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Thread: Larry Keith Robison - Texas Execution - January 21, 2000

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    Larry Keith Robison - Texas Execution - January 21, 2000


    Georgia Reed


    Ricky Bryant


    Scotty Reed


    Bruce Gardner


    Earline Barker




    Summary of Offense: At 4:30 p.m. on August 10, 1982, Junett Bryant went to the home of her adult son, Ricky Lee Bryant, in Fort Worth and discovered him lying on the floor - his head severed from his body. Ricky Lee Bryant had been sexually mutilated and had suffered two gunshot wounds to the head, eight cut wounds, and forty-nine stab wounds. His penis was found in the kitchen sink and his testicles were never found. His decapitated head was posed in the crook of his arm.

    Four more homicide victims were located in the house next door to Bryant's. The fully-clothed bodies of Earline Barker and Bruce Gardner were lying in the living room. Barker had multiple gunshot and stab wounds, including one very deep cut wound to the neck. Gardner had several gunshot wounds and a cut wound to his neck. In a bedroom was the body of 11-year-old Scott Willard Reed, lying on his stomach. He had been shot once, suffered a contusion of the head due to blunt trauma, and had been cut and stabbed multiple times. Finally, the nude body of Georgia Reed was located in another bedroom. She had been shot twice, stabbed multiple times, and had a deep cut wound to the neck severing the jugular veins and carotid arteries.

    The next day, Robison was arrested in Wichita, Kansas driving the car of Bruce Gardner and in possession of a woman's wedding ring, some bullets, three wallets containing the driver licenses of Robison, Bruce Gardner, and Ricky Lee Bryant, and a loaded .22 caliber handgun, later determined to be the murder weapon. About a month before the murders, Robison had moved in with Bryant. An insanity defense was presented and rejected at trial. The original conviction and death sentence was reversed on appeal due to an error during jury selection. On retrial in 1987, Robison was again convicted and sentenced to death.

    Victims: Rickey Lee Bryant, Georgia Ann Reed, Scott Reed, Earline H. Barker and Bruce M. Gardner

    Method of Execution: Lethal Injection

    Last Meal:

    Final Statement: This offender declined to make a last statement.


    MEDIA ADVISORY: LARRY KEITH ROBISON SCHEDULED TO BE EXECUTED.

    AUSTIN - Thursday, January 20, 2000 - Texas Attorney General John Cornyn offers the following information on Larry Keith Robison who is scheduled to be executed after 6 p.m., Friday, January 21st:

    FACTS OF THE CRIME

    At 4:30 p.m. on August 10, 1982, Junett Bryant arrived at the home of her adult son, Ricky Lee Bryant, in Fort Worth, Texas. When he did not answer the door, Ms. Bryant entered the house and discovered her son lying on the floor -- his head severed from his body. Ms. Bryant summoned the police. The chief medical examiner testified that Ricky Lee Bryant had also been sexually mutilated and had suffered two gunshot wounds to the head, eight cut wounds, and forty-nine stab wounds.

    Four more homicide victims were located in the house next door to Bryant's. The fully-clothed bodies of Earline Barker and Bruce Gardner were lying in the living room. Barker had multiple gunshot and stab wounds, including one very deep cut wound to the neck. Gardner had several gunshot wounds and a cut wound to his neck. In a bedroom was the body of a child, Scott Willard Reed, lying on his stomach. He had been shot once, suffered a contusion of the head due to blunt trauma, and had been cut and stabbed multiple times. Finally, the nude body of Georgia Reed was located in another bedroom. She had been shot twice, stabbed multiple times, and had a deep cut wound to the neck severing the jugular veins and carotid arteries.

    Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on August 11, 1982, a police officer in Wichita, Kansas, noticed a suspicious looking vehicle backed up to a local church. The officer approached the vehicle and asked Larry Robison, the sole occupant of the vehicle, to get out of the car and for identification. Robison claimed not to have any identification and told the officer that his name was Jeffrey K. Kennedy and that the car belonged to his brother, George. Further investigation revealed that the car's registration had expired in 1980, although the license plate bore a 1983 sticker. Thereafter, Robison volunteered that he had a checkbook in the car that would serve as identification. The checkbook was in Robison's given name. A search of Robison's pockets revealed a woman's wedding ring, some bullets, and three wallets containing the driver licenses of Robison, Bruce Gardner, and Ricky Lee Bryant. Robison was handcuffed and placed in the police car.

