A Texas man convicted of fatally stabbing and beheading his three young children in 2003 was executed Thursday evening, hours after Oklahoma put another man to death. John Allen Rubio, 46, was pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. after a lethal injection at the state prison in Huntsville, the Associated Press reported.
Rubio was convicted of capital murder for the March 11, 2003, killings of 3-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John Esteban Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio in a Brownsville apartment on the U.S. border with Mexico. Prosecutors said Rubio believed the children were possessed by evil spirits. The killings so shook Brownsville that the apartment building was later demolished and the land turned into a park and community garden.
Rubio was first sentenced to death in November 2003, after a jury convicted him on three counts of capital murder. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction in 2007, ruling that statements from his common-law wife, Angela Camacho, had been wrongly admitted as evidence, and Rubio was retried. A second jury convicted him again in July 2010, and he was sentenced to death a second time.
Camacho, the children's mother, pleaded guilty in 2005 and was sentenced to three concurrent life sentences with parole eligibility after 40 years. She remains imprisoned, with her earliest parole hearing scheduled in March 2043.
Rubio's final appeals failed this year. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his case in January, a state judge ruled him mentally competent to be executed on October 7, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed his last appeal on November 6. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously denied clemency on Tuesday, clearing the way for Thursday's execution.
The execution came hours after Oklahoma carried out an execution earlier Thursday, making it the second execution in the United States on the same day.
