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Nov 6, 2008 7:23 am US/Central
Parolee Set For Execution For 1993 FW Slaying
HUNTSVILLE (AP) ―
Renee Harris Toliver remembers her uncle as a 65-year-old mentally ill man living with her grandmother until the woman's own health problems confined her to a nursing home, leaving Otis Flake home alone.
That left Flake and other elderly people in the near downtown Fort Worth neighborhood vulnerable to the likes of Elkie Lee Taylor, a paroled burglar, who was spotted with a buddy leaving Flake's home. A woman who knew Flake found the front door to the home open, the house ransacked and Flake dead.
"He was an animal who preyed on the weakest of people," Toliver, now an assistant federal prosecutor, said this week of Taylor. "He was an ex-con basically preying on them at will."
Taylor, 46, was set to die Thursday evening for Flake's April 1993 slaying.
He would be the 15th Texas inmate executed this year and the first of six scheduled for lethal injection this month in the nation's most active capital punishment state.
Taylor, originally from Milwaukee, had been on parole about three months when Flake was found murdered. Flake was sitting against his bed, his hands tied behind his back with plastic tubing, his feet tied together with a coat hanger, and a T-shirt and two more coat hangers wrapped around his throat. Taylor had served less than nine months of an eight-year sentence for burglary.
He was arrested after a wild police chase where he drove a stolen 18-wheeler cab for over 150 miles, leading officers from Fort Worth to Waco. It ended with a state trooper shooting out the truck's tires but not before Taylor at one point tried to ram two police cars and run over two troopers standing on the side of the road.
Taylor's lawyers went to the U.S. Supreme Court with an appeal challenging the validity of instructions given to jurors at his 1994 trial. State and lower federal courts already had rejected the arguments.
The prisoner declined to speak with reporters in the weeks preceding his scheduled punishment.
In 2003, he came within two days of execution before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals gave him a reprieve after state prison records showed he may be mentally retarded and ineligible for execution under U.S. Supreme Court guidelines.
The reprieve later was lifted and appeals courts upheld lower court rulings that Taylor was not mentally retarded.
"One of the defenses at his trial and then talked about for years now was he's slow, ain't too smart, not the sharpest knife in the drawer," recalled Terri Moore, the former Tarrant County district attorney who prosecuted Taylor. "But Elkie had some pretty good little skills, scheming and conniving skills."
Authorities contended Taylor and an accomplice took jewelry, cash, a television and other items in the robbery at Flake's house so they could be sold to buy crack cocaine. Prison records showed they got $16 for the loot.
Taylor admitted to his involvement in a similar slaying of an 87-year-old Fort Worth man seven blocks from Flake's home and 11 days before his murder. But Taylor, like in Flake's killing, blamed the murder on a partner.
His accomplice, Darryl Birdow, was sentenced in 1994 to life in prison for Flake's death. Taylor acknowledged binding and gagging Flake but said Birdow was the killer.
Two more executions are scheduled for next week.
George Whitaker III, 36, was to die Nov. 12 for the shooting death of Kiki Carrier, the sister of his ex-girlfriend, at her home outside Crosby in Harris County, east of Houston. A 5-year-old girl was one of two others wounded in the attack.
Then the following day, Nov. 13, Denard Manns, 42, faced execution for the 1998 fatal shooting of Christine Robson, 26, at her apartment in Killeen. Robson was a Fort Hood soldier living off the base.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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