David Martin Long

David Martin Long (July 15, 1953 – December 8, 1999) was an American murderer. He was arrested after the 1986 hatchet killings of three women in Lancaster, Texas, and was convicted of murder and sentenced to the death penalty. Long was never tried for any other murders, but he also confessed to killing a gas station attendant in a 1978 beating in San Bernardino, California, and killing a former boss, Bob Rogers, in a 1983 fire in Bay City, Texas.

David Martin Long
Born	(1953-07-15)July 15, 1953
Status	Executed by lethal injection
Died	December 8, 1999(1999-12-08) (aged 46) Huntsville, Texas
Conviction(s)	Capital murder
Criminal penalty	Death penalty

While on death row, Long confessed to setting a fire that killed two women in 1986. Ernest Willis was already on death row for the crime. Long's confession was ultimately found to lack credibility, but it sparked new interest in the case, and when arson investigators re-examined the case, they felt that an electrical issue most likely caused the fire. Willis was released from prison in 2004, having spent 17 years on death row.

Two days before Long was scheduled to be executed, he took an overdose of prescription drugs and was hospitalized in Galveston, Texas. Officials in Texas refused to delay the execution. Initially placed on a ventilator, Long improved significantly by the next day. He was placed on a medically supervised flight back to Huntsville on the day of his scheduled execution so that he could be executed as scheduled.

Early life

Long's brother and sister said that their father was an abusive alcoholic who often neglected them. They said that Long's behavior became problematic after the death of their mother when Long was ten years old. Long was sent to foster homes, and he was enrolled in a reformatory by the age of 12. He began regularly drinking alcohol around that time and he subsequently used illicit drugs, including heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, for many years.[1]

Triple murder and arrest

In 1986, after being expelled from an alcohol rehabilitation program in Little Rock, Arkansas, Long was hitchhiking when 37-year-old Donna Sue Jester gave him a ride and allowed him to stay at her home in Lancaster, Texas. They lived with Jester's 64-year-old blind and bed-ridden adopted mother named Dalpha Lorene Jester, and with a third woman, 20-year-old Laura Lee Owens. The women were killed with a hatchet.[2] Not long after the murders, Long was arrested for drunken driving, and he told jailers about killing the three women in Lancaster. The women's bodies had not been discovered at that point, so Long's story was not taken seriously and he was released from jail.[3]

When police discovered the bodies in Lancaster, they found the weapon, which had been wiped off and wrapped in a towel. Police focused on Long as a suspect because Jester's diary entries described how she had met Long and allowed him to move in.[2] A warrant had been issued for Long's arrest based on the diary entries. Long was arrested in Austin for public intoxication a month after the murders, and police discovered his possible connection to the Jester murders when they fingerprinted him.[4] He admitted to killing the three women because they criticized him for his drinking.[2]

While he was in police custody, Long also confessed to two unsolved murders. He admitted that he fatally beat gas station attendant James Carnell with a tire iron in 1978 in San Bernardino, California, because Carnell had overcharged him for the repair of a tire. He said that he started a fire that killed his former boss, Bob Neal Rogers, in 1983, in Bay City, Texas. Long indicated that he thought his criminal tendencies would get better with time, but he said that they were getting worse. He said that Texas seemed to fairly dispense the death penalty, and he indicated that he was "pretty much ready to call it a day with [his] demented personality."[5]

Trial

At his trial in the Jester case, Long's defense was that he had psychiatric problems, including schizophrenia. He said that he had sustained multiple head injuries, and he believed that some of his actions were related to being possessed by Satan.[1] Long told a psychiatrist that Donna Jester's home had a foul smell and that he became agitated around foul odors because he associated them with his mother's death. Long suspected that dead bodies were buried behind Jester's home. He said that he retrieved the hatchet on the day of the murders because he thought the three women in the Jester home were conspiring against him.[1]

Psychologist William Hester testified for the defense, opining that Long was likely psychotic at the time of the crime, but the prosecution pointed out a statement in one of Hester's notes that he had found no evidence of insanity. Testifying for the state, psychiatrist James Grigson said that Long had antisocial personality disorder, which he said was not considered a mental disease or defect. Grigson said that Long "understood the difference between right and wrong" at the time of the crime.[1]

At one point during the trial, Long stood up and yelled to the jury that he was guilty, saying that he had never wanted to advance the insanity defense in the first place.[6] Long was convicted of murder, and a jury sentenced him to the death penalty on February 10, 1987.[7]

