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LIVINGSTON (AP) ― Convicted killer Eric Dewayne Cathey got off death row a decade ago and nearly made it to freedom. He'll leave death row again on Tuesday but in a caravan of armed guards headed to his execution.

Cathey, 37, was among seven condemned inmates who staged a daring prison break on Thanksgiving night in 1998. He got as far the top of a second fence surrounding the outside of the Ellis Unit prison before gunshots from officers coaxed him to the ground.

"An amazing experience," Cathey recalled recently from the Polunsky Unit, where death row was moved to the more modern and secure prison in the wake of the escape attempt.

On Tuesday, Cathey was set for transfer to Huntsville for lethal injection for the the crime that earned him a death sentence -- the abduction and fatal shoooting of a 20-year-old woman in Houston more than 13 years ago.

Cathey would be the 18th Texas inmate executed this year and the first of two scheduled for lethal injection this week in the nation's busiest death penalty state.

The former security guard who also worked as a promotion manager for a company that produced a Houston rap act denied he was responsible for the September 1995 slaying of Christina Castillo, the girlfriend of a reputed drug dealer.

"It's very frustrating," Cathey said. "Nobody believes you."

Castillo, blindfolded with duct tape and bound hand and foot, was found dead in a Houston field a week after she was reported missing from her southeast Houston apartment complex.

Evidence showed Cathey was among six men involved in the abduction in which Castillo was ordered to divulge where her boyfriend hid drugs and money so they could rob him.

The woman either didn't know, refused to tell or there wasn't such a hidden cache. She was beaten, tied up and driven to the overgrown field where her body later was found by a man picking up aluminum cans. She'd been shot three times in the head.

More than four months later, Cathey and several of his companions were arrested in Brookshire, west of Houston, where one of the group involved in Castillo's abduction had become a paid police informant.

The informant testified at Cathey's capital murder trial that Cathey was the only one of the men who was armed during the abduction and that Cathey acknowledged to him that he shot the victim.

"They took her in a vehicle and marched her out into a field and Eric Cathey basically executed her," said Lyn McClellan, the Harris County district attorney who prosecuted Cathey. "Whether it was true that there ever was any dope or money, we'll never know. Their thought process was: She saw us, she could identify us, we better kill her."

"I was a drug dealer," Cathey said from prison. "I'm innocent of this case. I didn't know the victim. I wasn't involved."

He said testimony against him at his trial was a lie.

"I have faith I will get a stay. But at the same time, I'm prepared for the worst," he said.

Cathey's lawyer, Kevin Dunn, without being specific, said he had planned late appeals in the courts to try to head off the punishment.

In the escape attempt, prisoner Martin Gurule was the only one to get over the second fence and disappear into the foggy night. After an intense manhunt, his body was found a week later in a creek a couple miles from the prison. An autopsy showed he had been shot once but that he died of drowning.

Cathey said he reached the top of the second fence with Gurule as officers fired at them.

"I'm hanging on with one arm," he said. "I let go. Martin went over. He kept running."

Another condemned prisoner, Rogelio Cannady, was set to follow Cathey to the death chamber Wednesday for a 1993 slaying of a fellow prisoner, but his execution date was withdrawn Monday by state District Judge Ronald Yeager. Cannady's recently appointed appeals lawyer asked for more time to review the case, and the judge agreed.

Then on Thursday, Robert Jean Hudson is set for injection for the 1999 fatal stabbing of his ex-girlfriend, Edith Kendrick, at her home in Mesquite in Dallas County.

(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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