    The vehicle identification number on Robison's car revealed that the car was registered to Bruce Gardner. In the car, officers found a loaded .22 caliber handgun under the driver's seat. Additionally, four rings, more bullets, and two watches were found in a suitcase in the car. A pawn shop manager sold Robison a .22 caliber handgun one week before the murders, and identified the handgun found in Robison's possession in Kansas as the one he had sold Robison. An assistant hardware manager at a Winn Dixie store sold Robison three boxes of .22 caliber ammunition on the day of the murders. All of the shell casings recovered from the murder scene were fired from Robison's handgun. Three knives recovered at the crime scene tested positive for blood, and the blood type on two of the knives matched three of the victims. A pair of shorts and a matchbook recovered from the suitcase in Kansas tested positive for blood. The rings and two of the watches recovered from Robison were identified as belonging to Ms. Reed and Ms. Barker. Another watch taken from Robison at the time of his arrest was identified as belonged to Gardner.

    Thomas Ozmer, a close friend of Ricky Bryant's testified that he had known both Robison and Bryant since 1976, and had introduced Bryant to Robison in June 1982. About a month before the murders, Robison moved in with Bryant. Ozmer stated that he had stored an old, inoperable 1966 Chevy Belaire at Bryant's home. The license plate found on Gardner's car in Kansas was from Ozmer's car.

    The primary defense at trial was that Robison was insane at the time of the murders. The defense presented testimony that several members of Robison's father's family had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and that Robison had exhibited behavior consistent with schizophrenia. Robison had also been diagnosed and treated for schizophrenia. A defense expert stated that Robison is a chronic paranoid schizophrenic, and was delusional and legally insane at the time of the offense.

    The State presented competing evidence that Robison was faking a mental disorder, and had a long history of drug abuse, including marijuana, methamphetamines, amphetamines, tranquilizers, LSD, and PCP. The State's expert stated that Robison's past behavior was attributable to a drug psychosis, which has similar symptoms to schizophrenia. There was no evidence that Robison was under the influence of drugs at the time he committed the murders.

    PROCEDURAL HISTORY

    In November 1982, Robison was indicted in Tarrant County, Texas, for the intentional murder of Bruce Gardner while in the course of committing and attempting to commit the offense of robbery of Earline Barker. In 1983, Robison was convicted of the capital offense and sentenced to death. However, in 1986, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed Robison's conviction and sentence due to an error during jury selection. The State retried Robison before a jury upon his plea of not guilty. Rejecting Robison's defense of insanity, on November 13, 1987, the jury found Robison guilty of capital murder. After a separate trial on punishment, the trial court, the 297th District Court of Tarrant County, Texas, sentenced Robison to death.

    On June 29, 1994, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Robison's conviction and sentence. The United States Supreme Court denied certiorari review on June 26, 1995.

    Robison filed an application for state writ of habeas corpus on April 22, 1996, and a supplemental application on July 19, 1996. On August 8, 1996, the trial court recommended that the application be denied and the supplemental application be dismissed as untimely filed. On October 9, 1996, the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed and denied habeas relief. On December 12, 1996, Robison filed a federal habeas petition in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. On February 9, 1997, the district court entered an order denying habeas corpus relief. On April 1, 1997, the district court denied Robison's request for a certificate of appealability. On August 13, 1998, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court's denial of habeas relief. The Fifth Circuit denied a motion for rehearing on September 21, 1998, and the Supreme Court denied certiorari review on May 3, 1999. A clemency petition is pending before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.

    PRIOR CRIMINAL HISTORY


    At the punishment phase of trial, the State presented evidence that Robison had received a three-year probated sentence for a felony theft conviction. Robison had violated one of the terms of his probation, but his probation was never revoked.

    Judy Smith, a friend of both Robison and Ricky Lee Bryant, testified that Robison had called her several times from the Tarrant County Jail. With regard to Bryant's murder, Robison told her that "he went into the bathroom and shot him like a kamikaze. . . . He said that after he had killed Ricky Bryant, he could not find the car keys, and that's why he went next door." He also told her, "If I could have found the car keys, I could have gotten away with it." Concerning the other murders, Smith testified that Robison expressed puzzlement about "why Mrs. Barker didn't do something because Georgia Reed was screaming and begging him for her life." He killed Scott Reed, the young boy, because he "couldn't leave any witnesses." With regard to his arrest in Kansas, Robison told Smith that "the lady police officer was very lucky that he didn't shoot her, too," but Robison realized that if he shot a police officer, "they'd never leave him alone." Smith also testified that she had seen Robison use amphetamines and knew he used LSD. Susan Wood testified that, in early 1982, she bought drugs from Robison, and they both used the drugs at her house, including speed, crystal, and marijuana.

    DRUGS AND/OR ALCOHOL - There was no evidence of drug or alcohol use connected with the offense.



