.

    Tinker - a high-profile defense attorney who would later represent Selena's killer, Yolanda Saldivar - was reappointed to Jurek's defense after it was discovered Jurek had confused Tinker with another attorney.

    Jurek became less animated when talking about the day of the crime for which he's in prison. His blue eyes fixed straight ahead. His head tilted to the side in attentiveness.

    Jurek pled guilty in turn for his life sentence. But he said he's innocent.

    He was with Wendy Adams on Aug. 16, 1973, the day she was murdered. But when the truck they were driving broke down, he said, his attention was directed toward fixing it. During this time, Wendy disappeared with his friend, Ricky Phillips, he said.

    "I didn't know they had disappeared 'til he came back saying, 'Oh, I killed her.' I said, 'You done what? And I'm thinking he's playing with me. Cause he always doing that to me," Jurek said. "I said, 'Go get the kid. Get her up here. We got to get her back to her parents.' 'No, I killed her.' Said, 'How'd you do it?' He said, 'I drowned her, I drowned her.' Come to find out he actually did do it."

    Phillips, who still lives in Cuero, said he had no part in the crime. He was brought in for questioning when it was discovered Wendy was missing, but he was never formally charged.

    Phillips said Jurek dropped him off at a pool hall before he abducted Wendy from the Cuero municipal swimming pool.

    "Well, it wasn't me, or I'd be in prison. I ain't a damn fool to kill a little girl like that. ... I got more sense than that," Phillips said. "He didn't like her daddy a lot. Her daddy used to stop him driving a lot. Try to stop him from speeding and all that stuff. He used to get in trouble all the time."

    Jurek has been up for parole 17 times. Each time he's been denied.

    "They want you to work like a slave in here, but still set you off," he said.

    Despite his frustration with the parole process, Jurek believes that someday he'll get out.

    If he does, he wants to move back to Louisiana, where his family lived before his dad lost his job and they moved to Cuero.

    "First thing I'm going to buy me is a Rolls-Royce. I've fell in love with that," he said. "I want the one they call the Rolls-Royce Drophead. That's a beautiful automobile."

    https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/new...4-decades-lat/

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    February 28, 2016

    Special report: A life sentence

    By Sara Sneath
    The Victoria Advocate

    Brandi Adams Garza sat down to write the 17th letter from her family to the parole board to keep her older sister's killer behind bars.

    She had pulled the parole notification from her mailbox, brought it into her Rockport home and went straight to work, writing in a mixture of cursive and print on the back of the two-page notice. She began the letter formally with, "To whom it may concern," but the words that followed told a personal account of what the murder did to her family.

    Jerry Jurek killed 10-year-old Wendy Adams near Cuero on Aug. 16, 1973. He strangled her until she was unconscious and threw her body into the Guadalupe River.

    Wendy was no longer there to brush little sister Brandi's hair. Her father, Ronnie Adams, left law enforcement, the only career he'd ever dreamed of. Her mother, Jane Adams, suffered a mental breakdown, leaving Ronnie to raise Brandi and her brother, Stephen Adams, alone.

    Garza took over the duty of writing letters to the parole board after her father died of a heart attack in 1989, yet another death she attributes to Jurek. As she wrote the 17th letter, she thought about her dad. She was 46, the same age he was when he died.

    Black ink stained her right hand as she held nothing back, desperate to persuade the board that Jurek deserved to stay behind bars. Years of practice had made her efficient at the task she loathed. She slipped the tear-stained letter into the mailbox.

    "I went from having a happy family and just doing things that families do, to all of a sudden, the house was cold and quiet," Garza said. "There was no more laughing going on."

    The case reached beyond the family's personal toll. It is one of a handful of cases that brought back the death penalty to the United States after a 10-year moratorium. In a state that has executed more inmates than any other since 1977, Jurek's case is the grandfather of them all.

    But on the same day that a firing squad executed Gary Gilmore in 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a second stay of execution for Jurek. He would later be granted a retrial.

    The community of Cuero moved on to deal with the next tragedy. There were floods, hurricanes and oil booms and busts. But the 10-year-old girl's murder stuck in the community's collective consciousness, inspiring a country song, leaving lingering questions of how Wendy could have been saved and forcing parents to hold their children closer.

