1995-02-22
RAPIST AND TWO-TIME KILLER IS EXECUTED IN TEXAS
A rapist and two-time murderer was executed by injection for hacking a pregnant woman to death with a hunting knife.
Samuel Hawkins, 51, did not respond when asked by a warden if he had a final statement. He never acknowledged the presence of five witnesses, including his son and a sister standing a few feet away from him.
Hawkins confessed to killing 19-year-old Abbe Hamilton in her home in Borger in May 1977. Hamilton, who was six months pregnant, was stabbed nearly 20 times and nearly decapitated.
Hawkins also had been sentenced to death for the abduction, rape and murder of 12-year-old Rhonda Keys of Amarillo in 1976. He was linked to about 40 rapes in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas.
According to psychiatrists who interviewed Hawkins, who is black, he said his father told him the best way to get back at whites was to attack white women. Hamilton was white.
After he was arrested, Hawkins told police that he had been looking to rape someone and had checked doors of houses until he found one that was open.
Late Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal contending that Hawkins wasn't warned that his conversations with a state-appointed psychiatrist could be used against him at trial. It was the seventh execution this year in Texas, which has put 92 people to death since the 1976 Supreme Court decision allowing states to resume using the death penalty. Both totals are the highest in the nation.
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