Scheduled execution is first of three
01:29 PM CST on Tuesday, December 9, 2003
HUNTSVILLE, Texas - Confronted by gunman Billy Frank Vickers and asked if he wanted to die, Arthur City grocery store owner Phillip Kinslow had his own gun in his pickup truck and was quick to respond with the same question.
Then both men opened fire.
Kinslow, 50, wound up with three wounds March 12, 1993. One was a fatal shot to the chest. Vickers, who never got the bag of money Kinslow had with him, also took three bullets, but survived, was arrested and condemned for the slaying.
He was set to die Tuesday night.
Vickers would be the 25th condemned prisoner to receive lethal injection this year in Texas and the first of three scheduled to die on consecutive nights this week.
Vickers already was a career criminal with numerous convictions and prison terms when he and a couple of buddies set out to rob the Lamar County grocery store owner. They'd inspected his store several times and watched his pattern of taking a money bag with him home to a rural area outside Arthur City, about 120 miles northeast of Dallas and just south of the Red River that divides Texas from Oklahoma.
"It didn't go the way it was supposed to," one of the robbers' girlfriends would testify at Vickers' trial.
Vickers, arrested the next day hobbling on makeshift crutches about two miles from the shooting scene, gave a written confession to police, according to court records.
"With his past ... in my opinion, this is exactly what the capital murder sentencing scheme was for," said Kerye Ashmore, a prosecutor at Vickers' capital murder trial. "And the death penalty, he's just a poster child for it."
Vickers, now 58, insisted in a recent death row interview that he wasn't responsible for Kinslow's death.
"I'm innocent," he told The Paris News. "I never confessed to shooting anyone."
In appeals, Vickers' lawyers argued the evidence was insufficient to tie him to Kinslow's fatal wounds.
A bullet taken from Vickers' knee came from Kinslow's .38-caliber pistol. His shoe print was found at Kinslow's gate. A hat found nearby had hairs that matched his hair. And .22-caliber hollow-point shells found at his home matched the bullets fired at Kinslow.
"There was too much and he was nailed," Ashmore said, disputing Vickers' claims of innocence. "It was pretty clear cut on guilt-innocence. And by the time we proved up his priors on punishment, I think the jury saw its duty pretty clearly."
Vickers first went to prison in 1967, getting a 21/2-year term for burglary. Then he picked up at least two more burglary convictions, plus multiple arson convictions and a federal gun possession conviction.
"He certainly ruined some lives," Ashmore said. "I've tried six death penalty cases and he certainly is high on the list of bad folks I've dealt with in 20 years of prosecuting."
Tommy Perkins, 51, who was with Vickers at the shooting scene, received a life prison term. Jason Martin, 34, who was supposed to be the getaway driver and was waiting a short distance away when the gunfire erupted, got 25 years.
On Wednesday, Kevin Lee Zimmerman, 42, was set to die for the 1987 fatal stabbing and robbery of a California man at a Beaumont motel. On Thursday, Bobby Lee Hines, 31, was set for injection for the 1991 robbery and fatal stabbing of a woman at a Dallas apartment.
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/120903dntextxexecute.9c9d0.html