    For Wendy's younger siblings, it meant growing up with tormented parents and an adulthood of worrying that some day the man who destroyed their family would be set free.

    "It stole part of our childhood because after that, we couldn't do anything or go anywhere. Everything was just real serious," Garza said. "Instead of being outside playing, we were inside memorizing our phone number and address to make sure that if anything ever happened, we knew how to get home safe."

    Wendy's big smile in a small town

    In 1973, Cuero's population was about the same as it is today, slightly fewer than 7,000 residents. In the small Texas town, about 30 miles north of Victoria, people not only knew your name but what street you grew up on and how many kids were in your family.

    In recent years, Cuero has made its money from oil and gas production, but the town was once supported by agriculture. Farmers would march thousands of turkeys through the streets on their way to the processing plant on the edge of town.

    Though the turkey industry slowed down in the late-'60s and early-'70s, the town continues to celebrate its history with an annual "Turkeyfest." During the festival, a team of Cuero residents chase a turkey down the street in a race against a Worthington, Minn., team for the title of "Turkey Capital of the World."

    Around this town, Wendy was known as police officer Ronnie Adams' firstborn.

    She had long, blond hair and a big smile, her best friend, Robin Brown, recalled. She wore solid colored pantsuits and talked to everyone she passed in the hallways at elementary school.

    Many weekends and summer days, Wendy rode her bike to Brown's house. The two girls would bike around the neighborhood and play school on the steps of the church next door to Brown's grandparents' home.

    "I was the student, and she the teacher," Brown said. "As the years passed, I often imagined that had she had the chance to live a full life, she would have been one of those teachers that cheered the students on with a pat on the back, a smile and word of encouragement."

    The first time Wendy spent the night at Brown's house, her mom asked Wendy what she wanted to eat.

    "The biggest smile came across her face, the one she was known for," Brown said. "Without hesitation she said, 'Fried chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes and corn.' So it was a feast to feed a little princess, which she was in our home."

    In the summertime, Wendy was a common face at the public pool in Cuero Park, where Mike Conrad was a lifeguard.

    The pool served as a "glorified daycare," Conrad said. Parents would drop off their kids 10 minutes before the pool opened, at 10 a.m., and the kids would stay all day long.

    "Wendy had future lifeguard written all over her," he said. "She was a pool rat and one of our favorites."

    The day Wendy disappeared was Conrad's 16th birthday. Conrad is now 58.

    "I took the day off and was not there. It haunts me if I could have changed anything," he said. "I always question if I could have done something. If I would have been there, would it have turned out differently?"

    Guilty as sin

    Jurek took Wendy from the pool shortly before dusk Aug. 16, 1973. Her parents were in San Antonio and her grandmother had given Wendy permission to go to a 4-H event at the park and swim until 7:30 p.m.

    When the girl's grandmother arrived at the pool at 7:20 p.m., Wendy was gone. Her clothes were found in the locker room at the pool.

    Several witnesses said they saw Wendy, still dressed in her flowered swimming suit, in the bed of Jurek's patchwork-painted pickup truck as it sped through town. She was shouting, her long, blond hair blowing in the wind.

    The police arrested Jurek, who was 22 at the time, at his parents' house at 1 a.m. the next day. He was taken to the police department without shoes or a shirt. One of the arresting officer's was Wendy's father.

    Less than six hours after Wendy disappeared, the police had their man.

    Later that morning, Jurek was taken to Austin for a lie detector test. In Austin, he admitted to strangling Wendy and throwing her lifeless body into the Guadalupe River near Hell's Gate Bridge.

    Based on the information Jurek provided, police found the 10-year-old's body Aug. 18, 1973, 2 miles from where Jurek tossed her into the water.

    The image of the little girl's body stuck with Bobby McMahan, now 82, who worked for the sheriff's office at the time.

    "I don't know how any of us took it seeing that little girl in the bottom of that muddy wet boat with a raincoat over her," he said.

