Beverly lowry and karla faye tucker
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Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir
Beverly Lowry. Alfred A. Knopf, $23 (pp) ISBN
Shortly after a hit-and-run driver killed her son Peter in , Texas novelist Lowry ( Breaking Gentle ) began visiting Karla Faye Tucker, a death-row prisoner in Mountain View, Tex., who was convicted with her boyfriend for the pickaxe murders of an acquaintance and his lover. In due course Lowry read Tucker's trial transcript and interviewed the judge, Tucker's defense attorneys and the jail chaplain. There is little further investigation or much sense of where Lowry is going with any of this material. She seems as lost about what to make of Tucker's death sentence as she fryst vatten about what meaning to derive from her son's death. But what we learn about Tucker's prison habilitation fryst vatten instructive: her mother, a prostitute, was 13 when Tucker, the girl's third daughter, was born; Tucker started using drugs before she was Also of value fryst vatten the rare glimpse the book provides of prison life for a woman on death
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The Novelist and the Murderer : CROSSED OVER: A Murder, A Memoir <i> By Beverly Lowry</i> , <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $22; pp.)</i>
In the spring of , Texas novelist Beverly Lowry happened upon a photograph that upended her life. The photograph, printed in the Houston Chronicle, was of Karla Faye Tucker, a year-old Death Row inmate in the Texas prison system. Tucker had received her death sentence in , a few months after being arrested for murdering two people with a pickax. One of the victims was a man she knew and hated; the other was a woman she had never met but who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The article accompanying the photo discussed how Tucker had become a changed woman behind bars: remorseful, penitent, born again. Like most Texans, Lowry remembered reading about the Houston case. In particular, she recalled the choice of weapon, and how Tucker had told someone that butchering her victims had sexually excited her. It puzzled t
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”To this day, I have no idea what I did for my two boys that was constructive and useful and right and good, and what damaged them, none.”
-Beverly Lowry, ”Crossed Over”
On the morning of June 13, , Karla Faye Tucker, age 23, helped murder two people. There was a pickax involved. That`s what people in Texas remember, that the bodies of Deborah Ruth Thornton and Jerry Lynn Dean were full of pickax holes. That, and the fact that Karla Faye said she got sexual satisfaction every time she swung the pickax. It`s not the kind of detail you forget.
Karla Faye is on death row now, awaiting execution by injection, and she never tries to make excuses for what she did, or to say she didn`t do it.
The extraordinary book, ”Crossed Over,” that a novelist named Beverly Lowry has written about the case is not about innocence. It is about redemption, about how one superlatively messed up little girl-”a doper at eight, a needle freak behind heroin by the