Execution Report: Arthur Burton

Arthur Lee Burton, 54, was executed by lethal injection on 7 August 2024 in Huntsville, Texas for the attempted rape and murder of a woman while she was jogging.

On Tuesday, 29 July 1997, Burton, then 27, was riding his bicycle along White Oak Bayou in northwest Houston. He spotted Nancy Adleman, 48, jogging along the bayou. According to Burton's confession, he rode up behind Adleman, pushed his bicycle down the embankment, dragged her into a nearby wooded area, and choked her until she was unconscious. He then removed her shorts and underwear and attempted to have sex with her, but in his nervousness, he could not. When she regained consciousness, she began screaming. She asked Burton whether he knew God and said she forgave him. She told him that he did not have to do it and that he was a handsome man. Burton said he got up and was going to leave, but she grabbed his ear and started screaming again. Burton choked her unconscious again and dragged her into a hole. He then began to leave again, but he saw a man walking by. He went back to Adleman, unlaced one of her shoes, and "tied her shoestring around her neck." He then retrieved his bicycle and rode away.

The police discovered Adleman's body the next morning in a hole about three to four feet deep, located in a heavily wooded area off the bayou jogging trail. The victim's shorts and panties had been removed and discarded some distance away from the body. She had been strangled with her shoelace. Her body looked as if she had been badly beaten.

Burton lived nearby and had been seen riding his bicycle along White Oak Bayou. He was arrested on 8 August. He initially denied killing Adleman and denied that he ever rode his bicycle along the bayou. He eventually gave the confession related above.

Sharon Lalen testified that she was watching her children play by the bayou around 7:20 p.m. She turned around and was startled by a "dirty and angry-looking man on a bicycle" standing very close to her. Lalen said, "Hello," but the man only gave her a mean look. Feeling threatened, Lalen called her children and went home. As she was calling her children, she saw Adleman jogging along the bayou. She identified Burton as the man on the bicycle.

Burton claimed that the police slapped and beat a false confession out of him.

At Burton's punishment hearing, the state presented evidence that in 1988, when he was eighteen, he participated in 39 burglaries of vehicles and outbuildings in a single month. He and his co-defendants stole guns, radios, fishing equipment, and other items.

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