    Karen Webb, 56, of Victoria, was a couple of years older than Wendy when she was murdered. Webb's father helped look for Wendy's body. And, her grandfather was the justice of the peace who arraigned Jurek.

    Before the murder, Webb and the other kids of Cuero would routinely stay out after dark and walk home from a friend's house. No one, not even adults, worried about that.

    But Webb saw something new in parents' eyes after the murder: fear.

    "I remember not feeling as free after that murder happened. ... I remember how the adults talked about it. And, I think that I recognized fear in their attitude that wasn't there before. ... It took away an innocence that used to be there."

    The questionable confessions

    Jurek made two written confessions. He did not have an attorney present for either.

    In his first confession, Jurek said he asked Wendy to ride around with him in his truck. They parked under Hell's Gate Bridge, about 4 miles outside of Cuero, where a rope swing often lured teenagers into the cool waters of the Guadalupe River.

    According to Jurek's first written confession, he killed Wendy because, while they were parked under the bridge, she said rude things about his family.

    "Wendy told me that I shouldn't be drinking, and that I was just like my brother who drinks a lot," Jurek's first written confession reads. "And she also told me that my nieces didn't have a good father because he didn't come home to see them that much. I got mad at her and jerked her off the truck and grabbed Wendy around her throat and choked her to death..."

    Jurek threw Wendy's body in the water a short ways upriver from the bridge and then drove back to town to drink beer with his friends, according to the confession.

    The DeWitt County District Attorney at the time, Wiley Cheatham, testified he took a second statement from Jurek because he felt there was "sexual involvement" that Jurek hadn't admitted to in his first statement.

    "I can't conceive of somebody going out and snatching up a girl, a little girl in a bikini, racing all through town, hollering, screaming for help, to ask her how she liked his kinfolks," Cheatham testified. "Just being perfectly blunt about it, I just can't conceive of a man doing that under those circumstances without some further ulterior motive."

    In his second written confession, Jurek said in lurid language that he wanted to have sex when he picked up Wendy. Under the bridge, he asked the 10-year-old to have sex with him, and she refused. She began to scream, at which point he began to strangle her, according to the second written confession.

    Jurek was charged with murder in the course of kidnapping and attempted rape.

    The autopsy performed the day the body was found indicated the girl had not been sexually violated.

    On Feb. 1, 1974, after deliberating for 45 minutes, a DeWitt County jury convicted Jurek for the murder of Wendy. They sentenced him to die in the electric chair.

    Vernon Schumacher, who was among the 12 jurors who found Jurek guilty in 1974, said he stands by the verdict.

    "You know, you'd think in a small town you'd be able to send your kids to the pool and not have to be sitting there right with them," he said. "But it made everybody change their attitude about that for sure."

    Fight for the death penalty

    Two months before Wendy was killed, former Gov. Dolph Briscoe had signed a new death penalty bill into law with a pen that belonged to a slain deputy sheriff. Under the new law, murder was punishable by death only if it was committed under certain circumstances, such as in the course of committing or attempting to commit kidnapping, burglary, robbery, forcible rape or arson.

    But before the governor signed the bill, it was debated heavily in the Legislature.

    On the House floor, former Rep. Craig Washington, D-Houston, adamantly argued against the punishment. In an attempt to block the legislation, he tried adding an amendment that would have put the electric chair "Old Sparky" in the middle of the House floor and required a majority vote of the House and Senate to fire it up.

    "If you have the guts to say we ought to have the death penalty, then you ought to have the guts to enforce it yourselves," he said.

    Despite his protests, the bill passed in the House 102-33 and 28-3 in the Senate.

    Jurek's case was brought to the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of Texas' new capital punishment law. Jurek's case was among a handful of cases that reinstated capital punishment in the U.S.

    "Texas has provided a means to promote the evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law. Because this system serves to assure that sentences of death will not be 'want only' or 'freakishly' imposed, it does not violate the Constitution," the Supreme Court's decision in Jurek v. Texas reads.

    Jurek's execution date was set for Jan. 19, 1977.

