HUNTSVILLE, Texas - A 66-year-old Texas death row inmate who confessed to four murders and at least nine rapes is set for lethal injection amid his lawyers' concerns that multiple health issues make it likely his execution will be botched and cause him unconstitutional pain.
Danny Paul Bible, known as the "Ice Pick Killer", was condemned for killing a woman in Houston nearly 40 years ago.
Twenty-year-old Inez Deaton was stabbed with an ice pick, raped and left on the bank of a bayou. Deaton was married with a 2-year-old daughter.
Bible's lawyers say his health problems will prevent Texas prison technicians from inserting an IV for the lethal drugs. They're proposing a firing squad or nitrogen gas as means of execution, but Texas law only allows lethal injection.
Bible's attorneys are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to halt Wednesday evening's scheduled lethal injection.
Deaton wasn't Bible's only victim.
"He left a trail of carnage in his wake that included three homicides on the same day: the 1983 rape and murder of Pam Hudgins and the double murder of Tracy Powers and her four-month-old son, Justin, according to Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg.
Bible was caught and pleaded guilty to murdering Hudgins and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
He was paroled in February 1992, and following his release, raped five young family members.
He was captured again in 1998, following his brutal attack and rape of another victim in Louisiana. During the interrogation for that attack, he confessed to Deaton’s murder nearly two decades earlier.
A Harris County jury convicted Bible of capital murder in 2003 and sentenced him to death.
“Some criminals’ actions are so heinous, they earn the label ‘worst of the worst,’” Ogg said in an earlier statement. “The jury who listened to the facts and saw the evidence of the crimes Danny Bible committed clearly reached that conclusion by sentencing him to death.”