    ProDeathPenalty.com

    Larry Robison was sentenced to die for the August 10, 1982, murder of Bruce Gardner, a General Dynamics assembly line worker. Robison, a former construction worker from Abilene, was arrested Aug. 11, 1982, in Wichita, Kan., driving the car of 33-year-old Bruce Gardner of Lake Worth. The previous day, Bruce was one of five people found mutilated, shot or stabbed in neighboring cottages near Lake Worth. Also killed were Bruce’s girlfriend, Georgia Ann Reed, 34; her mother, Earline Barker, 55; and Georgia’s 11-year-old son, Scott. Robison, who has acknowledged a history of drug abuse, was convicted of capital murder for Bruce's death.

    But before Bruce arrived at the Shore View Drive cottage, Robison had slain Rickey Lee Bryant in the bathroom of the home they briefly shared. Rickey, 31, had been shot twice in the head, decapitated, sexually mutilated and stabbed 49 times. His penis was found in the kitchen sink and his testicles were never found. Robison then went next door and killed Georgia Ann Reed in her bed. Reed's son Scott, who in two days would have been 12, was killed in the living room. Under his body was a hammer, which authorities suggested may have indicated that the boy had intended to defend his mother. Reed's mother, 55-year-old Earline Barker, was also killed in the living room. She had been recuperating from surgery to correct a brain aneurysm. Bruce was killed when he arrived to pick up Georgia for a date. Rickey's mother found her son's body, posed with his head in the crook of his arm. Authorities then found the bodies of the other victims. Greg Pipes, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Robison, said the idea that he was insane is an illusion. “They did diagnose him (as schizophrenic),” Pipes said. “But there are an awful lot of people diagnosed as schizophrenic that aren’t killing people." Pipes also stated that if Robison's sentence were to be commuted to a life sentence, he would be released from prison in a few years since mandatory release laws were in effect at the time of his crime. Mandatory release requires an inmate to be given "good time" credit of one and a half days for every day served in prison. When the inmate's time served plus his good time credits equal his sentence, he must be released, regardless of his potential as a future danger to society, after only one third of the actual sentence is served.

    Inside the death chamber, Rhonda Kreps, whose mother, sister and nephew were slain by Robison, dabbed her eyes as she watched him die. She sobbed heavily and was comforted by the other 5 witnesses and by prison officials as she was helped outside. After the execution, relatives of the 5 people Robison killed issued a statement saying, "Justice has been done. Larry Robison has paid with his life for the 17-year nightmare of trauma and heartache he caused for the families of his victims," the family said. "We will cherish the memories of our loved ones. We are grateful for the support of our friends and families, the community and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Victims Services Division."
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    Wisconsin Spa Shooting Brings Back Painful Memories for the Moms of Mass Killers

    News of Sunday’s shooting at a spa in Wisconsin brought back painful memories for Lois Robison, more than 1,000 miles away in Burleson, Texas.

    Robison’s son, Larry, was executed in 2000 for the brutal murders of five people near Ft. Worth in 1982. Every time it happens again, every time a gunman takes to a mall or a Sikh Temple or a school playground, bent on rampage, Robison remembers her own son.

    This past week, it was the shooting at the Azana Spa in Brookfield, Wisc., that triggered those flashbacks. There, Radcliffe Haughton Jr. reportedly shot seven women, three of them fatally, including his wife, before turning the gun on himself.

    It didn’t take television crews long to reach the man’s distraught father, Radcliffe Haughton Sr., the following day. “All I can say is, I want to apologize to the people of Milwaukee who have been hurt,” Haughton Sr. told a reporter on Monday. “He did not give me any hint of what he would do.”

    He did not give me any hint of what he would do.

    Haughton Sr. appeared to be answering an implied question, one that’s asked either directly or indirectly of parents and other relatives every time such a tragedy unfolds—“Did you see this coming? Why didn’t you stop it?” It’s why, when Arlene Holmes told a reporter “You have the right person,” after her son allegedly went on a shooting rampage in Aurora, Colo., last summer, many assumed she was saying, “I knew it was him.” Holmes later clarified she was talking about herself, not her son.

    Susan Klebold, mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, took 3,800 words to answer the question in a 2009 piece she penned for O Magazine titled, fittingly, “I will never know why.” The stepmother of Wade Michael Page, the shooter in the August killings at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that she had “no idea” why the child who grew up “precious” became a mass murderer.

    These are unfair queries, says Renny Cushing, executive director of the Boston nonprofit Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights. Cushing’s own father, Robert, was murdered in 1988, and he has dedicated his life to opposing the death penalty. He has worked with many relatives of murder victims and of killers over the years. Both sides grieve, but in different ways, he says.