    But two days before he was scheduled to be executed, the Supreme Court granted a stay, pending an appeal for a retrial. Among the issues Jurek's attorneys raised were his mental ability to comprehend the repercussions of his confessions and whether his confessions were voluntary.

    The case for a retrial

    Three doctors and one of Jurek's trial attorneys testified on Jurek's mental limitations at an evidentiary hearing held by the district court.

    Testimony at the hearing, as well as expert testimony during the trial, established Jurek was a man of "below-average intelligence, mildly retarded, with possible organic brain damage," according to court records.

    One of the attorneys who helped get Jurek a retrial, Jack Boger, said he remembered vividly when Jurek was asked what day of the week followed Wednesday.

    "And his response would be, with a question mark, 'February?'" Boger said. "In other words, he didn't know the days of the week."

    But the circumstances that led the majority of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to grant Jurek a retrial was not his intellect alone, but the possible overreach of the prosecution, especially as it pertained to the second written confession.

    "When Jurek's limited intelligence is factored into our consideration, it becomes evident that he could not have understood the gravity of his act in the absence of legal counsel," the majority decision reads. "No court-appointed attorney worth his salt would have allowed Jurek to sign the second confession."

    Jurek's second confession was taken after 40 hours in police custody, without legal representation and without contact with his family. And the contents of the confession, which included attempted sexual relations, added a factor which could be used to secure the death penalty.

    "When they questioned Jurek in an effort to elicit his second confession, the authorities were not trying to find Wendy Adams, for they had already found her body; they were not even trying to find out who killed her, for Jurek had already confessed to that," a panel of the Fifth Circuit wrote. "It is difficult to resist the conclusion that they were trying to gain the evidence that would send Jurek to his death."

    But there was a large split in the opinions of the 25 judges on the Fifth Circuit. In fact, only four judges found the first written confession admissible and the second inadmissible. There were five different opinions filed, ranging from all of the confessions were constitutional to none of the confessions were constitutional, including those given orally.

    And, the issue of fairness for both the accused and the victim's family member seemed to have played a large part in the split on the court.

    In his opinion, Judge John R. Brown wrote, "This case presents in dramatic terms the tensions between promoting thorough and efficient enforcement of the laws and ensuring that the rights of the accused are scrupulously guarded."

    The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's decision for a retrial. Former Justice William Rehnquist dissented, again going back to Brown's words.

    "Even though Jurek has made at least one 'voluntary' confession, he may well escape all punishment for his violent, senseless slaying of a young girl. I, for one, am unwilling to subscribe to a decision of this Court which sanctions such an outcome," Rehnquist wrote in his dissent.

    The aftermath

    Jurek got his retrial in January 1982. A change of venue was granted, bringing the trial to Victoria and back to the forefront of the community.

    But the trial was cut short when Wendy's father, Ronnie Adams, asked for a plea deal. Jurek was sentenced to life with parole. Life without parole was not a possible sentence in Texas until 2005.

    Adams believed the death penalty could help ease his family's pain and deter future murders. But the punishment didn't come swiftly enough, he said, and he couldn't put his family through endless appeals once again.

    "It was a very difficult decision. I do not feel it serves the ends of justice," he told the Advocate before he died in 1989. "However, the federal judicial system and its unlimited appeals process would subject my family, as well as my community, to many more years of turmoil of being constantly reminded."

    The eight years Jurek had already served in prison were counted toward his sentence. Jurek first came up for parole two years after his second trial, in November 1984.

    The turmoil

    The turmoil that victims' families and communities have to endure through the appeals process may be part of the reason why the number of death sentences has dropped in recent years, said Boger, who helped get Jurek a retrial.

    To family members, what's most just is that the process be quick so they can move on with their lives. But what is most just to the defendants is they be given every opportunity to prove their innocence.

    Boger worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund when he was put on the Jurek case. In the early-1960s, the group of lawyers challenged capital punishment because of the racial disparities in how the death penalty was being applied.

    "This has not proved as satisfying as those who initially in the '70s were strongly for it had thought. And some say cut all the appeals. If the trial were in March, let's have the execution in August. But then you go, wow, but there's so much evidence that trials aren't always conducted fairly. And is that enough?" he said. "So, in other words, it's not a system that's very satisfying for even those who have been most supportive of it."

