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Thread: Chester Lee Wicker - Texas Execution - August 26, 1986

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    Chester Lee Wicker - Texas Execution - August 26, 1986

    Summary of Offense: Convicted of kidnapping a woman and killing her on April 4, 1980 by burying her alive on a beach

    Victim: Suzanne Knuth

    Time of Death: 12:20 a.m.

    Manner of execution: Lethal Injection

    Last Meal: Lettuce and tomatoes

    Final Statement: "I love you," he told his friend Judith Lamblion - his sole personal witness.

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    August 26, 1986

    Killer is put to death for murder of woman

    HUNTSVILLE - His rage and isolation still manifest even as he waited to die, killer Chester Lee Wicker walked to the Texas death chamber shortly after midnight and was executed for burying a woman alive on a Texas beach after a bungled attempt to choke and rape her.

    The 37-year-old Groves fisherman and diver was the third Texas convict executed in less than a week and the eighth this year. He was sentenced to die by injection for the April 4, 1980, abduction-slaying of Suzanne Knuth, 23, a part-time Lamar University librarian and student. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal late Monday.

    "I love you," he told his friend Judith Lamblion - his sole personal witness for the execution - as he was strapped to the gurney in the death chamber. He then told officials he was worried about his mother's well-being and that he understood the uncomfortable situation they were in as participants in his death.

    The lethal dose of drugs was administered at 12:10 a.m. His eyes fluttered, and he was pronounced dead at 12:20 a.m.

    The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, rejected arguments that the state's death penalty law should be struck down because people convicted of murdering whites, such as Wicker, are executed more often than those found guilty of killing blacks.

    "OK. I am ready," Wicker calmly told Texas Department of Corrections officials when told his appeal had failed. Earlier Monday, as the Supreme Court pondered his case, he flew into a rage in his death row cell, smashing an electric fan.

    "He threw his fan into his personal property bag and just crushed it," said Texas Department of Corrections spokesman Charles L. Brown.

    Justices Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens voted in favor of halting the execution. The court last month stayed the execution of a Louisiana murderer on similar grounds, said Wicker's attorney, Bruce Griffiths of the American Civil Liberties Union. Both Wicker and Knuth are white.

    Wicker also had appealed on the grounds that detectives coerced four confessions from him.

    Wicker was calm late Monday and ate a vegetarian dinner while awaiting his execution.

    He was moved Monday afternoon from the Ellis I Unit to the Huntsville "Walls" Unit where the death chamber is located. "I wouldn't say he was kind, but he was coherent about everything," said Warden Jerry Peterson.

    Wicker was awakened for breakfast Monday at 2:30 a.m. He visited most of the morning and early afternoon with a prison chaplain, his mother and grandfather and a woman described as his spiritual adviser. He refused lunch and ate a final meal of lettuce and tomatoes. His mother, Mary Wicker, although chosen by Wicker, did not witness the execution.

    Wicker's temper tantrum occurred at about 2 p.m. after he visited with his family. Guards refused to allow him to give his fan to another death row inmate when he began gathering his personal property, said Peterson.

    "We had a problem with guys (scheduled for execution) running up and down the row giving their things away," said Peterson. "If they got a stay, then they'd come back and want their property back."

    After the incident, Wicker quieted down, said Peterson.

    Wicker, who would have been 38 on Thursday, was convicted of abducting Knuth from a busy Beaumont street as she walked away from her stalled car.

    He took Knuth to a remote section of Crystal Beach, tried to rape and strangle her, and then buried her face down in a shallow grave before she died.

    Wicker, a convicted rapist who was paroled in 1977, was arrested at a Houston bus station about two weeks after Knuth's disappearance. He led police to the body.

    In a 1981 interview just after he arrived on death row, Wicker claimed he blacked out and could not remember what happened the night of Knuth's abduction. "I don't know what the problem is . . . a thing inside me where I would go blank."

    He said he had a history of mental problems while working as a commercial fisherman and an off-shore diver. He described mental blackouts and depression that brought on uncontrollable fits of anger.

