Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Texas is set to execute Garcia White on Tuesday for multiple murders he committed between 1989 and 1995.
White, 61, was convicted in 1996 of murdering twin sisters Annette and Bernette Edwards, who were 16 years old. Their mother, Bonita, was killed in the same incident, but he was not tried for that crime.
A jury sentenced him to death after learning that he had also killed Greta Williams in 1989 and Hai Pham, a convenience store clerk, in 1995 but was not tried for either crime.
White has sat on death row since, filing multiple unsuccessful appeals in state and federal court. His latest appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was denied on Sunday, and a petition to stay his execution was pending at the U.S. Supreme Court as of Tuesday morning.
He would be the fifth person executed in Texas in 2024 if he does not win a stay of execution. The state intends to execute one more inmate, Robert Roberson, on Oct. 17.
The bodies of Bonita, Annette and Bernette Edwards were found inside their home in December 1989, each of them with multiple stab wounds in the neck and chest, according to court documents.
Their murders went unsolved for around six years. A break in the case came in 1996 when, during an interview about Pham’s slaying, White’s friend, Tecumseh Manuel, told police that White had admitted to killing the Edwards family and Williams.
White first denied any involvement in killing the Edwards family, then later told police that he and a man named Terrence Moore had gone to the house to do drugs and have sex with Bonita. White said that a fight ensued when they would not share the drugs with Bonita, and Moore stabbed her and her two daughters.
Upon further investigation, law enforcement discovered that Moore had been killed four months before the crime. When confronted, White confessed to killing all three women himself.
During White’s sentencing phase, prosecutors presented evidence that White had confessed to killing Williams and Pham in addition to the Edwards family.
Pham was a Vietnamese immigrant running a convenience store in Houston. His 16-year-old son testified at sentencing that two men, one of them White, had come into the store in July 1995 and fatally beat his father before leaving with some cigarettes.
Williams was found in an abandoned home in November 1989. She had been beaten to death and rolled up in a carpet.
“Five murders in three transactions, including two teenage girls, is simply too much bloodshed and carnage to ignore,” Joshua Reiss, the head of post conviction writs at the Harris County district attorney’s office, said on Friday. “This is the type of case for which the death penalty is appropriate.”
In his efforts to stop his execution, White tried to use Texas’s 2013 junk science law, a groundbreaking provision that allows people to obtain new trials when the science used to convict them has since changed or been discredited. He won a temporary stay in 2015 under the law.
White said that he had obtained DNA evidence pointing to another unidentified male at the scene where he killed the Edwards girls. He also argued that he was suffering a cocaine-induced psychotic break when he killed the Edwards family, and that scientific studies since the crime have demonstrated the effect of heavy cocaine use on the brain.
If available to the jury at the time, White’s lawyers argued, those factors would have resulted in a sentence other than the death penalty.
A split Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected that argument, with the prevailing opinion finding that the junk science law only applied to changed science in the conviction phase of a trial, not in the sentencing phase. The Texas House passed legislation to amend the junk science statute to apply to the sentencing phase, as well, but the measure did not move in the state Senate.
White also argued that according to the latest psychiatric guidance, he qualified as intellectually disabled and was thus ineligible for the death penalty.
“Mr. White’s case illustrates everything wrong with the current death penalty in Texas,” his lawyers wrote on Friday in his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. “He has evidence that he is intellectually disabled, which the CCA refuses to permit him to develop. He has significant evidence that could result in a sentence other than death at punishment but cannot present it or develop it on a new writ.”
His lawyers added: “None of this ever saw the light of day with a jury and none of it has been permitted to be developed or presented.”
The state, meanwhile, argued that these claims were properly addressed by the courts since White’s conviction.
“White presents no reason to delay his execution date any longer,” the state wrote to the U.S. Supreme Court. “The Edwards family — and the victims of White’s other murders, Greta Williams and Hai Pham — deserve justice for his decades-old crimes.”
Patrick McCann, White’s longtime lawyer, said that White — who is now a grandfather and was selected to serve in the death row ministry program — had spent the past 28 years in prison “trying to become a better man for the right reasons, for his family and for the people he loves.”
McCann argued that White’s execution would not serve any deterrent or retributive purposes three decades after his crimes, and that he was “a different man today than he was 30 years ago.”
“Any murder is not something that should be ignored,” McCann said in an interview. But, he added, “the guy they wanted to kill was probably undergoing a psychotic episode at that time, and is not the guy that’s up there today. He just isn’t.”
Pham’s survivors included his wife and four children under 21 years old — who had immigrated to Houston from Vietnam less than a year before — in addition to family still in their homeland. Pham, who had served in the South Vietnamese Navy, left for the United States in 1986 after the Vietnam War, according to his son, Hiep Tuan Pham, who was 17 at the time of his father’s death.
“His goal was for us to have a better life in the States,” Hiep, now 47, said in an interview.
His father’s plan at the time was to move the family to California, where he believed he could make a better living. The day of his murder, Hiep said, his father was “so happy” because the preparations for their move were just starting to come together. Then he was killed.
The family did not speak English yet, and Hiep remembered knocking on his neighbors’ doors to ask for donations to help pay for his father’s funeral. It would be years before Hiep learned what Father’s Day was. He mourned that he would never get to celebrate the day with his father over a beer.
“I don’t know him. I don’t know what made him kill my dad,” Hiep, who plans to attend the execution with his wife, said about White. “I just hope that he knows that because of all of this, we have suffered for a very long time.”
