Execution Report: Danny Bible

Danny Paul Bible, 66, was executed by lethal injection on 27 June 2018 in Huntsville, Texas for the rape and murder of a woman in his home.

On Sunday, 27 May 1979, a man discovered a woman's body along the slope of a bayou in Houston. The woman, Inez Deaton, was 20 years old. Her body had eleven stab wounds, and bruises covered her head. She was not wearing pants, her underwear had been partially torn from her body, her legs were spread apart, and she had trauma on her vagina and anus, indicating she had been sexually assaulted.

A neighbor reported that Deaton had come by her house a few days earlier asking to use her telephone. She suggested to Deaton that she use the phone at Bible's home, which was next door. Another neighbor saw Deaton enter Bible's house. No one saw Deaton alive after that.

Bible, then 27, whose sister was friends with Deaton, disappeared a few days after Deaton's body was discovered. The case of Deaton's murder was considered unsolved for almost 20 years.

Bible went to Wyoming and Montana for a while. He committed aggravated kidnapping, theft, and rape in Montana, then returned to Texas. In 1984, Bible pleaded guilty to murder and robbery for two separate crimes. The murder was of Pam Hudgins in Palo Pinto County, west of Fort Worth. He was given sentences of 20 and 25 years in prison, respectively. He was paroled in 1992. At the time, parole of violent offenders was common in Texas due to strict prison population caps imposed by U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice.

On 7 November 1998, Bible burst into Tera Robinson's hotel room in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana and raped her. He was arrested in Florida and brought back to Louisiana. On 16 December 1998, Bible confessed to attacking Robinson. He also admitted to Deaton's 1979 murder. Authorities in Texas were contacted, and they took his confession to that crime on 18 December.

In his confession, Bible stated that he was watching television in his home when Deaton came to the door. He immediately grabbed her and forced her to have sex with him. He remembered strangling her and using a knife on her. He remembered putting her in the trunk of a car and dumping her body.

Bible also confessed to raping his sister-in-law, Tracy Powers, in 1983 and then killing her and her 4-month-old son, Justin, in Parker County, west of Fort Worth. Powers was roommates with Pam Hudgins, the woman whose killing Bible had gone to prison for, and he killed them on the same day. He also confessed to raping his five young nieces between 1996 and 1998, while he was on parole, and the rape of an 11-year-old girl in Montana. In all, he confessed to four killings and at least nine rapes.

Investigators determined that the weapon used to stab Deaton to death was an ice pick. He was dubbed "the ice pick killer" in some Houston media reports.

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