Tarrant County man executed for 2001 slayings

By Mary Rainwater

A Tarrant County man who confessed to killing five family members was executed Tuesday for the 2001 slaying of his two stepchildren.

“I am sorry for what I’ve done and for all the pain and suffering my actions have caused,” Terry Lee Hankins said while in the execution chamber. “Jesus is Lord. All Glory to God.”

At 6:19 p.m., just 11 minutes following the lethal injection, Hankins was pronounced dead.

Hankins surrendered at his girlfriend’s Arlington apartment in 2001 after a five-hour standoff with police who wanted him for gunning down his estranged wife, Tammy, 34, and her children, Devin Galley, 12, and Ashley Mason, 11.

Hankins later confessed to officers that he was responsible for the deaths of his father and half-sister almost a year earlier.

“I accept his apology,” Melissa Bryce, sister of victim Tammy Hankins, said in a press conference following the execution. “But that doesn’t take away the pain of the things he did.”

Bryce and her mother, Linda Sheets, who also attended the press conference, chose not to witness Hankins death but instead to remember the family she lost.

“Terry and I talked a couple of weeks ago and he apologized then,” Sheets said. “He seemed very remorseful about what he did, especially to the children.”

Ruthie Hedleston, who survived a beating during the two years Hankins lived with she and her husband, chose to witness his death as a form of closure.

“The reason I was there was to make that fear of him I had for seven years go away,” Hedleston said. “He has haunted me for seven years — turning my life upside down.

“He kept mouthing to me, ‘Ruthie, I am sorry,” she said. “I believed him that he’s sorry but that doesn’t mean I can forgive him for what he did.”

Hankins was the 16th condemned prisoner executed this year in Texas, the nation’s most active death penalty state. The lethal injection also was the 200th during the tenure of Gov. Rick Perry, a milestone denounced by capital punishment opponents.

Appeals to the courts to halt the execution were exhausted and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles refused a clemency petition from Hankins, a former auto mechanic.

Hankins did not testify at his trial, but police found a note Hankins wrote on a bank envelope.

“I guess to sum it all up, I’m guilty of murder, incest, hatred, fraud, theft, jealousy, envy,” he wrote.

In a diary recovered by officers, Hankins wrote he had become a “non-caring monster” and rambled about his troubled childhood with a divorced inattentive father and two stepmothers who molested him and taught him sex acts.

“I just didn’t like myself,” he wrote.

Tammy Hankins’ mother became worried when her daughter didn’t report for work at an Arlington Burger King she managed and her children failed to show up at school.

She went to her daughter’s mobile home in Mansfield, about 20 miles southeast of Fort Worth, and found the victims. Each had been shot in the head with a .45-caliber pistol.

Police immediately suspected Terry Hankins because they repeatedly had been summoned to the home in recent months for domestic disturbances, fighting, and breaking and entering.

Hankins was tried only for the deaths of his two stepchildren.

Death penalty opponents planned protests to mark the 200th execution during Perry’s administration. About three dozen people gathered near the prison, about double the usual number. Hankins’ execution was 439th since Texas resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982.

Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle said the governor, “like most Texans,” believed capital punishment was appropriate “for those who commit the most heinous crimes.”

At least five other Texas inmates have execution dates in coming weeks. Scheduled to die next, on July 16, is Kenneth Mosley for the 1997 shooting death of a Dallas-area police officer during a bank robbery.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.