Karla Faye Tucker (November 18, 1959 – February 3, 1998) was an American woman sentenced to death for killing two people with a pickaxe during a burglary. She was the first woman to be executed in the United States since Velma Barfield in 1984 in North Carolina, and the first in Texas since Chipita Rodriguez in 1863. She was convicted of murder in Texas in 1984 and executed by lethal injection after 14 years on death row.
Due to her gender and widely publicized conversion to Christianity, she inspired an unusually large national and international movement that advocated the commutation of her sentence to life without parole, a movement that included a few foreign government officials.
Karla Tucker was born and raised in Houston, Texas, the youngest of three sisters. Her father Larry was a longshoreman. The marriage of her parents was troubled, and Tucker started smoking cigarettes with her sisters when she was eight years old.During her parents’ divorce proceedings when she was 10 years old, Tucker learned that her birth was the result of an extramarital affair.
By age 12, she had begun taking drugs and having. She dropped out of school at age 14 and followed her mother Carolyn, a rock groupie, into prostitution and began traveling with the Allman Brothers Band, The Marshall Tucker Band, and the Eagles.
At 16, she was briefly married to a handy man named Stephen Griffith. When she was in her early 20s, she began hanging out with bikers and met a woman named Shawn Dean and her husband Jerry Lynn Dean. The couple introduced her in 1981 to a man named Daniel Ryan Garrett (Danny Garrett). Then 21 years old, Tucker started dating 35-year-old Garrett.