    A Los Angeles native, the killer was a ninth-grade dropout.

    Wicker said he entered the Marine Corps when he was 18 and at that time began suffering mental problems.

    Texas, which has executed two other men in the past week, leads the nation in the number of executions since resumption of the death penalty. Since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on capital punishment in 1976, and Texas reinstated the practice in 1982, 18 men have died. The state with the next highest number, with 16, is Florida.

    Texas inmate Randy Woolls was executed last Wednesday for killing a Kerrville drive-in cashier, and Larry Smith was put to death Friday for slaying a Dallas store manager.

    http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/ar...id=1986_262245

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    August 26, 1986

    Victim was portrait of a perfect daughter

    BEAUMONT - The six-year nightmare for the family of Suzanne Knuth, Chester Wicker's murder victim, began on April 4, 1980 - Good Friday.

    The 23-year-old part-time librarian and her husband, Calvin Knuth, were preparing to go to a friend's home for dinner. Dining with friends was a favorite entertainment.

    When their car refused to start at a local shopping center, they walked toward home down busy College Street. Calvin Knuth decided to run ahead, get their second car and return to pick up his wife.

    He drove back down College Street, but his wife was no longer there. She wasn't back at the shopping center. She wasn't at a friend's house. She wasn't at any local hospital.

    It wasn't like Suzie Knuth to just disappear.

    The oldest of four children, she had graduated from Vidor High School and was working toward a degree in special education at Lamar University. At the time of her death she was working at the school's library.

    Suzie had never been a problem child, her mother, Juanita "Ray" Fielder, remembers. She was the kind of girl who always told her parents where she was going. If plans changed, she would call home.

    "She went to a nightclub once - just once," her mother said. "The next day she felt so bad. `I'm glad I went,' she said, `but never again.' "

    She played the piano and loved to sew. She spent her spare time playing basketball, although she was 5 feet 2 inches tall, said Fielder, 50, an apartment locator from Spring.

    Fielder said her daughter once worked at a Beaumont school for special children, but she had to quit. "She got too emotionally involved with the children."

    Calvin Knuth, a tall Washington state native who came to Texas in the Air Force, met Suzanne on a blind date while visiting Beaumont with his roommate.

    By the time he got out of the Air Force in January 1978, he had decided to move to Beaumont to be near her. He got a job at the medical equipment company where he still works. In July 1978 they were married.

    The young couple bought an older home and moved in over Easter weekend in 1979. "They were pinching pennies, like most newlyweds," her mother said. "They were fixing up that house.

    "Both she and Calvin were so very level-headed," Fielder said.

    Knuth, quiet and home-loving, remained active in her Baptist church.

    When Knuth telephoned the day after Good Friday, Fielder knew something was terribly wrong. Suzie would never just disappear.

    They alerted police. That day a woman found Suzie Knuth's purse in the weeds next to College Street. With it was a cross Suzie Knuth wore around her neck.

    Police, friends and family members combed the city. They dragged canals, thrashed through weeds.

    Knuth's sister consulted a psychic in Portland, Ore. The psychic said Suzie would be found near water, so Knuth combed the sides of streams as far north as Lufkin.

    Searchers found the bones of an old man who had wandered away from a Beaumont nursing home, but no sign of the missing woman.

    Two witnesses reported seeing a man force her into a car. She was screaming. They recognized her long, brown hair. One witness identified her attacker as Knuth, but both witnesses later identified an ex-convict, Chester Wicker, after undergoing hypnosis. The hypnosis became part of Wicker's later appeals.

    One of Chester Wicker's uncles told investigators that on the night of April 4 he had helped Wicker get his mother's car out of the sand on a Bolivar Peninsula beach.

    There was blood in the car and on his clothes, the uncle said. Wicker had scratches on his face. He had gone off to California - just like he had done before when he got into trouble.

    Wicker, a convicted rapist on parole, became a prime suspect.

