On May 14th, 2026, Edward Lee Busby became the 600th person executed by the state of Texas. But the crime that put him on that gurney inside the Huntsville unit started in a parking lot 22 years earlier. 23 ft of duct tape. That is how much was wrapped around a 77-year-old woman’s face inside the trunk of her own car.

Her nose was physically pushed sideways from the pressure. She could not breathe. She suffocated slowly, sealed in that trunk somewhere on a highway in Oklahoma. And it all started because she went grocery shopping on a Friday morning. The morning of January 30th, 2004 was mild and pleasant for a winter day in Fort Worth, Texas.

The sun had come out. The parking lot at the Tom Thumb grocery store at Hulen and Bellaire Drive, just southwest of downtown Fort Worth, was busy with weekend shoppers coming and going from their cars. One of those shoppers was Laura Crane. She was 77 years old, a retired director of the Starpoint School at Texas Christian University, a school dedicated to children with learning disabilities.

Friday was her regular shopping day.    She lived nearby. She knew the store. And she was still sitting in her car in that Tom Thumb parking lot when Edward Lee Busby walked up and opened her driver’s side door. He said two words,    “Slide over.” She complied. A woman named Kathleen Latimer, who went by Kitty, climbed into the back seat of Laura’s car.

Kitty owed money for drugs in Fort Worth. They needed a car to get out of town. When Edward spotted Laura sitting alone in that grocery store parking lot, he made his decision. A man named Steve Humble, who worked at a men’s clothing store called the Squire Shop next door to Tom Thumb had seen them moments earlier.

He noticed a very blonde woman walking fast across the parking lot trying to catch up with a man about 30 yards ahead of her who had been testing car door handles. That man was Edward. From the Tom Thumb parking lot, Edward drove Laura’s car. Kitty sat behind him and Laura sat in the front passenger seat. By all accounts, Laura was calm.

She turned to Kitty in the back seat and said, “Hi, darling.” Then she turned to Edward behind the wheel and asked what his mother would say if she knew he was doing this. A 77-year-old woman had just been carjacked outside a grocery store in broad daylight in Fort Worth and her instinct was to talk to these two like human beings.

They stopped at a gas station and they used Laura’s ATM card to withdraw money. Then Edward drove Laura’s car to the back of a vacant house near Airport Freeway and Beach Street in Fort Worth.  He got Laura out of the front seat. He walked her around to the back of the car. He opened the trunk and he told her to get in.

They drove north on Interstate 35 through Texas toward Oklahoma. They stopped at stores along the highway. At one of them, Kitty went inside and bought a roll of duct tape from the shelf. Edward kept honking the horn in the parking lot for her to hurry up. They checked into a motel room along the highway. They drove around looking for crack cocaine.

At some point during those 36 to 48 hours with Laura still locked inside the trunk of her own car, Edward wrapped that duct tape around her face, layer after layer over her nose, over her mouth, over everything. The medical examiner in Oklahoma later testified that approximately 23 ft of duct tape had been applied to Laura’s face with enough force to physically deviate her nose from its natural position.

She could not breathe through any part of her face, and she slowly suffocated inside that trunk on a cold winter drive through Oklahoma. After Edward and Kitty discovered Laura had died in the trunk, they placed her body wrapped in a motel bed sheet down an embankment off an Interstate 35 service road near Davis, Oklahoma, just north of the Texas border.

And they kept driving north in Laura’s car. Two days after the abduction on February 1st, 2004, an Oklahoma City police officer pulled Edward over for multiple traffic violations. Edward was still behind the wheel of Laura Crane’s car. He was arrested on the spot in Oklahoma City. Over the next several days inside police interrogation rooms, Edward gave statement after statement to the FBI, to Oklahoma police, and to Fort Worth homicide detectives.

His first story was that he and Kitty had gotten the car from a man named JD back in Fort Worth, and that Laura’s body had already been in the trunk. He claimed they had simply disposed of her along the Interstate, but that story fell apart under questioning. On February 3rd, 2004, Edward led investigators to Laura’s body himself.

Standing at that embankment off the service road near Davis, Oklahoma, he gave a tape-recorded statement and abandoned the JD story entirely. He admitted that he and Kitty had abducted Laura from that Tom Thumb parking lot, robbed her, and killed her. But Edward pointed the finger at Kitty. He told investigators that Kitty had been the brains of the entire operation, that he had been following her lead the whole time, and that she had told him to tape Laura’s head up.

 He said several times that he had not meant to kill her. He said he had prayed with Laura before it happened. Kitty told Fort Worth detectives a completely different story. She said Edward was the one in control from the moment they walked into that Tom Thumb parking lot. She said he had directed everything. And that when she asked him what he was doing testing car doors, he told her to shut up.

And the physical evidence from the crime lab sealed it. Only Edward’s fingerprints were found on the duct tape recovered from Laura’s face. Not Kitty’s fingerprints, his. Kitty pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison in February 2006. She was sent to a women’s facility at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas.