    The pursuit of justice

    The Jurek case showed how thorough and painstaking the U.S. justice system can be. A jury, the state trial court, the state appellate court and the district court all found Jurek's first sentence should stand. But it didn't end there.

    The case was reviewed by a panel of the Fifth Circuit, which found issue with Jurek's confessions. And the whole Fifth Circuit and ultimately the Supreme Court - which had seen the case before when it ruled on the constitutionality of Texas' death penalty - agreed.

    Jurek's case wasn't taken on by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund because of the color of Jurek's skin. Jurek is white.

    The case was taken on because it was a capital punishment case near the end of the appeals process. And, the Legal Defense Fund made it a goal to give these cases that were nearest to the death penalty another chance with an attorney versed in capital punishment.

    "From our perspective, the important thing was to be sure that nobody was going to be put to death in a case that, when you looked at the way it was investigated and prosecuted, you'd say there were clear constitutional prohibitions that were violated," Boger said.

    And, upon review, Boger did find issue with the way the confessions were taken. Defendants are supposed to be taken before a magistrate to be read their rights and given an attorney at a very early stage, not one or two days after the arrest, Boger said.

    "It had to be pretty egregious in a case with these horrible factual circumstances - the sad death of this young girl taken from a swimming pool in the middle of the day - for a federal court to say given all the egregiousness of the crime, we still have to reverse because it's such a basic violation of the law" he said.

    But whether the extensive appeals process and the indefinite parole process that the Adams family endured and continues to endure is fair, well, that's not an easy question.

    "What I've found in my work is that the criminal justice system is only an approximation of fairness. And there are things within it that simply aren't fair and can't be reconciled with fairness.

    But what you've done is created a system of rules - rules governing the behavior of police officers, prosecutors and the judges and jurors and constitutional provisions - that you hope will assure greater fairness," Boger said. "But there's a lot of stuff that goes on that's not as fair as heaven would like."

    No end in sight

    Jurek has been denied parole 17 times, most recently in the fall of 2015.

    Jurek will be eligible for parole again Sept. 1, 2020. And, Garza will write yet another letter detailing the horrific crime and the effects it has had on her family.

    "You're having to relive it. You're having to write a letter about what it did to you. And it has a very tough, negative impact on you," Garza said. "Now, as an adult, I can see what it did to my dad for so many years."

    Garza supports the death penalty but stands by her dad's decision to stop pursuing it because of the extensive appeals process.

    "I think maybe a lot of people don't support the death penalty until something like this happens to your family," she said. "I think that the death penalty was appropriate to start with and, had it been followed through with, it would have eliminated a lot of stress on my dad, my family, myself, my brother. But of course that didn't happen."

    Before Wendy's murder, the Adams family would go camping on the Texas coast and had large family dinners every Sunday after church. Her dad was a jokester who would let Garza put ponytails in his hair.

    Wendy's dad grew up wanting to be in law enforcement like the men in his family before him. But after the murder, he left the police force, vowing he would never search for another person's child.

    After the murder, his demeanor changed.

    "He would try to put up a front like he was OK," Garza said. "But I think my brother and I always knew he wasn't OK."

    Her father became withdrawn and strict, not allowing Garza out of his sight. He would go to her school dances, standing at the back of the room.

    "Everybody would go to Sonic after the dances. I was the only one at Sonic with my dad. I just thought, 'Why won't he let me do anything?' " Garza said. "And now that I'm a parent, I completely understand. I was the same way with my kids. ... I'm not one of those people who thinks it can't happen to you because it can happen to you."

    Her father was a strong family man until his last day. But he weighed the pursuit of justice for his little girl against the health and well-being of his two other children.

    "For him, he wasn't the type to back down. He was very strong in his convictions. And I think that for him to say, 'we'll do the plea deal,' he was really at his breaking point," Garza said. "And I think he realized it's taken a toll on us. I think he could have probably persevered, but I don't think he wanted to put us through it anymore."

    https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/new...life-sentence/

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    Is he still alive?

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    He was alive in January so I assume yes
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