    When Wicker returned to Texas on April 21, four Beaumont policemen picked him up at a Houston bus station. During the trip back to Beaumont he told them he had abducted the young woman, attempted to rape her, strangled her and buried her at the beach. They went to the beach, but Wicker couldn't find the grave at night.

    The next morning Wicker led police to the grave. Knuth's left arm was sticking out of the sand.

    A medical examiner found sand in her lungs, indicating she had been buried alive.

    "I was crazy for about a year," Fielder said. Her other children, still teen-agers, weren't allowed outside after dark. "It was a blur. I looked in the mirror one day and saw that my hair was gray."

    Calvin Knuth, now 30, haunted the homes of friends. "I would keep them up to 2 a.m., just talking. Anything to keep from having to go home."

    Suzie Knuth had taken square-dancing lessons, and Knuth found himself drawn to the dances. He would go weekly just to watch. After awhile he was coaxed to join in and was paired with a recently divorced mother of a small son. They fell in love and were married. Nine months ago they had a daughter.

    But Calvin Knuth still remembers. The day after Wicker is executed, Knuth said he will go to Galveston, where Suzanne Knuth's wedding rings still are being kept - leftover evidence from Wicker's trial.

    He will retrieve the rings, he said, and then the nightmare will be over.

    http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/ar...id=1986_262296

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    August 27, 1986

    Victim's kin 'relieved' by Wicker execution

    HUNTSVILLE - The mother of the Beaumont librarian slain by Chester Lee Wicker said she thinks the former sex offender was a very sick man who refused to face his problems.

    "He's a pitiful human being, a sick person, very sick," said Vaughnita Fielder, the mother of Suzanne C. Knuth.

    "He had six years to come forth and he didn't even say `I'm sorry,' " said Fielder. "It's really a shame when people can't face reality.

    "My impression was that he thought it wasn't his fault but somebody else's," she said.

    Wicker, of Groves, was put to death Wednesday morning for murdering Knuth in 1980. He was the third Texas death row inmate executed in the past week and the eighth this year. Two executions are scheduled to take place next month - Donald G. Franklin, on Sept. 16 and Raymond Riles, on Sept. 17.

    Fielder said the family was relieved by Wicker's death.

    "I feel much more calm. It's sad it has to go this far," she said. "Maybe we can get back to as normal a life as possible. We've all worked very hard to get over it and put our energies into working and dealing with what was coming," she said.

    Wicker was convicted of abducting Knuth, 23, from a busy street in Beaumont as she walked away from a stalled car.

    He took Knuth to remote part of Crystal Beach, tried to rape and strangle her and then buried her face down in a shallow grave while she was still alive.

    The execution reopened many old wounds.

    Fielder briefly considered coming to Huntsville on Monday night to be near where Wicker was executed but decided against it. She said she did not want to watch the execution.

    "It brought back back a lot of feelings buried," she said. "I think if I could have got to him in the last couple of days my hatefulness would have come out."

    Wicker, a convicted rapist who was paroled in 1977, was arrested at a Houston bus station about two weeks after Knuth's disappearance. He led police to the body.

    He claimed that he blacked out and could not remember what happened the night of Knuth's abduction.

    Wicker, who would have been 38 on Thursday, seemed nervous before the witnesses were brought into the death chamber after midnight Monday, said Attorney General Jim Mattox.

    "He realized it was not a pleasant thing for everyone involved and was concerned about his mother and her well-being," Mattox said.

    Texas Department of Corrections Chaplain Carroll Pickett held Wicker's head up above the top of the gurney so he could see the faces of the witnesses as they filed into the death chamber. He was strapped to the table with six broad white leather belts.

    Wicker made a brief last statement before the executioners started the lethal flow of drugs.

    "I love you," Wicker said to Judith Lamblion, a friend and spiritual adviser who was his sole personal witness.

    After the lethal drugs started flowing Lamblion kept repeating a series of phrases to him. "Keep your focus up; keep your attention up," she said.

    Wicker breathed deeply several times. Doctors pronounced him dead at 12:20 a.m.

    http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/ar...id=1986_262339

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