Firefighters responding to a blaze at an Amarillo apartment found the body of 37-year-old Ronnie Dawn Hewitt, but the fire did not kill her.
Hewitt had been strangled, a belt pulled around her neck. Then she was raped after she already was dead.
About two weeks later in June 1998, Tony Roach, a South Carolina parolee picked up by police about 195km to the north in Guymon, Oklahoma, for stealing some cigarettes and reselling them, volunteered to officers that they should ask him about the killing of a woman in Amarillo.
"Tony was breaking back into prison," recalled Walt Weaver, who defended Roach at his capital murder trial. "Life was difficult. And that was my jury argument."
A Potter County jury rejected Weaver's plea that Roach be sentenced to life in prison and instead sent him to death row.
The drifter from Greenville, South Carolina, now 30, was set to die last night for Hewitt's slaying.
He'd be the 24th Texas inmate executed this year, equalling last year's total in the busiest capital punishment state in the US.
"I just remember him being very quiet, never repentant, never anything, just very cold," said Rebecca King, then the Potter County district attorney who prosecuted the case,
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year denied Roach permission to move forward with other appeals.
His appeals lawyer, Joe Marr Wilson, said he did not believe he had anything left to pursue, even to the US Supreme Court, to try to stop the execution.
Hewitt was killed after Roach climbed through a bedroom window of her apartment and attacked her despite her pleas that he take what he wanted but not harm her. Evidence showed Roach set her place on fire by lighting an aerosol can of hair spray and using it as a blowtorch.
Roach declined to speak with reporters in the weeks before his scheduled execution, the first of five set for this month in Texas.
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