Execution Report: Tyrone Fuller

Tyrone Leroy Fuller, 35, was executed by lethal injection on 7 July 1999 in Huntsville, Texas for the rape and murder of a woman during a burglary of her home.

On Tuesday night, 19 January 1988, Fuller, then 24, John McCrew, 24, and Kenneth Harmon, 23, broke into the apartment of Andrea Duke in Paris, near the Red River in northeast Texas. Duke, 26, was beaten with a blunt object, whipped with an electrical cord, stabbed multiple times, and raped. The assailants drove off with her car, jewelry, and credit cards.

The victim crawled out of her bedroom and apartment, across the front lawn, and then died on the front steps of her neighbor's home. Her body was found there the next morning.

Fuller's fingerprints were found in the victim's car, which was discovered about a block from his home in Paris. He was arrested after using the stolen credit cards in Dallas, about 100 miles away.

Fuller confessed that he had been planning to break into Duke's apartment for about two weeks and had asked McCrew and Harmon to come with him. He said he was unaware anyone was home. When he discovered the woman, he informed the other two men and then went into another room to look for more items to steal. He said he heard scuffling in Duke's room and thought the other two were tying her up and putting her in the closet.

At Fuller's 1989 trial, which was moved from Lamar County two counties away to Grayson County, prosecutors used the then-new technology of DNA testing on body fluids and hairs recovered from the victim to identify him as the rapist and to exclude the two co-defendants as participants in the rape. Fuller was also placed at the scene by a bloody footprint.

A pathologist testified that Duke likely survived for several hours after the attack, but couldn't call out for help because one of the 44 stab wounds she received severed her vocal chords. Three other potentially fatal stab wounds were to her chest.

Cleon Drake, one of Fuller's probation officers, testified that he nicknamed himself "Evil."

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