The murder of Inez Deaton

There was no forensic breakthrough in this case. It was solved by Bible's own words, spoken to police who were investigating something else. In 1979 Deaton's killing went unsolved. A federal judge's later summary of the record describes a neighbor who sent her to Bible's house to use the telephone and another who saw her go in, but nothing that tied him to her death. Around the time of her funeral Bible disappeared and spent the next two decades moving between states and committing violent crimes, according to the same record. On November 7, 1998, he attacked a woman in a Louisiana hotel room. Police arrested him in Florida, and the Associated Press reported that he asked detectives for a Bible and a pack of cigarettes and began talking. On December 16, 1998, he gave Louisiana police a statement about the hotel attack. During that questioning, the court recorded, he told them he had murdered Deaton, and Louisiana police called Texas. On December 18 he gave two tape-recorded statements. In the first he confessed to killing Deaton, though he claimed not to remember the assault or the killing itself. In the second he confessed to a 1983 killing of a woman and her baby. Harris County charged him with capital murder in March 2001. His lawyers moved to suppress the statements and the trial court refused. At the 2003 trial, family members described suspicious behavior by Bible after Deaton vanished, but the federal judge wrote that the State's case turned on the confession, and that apart from that behavior only the confession connected him to the killing. The jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 2005, a federal court denied habeas relief in 2014, the Fifth Circuit refused further review in 2016, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene that October. Reports differ on his arrest date (1998 or 1999) and on whether Deaton was a friend of his sister or his cousin.