Execution Report: Excell White

Robert Excell White, 61, was executed by lethal injection on 30 March 1999 in Huntsville, Texas for the robbery and murder of four men.

On Friday, 10 May 1974, White, then 36, fatally stabbed Roy Perryman, a gun collector, in Waco and stole more than two dozen weapons, including a .30-caliber carbine machine gun. He and two companions, James Livingston, 29, and Gary Livingston, 22, then drove north. Around daybreak the next morning, they pulled into a country store and gas station near Princeton in Collin County, northeast of Dallas. Store owner Preston Broyles, 73, was outside, helping customers Gary Coker and Billy St. John, both 18, put oil in their car. White ordered the three men inside the store and announced, "I'm not going to leave any witnesses." He had the men get on the floor, then he riddled them with machine gun fire. He and the Livingstons then took $6 from the cash register and $60 from the victims' wallets, left the store, and returned to Waco.

The victims were soon discovered by other customers. Broyles and Coker were dead, with multiple bullet wounds to their backs. St. John had been shot several times in the chest. He died en route to the hospital. Perryman's body was discovered in Waco later that morning.

The empty wallets of each of the three shooting victims were found along the highway at various places in Collin County.

White subsequently fled to Mississippi, where he told a cousin about the killings and turned himself in to police. He confessed to the shootings and to stabbing Perryman to death. He said that committing the murders "was like stepping on a fly."

28 guns from Perryman's collection were found in White's car. The murder weapon was not among them. White told deputies he tossed it into the Brazos River in Waco. Waco police later found it in the water under a bridge.

White said that he and his accomplices were drinking beer with Perryman at his house Friday night and discussed stealing his guns. White then told Perryman, "You have to go. Your time is up," then stabbed him to death.

"I am the one who killed those people," White said at a court hearing in 1976. "I ain't going to ask for forgiveness, because I don't deserve it." He said he wanted to be put to death, and quickly.

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