In the years since, behind those prison walls, she earned her first Braille certification. Other inmates at Gatesville came to know her as Mama Kitty. She remains locked up to this day, now 61 years old, with a parole eligibility date    in 2034. But Edward went to trial in Tarrant County. In November 2005, Edward Lee Busby stood trial for capital murder inside the Tarrant County Courthouse in downtown Fort Worth.

The defense attorneys leaned hard on Edward’s recorded statements to police. The argument was that Edward hadn’t intended to cause Laura’s death, that he was following Kitty’s instructions, that there was no deliberate plan to kill anyone, only a robbery and carjacking that spiraled out of control on the highway.

But the prosecution put the Tarrant County Medical Examiner on the witness stand. And the testimony was devastating. 23 ft of duct tape wrapped with enough force to physically move bone in Laura’s face. Laura had not died quickly in that trunk. She had not died painlessly. She had suffocated slowly, sealed shut inside the trunk of her own car while Edward drove through rural Oklahoma looking for crack cocaine.

On November 11th, 2005, the jury inside that Tarrant County courtroom convicted Edward of capital murder and sentenced him to death. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin affirmed the conviction and the death sentence. For the next two decades, Edwards’ defense team fought the sentence through every court they could reach.

One of the central arguments Edwards’ lawyers raised repeatedly was that Edward was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty under the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins versus Virginia. IQ tests administered over the years produced varying results. His lawyers presented evidence that both a defense expert and an expert hired by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office had found him intellectually disabled.

The District Attorney’s own office had even recommended reducing Edwards’ sentence to life in prison. But the trial judge in Fort Worth disagreed with those findings. In 2023, that judge upheld the death sentence. Edwards’ execution was first scheduled for May 6th, 2020. It was stayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A second execution date was set for 2021. It was stayed again by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for a disability review. A third date was set for May 14th, 2026. Six days before the scheduled execution on May 8th, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans issued a temporary stay. In a two-to-one decision, Judge Stephen Higginson wrote that in a matter of life and death, the court must be certain it applies the proper constitutional rule before a state can execute someone.

It looked for the third time like Edward Busby would not be put to death on his scheduled date. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office filed an emergency application with the United States Supreme Court in Washington, asking the justices to lift the stay. They argued Edwards’ claims were meritless and had already been litigated for years.

On the afternoon of May 14th, just hours before the scheduled execution inside the Huntsville Unit, the Supreme Court sided with Texas. In a divided six-to-three decision, the court lifted the Fifth Circuit stay and cleared the way for the lethal injection to proceed that evening. All three liberal justices dissented.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the court was granting emergency relief to ensure that Texas could carry out the execution that night. She wrote that in capital cases, the court rarely intervenes to preserve life, and she said she could not understand the court’s rush to extinguish it. Edwards’ attorney scrambled to file one more emergency motion with the Fifth Circuit that Thursday evening.

It was denied within the hour. Every legal door had closed inside every courthouse from Fort Worth to Washington. And Kitty, from her prison cell at Gatesville, had an opinion about the intellectual disability argument. She told an interviewer that Edward was not mentally impaired. She called him plain mean.

 If you are finding this one hard to look away from, hit subscribe. I cover cases like this every week. Meanwhile, the woman Edward and Kitty took from that Tom Thumb parking lot had spent her entire career shaping the lives of children who needed help the most. Laura Lee Crane had graduated from Paschal High School in Fort Worth, earned a bachelor’s degree from Sweet Briar College in Virginia, and a master’s from Texas Christian University.

Her career was devoted to children with learning disabilities at the Starpoint School on the TCU campus. She authored a nationally recognized reading program for students with learning differences and led the school for over 20 years as its director. The university’s provost at the time, William Koehler, said Laura’s impact on the TCU community had been profound.

That she was beloved, that her students loved her. She had driven to a grocery store on an ordinary Friday morning in Fort Worth. And when a stranger opened her car door and told her to slide over, she asked him what his mother would say. She was 77 years old. Texas abolished the special last meal program in 2011.

Edward was not allowed to choose a final meal. On the day of his execution at the Huntsville unit, he ate whatever was served to the general population that evening. On the evening of May 14th, 2026, Edward Lee Busby was led from his holding cell to the execution chamber inside the Huntsville unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

He was strapped to the gurney. When the warden asked if he had a final statement, Edward spoke directly to Laura’s family members who were watching through the witness room window. He told them, “Sir, ma’am, I am so sorry. I ask that you please Please don’t hate me and that you can find it in your heart to forgive me for the part that I played in what happened to her.

Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her.” He said he wished he could take it all back. He said he had no right to get in that car. He turned toward his sister who was praying on the other side of the glass and told her to find a church and pick up her cross. “I’m here because this is the will of God,” he said.

Prison officials began administering the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital. Edward took a sharp breath on the gurney, closed his eyes, and gasped. Then he made snoring sounds that grew progressively quieter inside the chamber. Within 40 seconds, all movement stopped. Edward Lee Busby was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m.

 on May 14th, 2026 inside the Huntsville unit in Texas. He was 53 years old and was the 600th person executed in the state of Texas since 1982. What do you think? Has justice been served? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.