Time on death row

Three years after Long arrived on death row, he gave investigators a three-hour confession in which he admitted to starting a 1986 house fire that killed two women in the West Texas town of Iraan. Ernest Willis had been found guilty of that crime, and he had been sentenced to the death penalty in 1987. The prosecutor in the case had described the evidence against Willis as circumstantial. Long refused to testify before an appeals court in the Willis case. The videotape of Long's confession could be admissible in court, but it would only be effective if evidence could be located to corroborate Long's story.[8]

Long's confession helped the Willis case to attract more attention from attorneys. Appeals lawyers spent several years looking for evidence to support Long's version of the events. Witnesses and arson experts said that several details in the case were consistent with the confession, including Long's admission to the prior arson in Bay City and an analysis that showed the Iraan fire could have been accelerated with a mixture of Everclear and Wild Turkey as Long claimed.[9]

In 2004, Willis was released from prison because new fire investigators looked at the case and determined that the fire was more likely caused by an electrical problem than by arson. Author Welsh White wrote that while evidence indicates that Long's confession was probably untrue, it was "the catalyst that precipitated the massive investigation that resulted in Willis's exoneration."[10]

In Long's own death penalty case, he lost a 1991 appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The next year, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his request for writ of certiorari, and his execution was scheduled for September 1992. He received a stay of execution, and his appeals continued for several years.[1]

Overdose

Long exhausted his appeals and was scheduled for execution on December 8, 1999. Two days before the scheduled execution, Long was found unresponsive after taking an overdose of antipsychotic medication. He was placed on life support and admitted to an intensive care unit in Galveston, Texas.[11] On December 7, Long improved enough that his breathing tube was able to be removed, and his condition was upgraded from critical to serious on December 8. He remained on oxygen.[11]

State officials asked intensive care physician Alexander Duarte to sign an affidavit stating that it would be safe to transport Long to Huntsville. Duarte refused, saying that under normal circumstances Long would have stayed in intensive care for another day or two and warning that Long still required continual medical care. State officials arranged a medically supervised transport from Galveston to Huntsville via airplane.[11]

Execution

Long's attorneys appealed to Texas governor George W. Bush for a 30-day stay of execution given Long's hospitalization. Bush was out of state campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, so Lt. Governor Rick Perry was left with the decision. Perry refused to grant a stay, and a spokesperson for Bush said that the governor agreed with Perry's decision. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Long's final appeal, and he was taken to the execution chamber. He was executed, as originally scheduled, on December 8, 1999.[11]

Long gave a last statement, saying:

Ah, just ah sorry y'all. I think of tried everything I could to get in touch with y'all to express how sorry I am. I, I never was right after that incident happened. I sent a letter to somebody, you know a letter outlining what I feel about everything. But anyway I just wanted, right after that apologize to you. I'm real sorry for it. I was raised by the California Youth Authority, I can't really pin point where it started, what happened but really believe that's just the bottom line, what happened to me was in California. I was in their reformatory schools and penitentiary, but ah they create monsters in there. That's it, I have nothing else to say. Thanks for coming Jack.[12]

Notes

1. "Media Advisory: David Martin Long scheduled to be executed". texasattorneygeneral.gov. December 7, 1999. Archived from the original on March 12, 2017. Retrieved March 9, 2017.
2. Graczyk, Michael (December 8, 1999). "David Long executed in Texas". AP News Archive. Retrieved March 8, 2017.
3. Pugh, Carol (October 3, 1986). "Search ends in murder". The News-Press. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
4. "Texas ax-slaying suspect arrested". The Times. October 25, 1986. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
5. "Suspect confesses, wants to be executed". The Times. October 27, 1986. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
6. "Man convicted in ax slayings". The Times (Shreveport). February 8, 1987. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
7. "Ax killer sentenced". The News Journal. February 11, 1987. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
8. White, pp. 59–60.
9. White, p. 60.
10. White, pp. 65–66.
11. Yardley, Jim (December 9, 1999). "Texan who took overdose is executed". The New York Times. Retrieved March 9, 2017.
12. "Death Row Information: David Long". Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Retrieved March 8, 2017.

References

• White, Welsh S. (2009). Litigating in the Shadow of Death: Defense Attorneys in Capital Cases. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472021591.