“My storage unit was broken into,” she says. “All those clothes had been labeled and packed away in there.”
I called the Houston Police Department to speak to the original investigating officers in the case, but their public affairs spokesman told me: “They’re just not available to talk on the matter.”
I also wrote to Robinson, Anderson and Williams — each currently serving a lengthy sentence in various Texas prisons — requesting interviews. Only Anderson replied, saying he was “not acquainted with Ms Carty,” but that if I helped him with his appeal, he would do all he could to help me “resolve [my] questions surrounding the Carty case.” In the trial, however, it was precisely his “acquaintance” with Carty that led to her conviction and sentence.
Today, Mathis is clearly fighting demons. Now a private investigator, he is upset that he took the stand for the prosecution and not on Carty’s behalf.
“I never wanted to help put anybody on death row,” he tells me.
He says that if Carty did organize the kidnapping then she was mentally ill, but that he is sure she was incapable of murder.
“If nothing else, she needed a better legal team on her side. I think everybody deserves a proper trial,” he says. “I think the guys hog-tied that woman, they stuffed her into that hatchback, and her lungs couldn’t fill with air … All we know is what the men said and they were trying to avoid the death penalty too. Is that fair?”
Carty’s lawyers are waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will take the case. But such intervention is rare, says David Dow, litigation director of the Texas Defender Service and a professor of law at the University of Houston.
Still, Carty’s daughter lives in hope her mother will be exonerated.
“To be honest we prayed [the appeal court] would find in her favor last year, but we knew in Texas they weren’t going to overturn anything. With mum, one, not being a citizen, two, being a woman, and three, being black, it’s going to be an upward battle. My hope is that the Supreme Court will hear her case,” she says.
Stafford-Smith says that if this fails, then hope will rest solely on a petition for clemency. The worst-case scenario? The court rejects the appeal or refuses even to grant Carty a hearing. If this happens, the ruling will come before the court goes into summer recess and Carty could be executed as early as June or July.
For now, Carty spends 20 hours a day in her cell, praying that her appeal will be heard. I ask if she finds solace in the company of her fellow inmates. “I don’t talk to them,” she says. “I don’t want to be around negativity. My life is more important than that. You would think it would break me, but it hasn’t.”
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