Chronicle file
Kynara Carreiro, 7, left, and Kristen Wiley, 10, are seen in a family photo.
Posted on 09/23/2002 11:11:57 AM PDT by Illbay
By MIKE TOLSON
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
In the 11 lines of bad verse that Rex Mays has posted on the only Web site that would give him a forum, he pleads for someone to "remember him for the best."
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Chronicle file
Kynara Carreiro, 7, left, and Kristen Wiley, 10, are seen in a family photo.
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Given what he did a decade ago, that won't prove easy.
There is nothing about his crime and little about the life that preceded it that invites favorable recollection.
Mays, 42, who is scheduled to be executed Tuesday in Huntsville, will forever be defined by his singular act of brutality visited on two young girls in northwest Harris County in 1992.
It was a moment that stunned the city. This was a time before Danielle van Dam or Samantha Runnion or even JonBenet Ramsey -- a time before it was common to associate the names of young girls with horrible incidents of violence.
When Mays finally confessed, 19 months after killing the daughters of two of his neighbors, it was hard to reconcile his words with the natural order of things.
Children playing in their suburban home on a summer day do not have cause for serious worry, especially with an older brother just across the street, a mother three doors down. That's why people moved there. Nobody in the neighborhood could fathom that degree of evil in their midst.
"You're on your own street, and your daughter is playing with a neighbor a few doors down in the middle of the day in July, and she ends up stabbed to death?" said Lyn McClellan, who prosecuted Mays. "You've gotta be kidding me. That just doesn't compute."
Mays helped teach Houston that safety is a myth. On July 20, 1992, hours after being fired from the latest in a string of failed jobs, he stabbed and slashed 7-year-old Kynara Carreiro 23 times, five times in the face. Kristin Wiley, her 10-year-old friend, was stabbed 18 times. Both were stabbed in the eyes. Neither girl was sexually assaulted.
Kynara's father, Robert, has long anticipated the day when Mays has to pay for what he did.
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Mays after his arrest
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Uh-Oh the Clown
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"What it means to me is that I'll probably sleep a little bit better, knowing that he'll be gone," Carreiro said. "It's not going to change anything. It will never bring our daughter back. But he will certainly never have the opportunity to do this to another little girl. He's just evil, that's all. He needs to be dealt with and removed from society."
Mays, who sometimes entertained children as Uh-Oh the Clown, blamed his actions on a bad day. Arriving home early, worrying how he would explain his latest job fiasco to his wife, he told police that he went over to the Wiley home next door to complain about loud music coming from Kristin's upstairs bedroom.
According to Mays' confession, Kristin sassed him when he asked her to turn down the music.
"Here I had just gotten fired and some kid's telling me no," he said.
Mays said he went into the kitchen with the girls behind him telling him to leave.
"It was just like something came over me," he said. "All the trouble came back to me."
He grabbed a knife and faced the girls, who screamed and ran. Kristin shouted that she was going to tell her dad. Mays followed and stabbed her.
"Still feeling badly about the way things had gone," he said.
Eventually he ended up straddling both girls on a bed in her brother's bedroom. He stabbed at Kynara's eyes when she looked at him. Mays said he was "reacting to what (he) had been taught in the Marines" when he yanked Kristin's head back and slashed her throat.
Afterward Mays went home and changed shirts. His wife did not notice the blood on his legs. He hurried to the shower and hid his bloodied pants and the murder weapon in a duffel bag.
Within minutes, Kristin's brother discovered the girls' bodies. Sheriff's deputies were soon swarming the neighborhood. Mays took it all in from his driveway.
"He gets a lawn chair and pours himself a Coke and sits down to watch," McClellan said. "Here's a guy who just killed two girls, and now he's sitting there in a lawn chair watching people run around like on a canvas he had painted."
Eager to appear helpful and divert attention, Mays told deputies that he had seen two men, one black and one Hispanic, coming over the Wileys' fence. The story, which Mays soon had to recant after failing a polygraph test, led to his becoming the prime suspect.
Amazingly, given the violence of the crime, no physical evidence tied him to the scene. It took a sustained effort by Detective Bob Valerio to bring the case to trial.
Valerio befriended Mays, drank with him, accompanied him to topless bars, spent hours listening to him, even let Mays accompany him on official business -- all in an effort to build a rapport that might someday lead to a confession.
Finally, on Feb. 10, 1994, it did. After failing yet another polygraph, Mays agreed to accompany Valerio to his office to discuss the case yet again. This time, however, he started to talk. He talked for four hours. His confession was boiled down to a detailed, six-page statement.
At Mays' trial, FBI behavioral scientist Alan Brantley testified that he was a continuing threat. He said that children did not incite the proper responses of sympathy and affection in him, but instead aroused anger and sexuality.
"When violence becomes eroticized, it's very dangerous," Brantley said.
He also said Mays' personality disorder was severe and irreparable.
"This was not a glitch in a sterling personality," Brantley said.
In arguing for the death penalty, McClellan acknowledged that Mays' troubled personality may have had its origin in an abusive, uncaring mother -- as his aunt testified in the punishment phase -- but that it no longer mattered.
"That damage was too permanent and the resulting act too heinous not to respond with a death penalty," he said. "Make sure Rex Mays has no more bad days so he has no more victims."
Mays declined recent requests for an interview.
[snortle] I'm in trouble then, bro! ;)
Hey what's the weather like in Dallas in November?
I think it was his sitting in the lawn chair enjoying the show afterward that really did it, at least for me. He'll be getting a painless needle in the arm - his victims got thrown down and sat on by somebody three times their size and stabbed repeatedly in the face. Against that the article tries to balance the good things he did in his life, and hey, he'd had a bad day...which is beyond weak, it's an insult to the intelligence.
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And dress him/make him up as his clown alter ego for the execution.
Seeing THAT would scare the bejeezus out of any budding criminals in the audience...
In reading this, I don't notice one word of remorse, of guilt for murdering two little girls. He'd had such a bad day, you see, and the older one smarted off to him after he'd entered the house without permission and went upstairs. I mean, it was such a bad day for him, doncha understand? < /sarcasm>
Part of the definition of a sociopath is that they are unable to feel anything for anyone else. Just the sociopath is all that matters, the feelings of others don't register. He even brought a chair out to his front lawn to watch the show as the police were frantically investigating and the the girls' families were in broken-hearted grief and horror. He'd had such a bad day...
I remember this, why is it that so much time passes between the conviction and the death chamber when there is no doubt at all the guy is guilty?I hear ya. The mandatory appeals process on death penalty outcomes. It just takes a while. Texas actually does a pretty good job. In California just recently, Westerfield was given the death penalty in the van Damm murder. The FOX News Channel guest Napolitano said that their appeals process is so involved that it would take TWENTY years to work through the appeals before he is executed. I think the current average for them is 16 years?
The youngest of these two girls would be seventeen now, and the other 20. It's not right that these guys get to live off the taxpayer for so long.
I'm not sure what the Texas average is, but somewhere around 8-10 years I believe.....
Not even close. I'd get the confession first, though..........privately.
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