    “Being the family member of a murderer is incredibly isolating,” Cushing says. “There’s a shame attached to it, a stigma, so they remain silent about their loved one. People will impute responsibility on them for the actions of the family member. Society’s fear gets projected upon you, and you end up being pretty isolated.”

    Lois Robison knows that all too well. She knew the day she found out her son had gone on a shooting rampage, she said in the fragile Texas drawl of a 79-year-old woman. That day, she recalls, she turned to her husband and said, “Now our whole lives will be different.”

    She was right. Robison had talked to her son Larry just the night before, she said. He was at his sister’s house, and something was wrong. Mom was trying to talk her son into coming over, to her home in Burleson. Larry said he couldn’t.

    “The next morning, I woke up and found out he was the one who killed all those people,” she said.

    In a psychotic rage, then 24-year-old Larry Robison had killed five people, including his former roommate, 31-year-old Ricky Lee Bryant, decapitating and sexually mutilating Bryant’s body. He also killed another man, two women and an 11-year-old boy, their bodies discovered in two remote cottages on the shore of Lake Fort Worth.

    In the shock of that initial moment, Lois’ first reaction was denial. Her son had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 21, a condition that explained a host of jarring behavior throughout his adolescent years. He once ran naked through the gymnasium during a basketball game. He once ran away from home, she said, and when she found him, he was tearing through the streets of Burleson, “running like a tracked animal,” she said. “He was just scared to death. I don’t know what he was running from.”

    But none of this was violent, never directed at anyone, never an obvious precursor of something horrible.

    “He was the most peace-loving person in the world,” she said. So when she first heard the news, “I thought, ‘Surely he couldn’t do that. He’s too good-hearted. Too kind.’”

    Mothers often describe their sons that way, even after they’ve done horrible things. Robison did that, too, to the reporters who showed up at her doorstep in 1982, wanting insight.

    “The next morning, I woke up and found out he was the one who killed all those people.”

    “On that particular occasion, he was acting like a monster. I admit that,” she said. “But he wasn’t a monster. Inside, he was very kind and loving and understanding.”

    Then Robison took it a step further. She went on a crusade. She had fought for years, trying to get help for her son. Again and again, she had him institutionalized, but without a lifelong commitment, a declaration that required a judge’s order, Texas only allowed Larry locked up for a maximum of 30 days. While contained and medicated, he behaved just fine. When released back out into the world again, he went off the drugs that kept him relatively sane, and the wheels came off.

    “Back then, they always blamed mental illness in boys on the mother,” she said. “It was the mother’s fault.”

    One counselor asked her to get on her knees during a therapy session, Robison said, and “beg his pardon for whatever I had done.” Robison refused. She didn’t accept that blame.

    After the killings, Robison spoke to any reporter who would listen, often to the dismay of the families of her son’s victims. One niece of a victim wrote her a letter, the gist of which was, “Lois Robison, shut up,” she said. But Robison didn’t shut up. Her son was “not a monster,” she said. “He was mentally ill.” She didn’t feel guilty, she said. She knew it wasn’t her fault. She had tried many times to have her son committed, she explained to the press. But because he’d never done anything violent, she couldn’t get anyone to listen, she said.

    “You wait until they’re already violent, then they give you the treatment,” she said. “But that doesn’t work. After you’ve already been violent, you go to Death Row.”

    Robison kept her job as an elementary school teacher, despite that some parents tried to pull their children from her class. Her principal defended her, she said, telling those parents, “Come back to me at midterm. If you want your child in another class, I’ll do it, but I’m not doing it right now.”

    Robison eventually joined forces with Amnesty International, dedicating the rest of her life to speaking out against the death penalty. She spoke at churches, in town hall meetings and at schools. “It was the only thing that saved my sanity,” she said.

    She continued to visit her son for the 17 years he sat on Death Row. She learned that the other inmates called him “lovable Larry.” She filled him in on her life, and that of his six brothers and sisters. And one day, when Larry’s 13-year-old daughter wanted to know the truth about her dad, Robison got in the car with her and drove the girl to the Texas State Penitentiary, in Huntsville. When Larry laid eyes on his daughter, Lois said, “it was the happiest I think I had ever seen him in his life.”

    This all comes flooding back, every time another mass killing shakes America’s conscience. Robison remembers her own fight to convince people that all of these killers are mentally ill, and they all needed help, sooner: “Why can’t we take care of these people, before they commit a horrendous crime?”

    For the parents of mass killers, she has this advice: “Love your child. They need you. So love them. They’re not monsters. There’s a reason why this happened, and it’s not because they’re monsters or just mean. They’re sick. Love them. They need your love.”

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...s-killers.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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