Execution Report: Robert Henry

Robert Loyd Henry, 41, was executed by lethal injection on 20 November 2003 in Huntsville, Texas for the murder of two women in their home.

On the 7 September 1993, the bodies of Carol Arnold, 57, and her mother, Hazel Rumohr, 83 were discovered inside their home in Portland. Both women had been severely beaten and stabbed. Arnold's cause of death was blunt trauma to the head. Rumohr's cause of death was a slashing stab wound across her chest. Arnold's body also had a rope attached to her leg.

Two months after the murders, Robert Henry, then 30, walked into the Corpus Christi police station and turned himself in. He told E. R. Frobish, an officer he knew, "I killed two people in Portland, and I want to turn myself in to you." He said that he killed the women after smoking marijuana. The soles of Henry's boots were matched to bloody footprints left at the crime scene. Rumohr's DNA was found in blood left in Henry's car, and Henry's blood was found inside the victims' home. The time of the murders was estimated as between midnight and 9:00 a.m. on 5 September.

Henry and Arnold's son had been friends during their teenage years, and Henry had regularly visited Arnold's home. He had maintained contact with Arnold and Rumohr over the years through Christmas cards.

At his trial, Henry pleaded innocent, despite his confession. A doctor testifying in his defense said that Henry panicked at the police station and told police whatever he believed would end the questioning quickly.

Paul Johnson, a co-worker of Henry's, testified that the day before Henry went to the police, they were watching a video together, and Henry told him, in tears, that he had "made his own bed and would have to lie in it."

The motive behind Arnold and Rumohr's murders was never clear. Prosecutors alluded to a possible connection to a bondage fetish, noting the rope that was found tied to Arnold's leg, plus Johnson's testimony that the video he and Henry watched together was an S&M video.

Henry had no previous criminal history.

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