Bio

Bobby James Moore was born on October 29, 1959. He grew up in Texas and was 20 years old at the time of the crime in April 1980. Moore struggled in school from an early age. By age 13, he had difficulty understanding basic concepts such as the days of the week, months of the year, seasons, telling time, measurements, and simple subtraction. Court records also state that he had limited reading and writing ability, had trouble keeping up with school lessons, and was sometimes separated from classmates and told to draw pictures instead of participating in regular classroom work. After failing every subject in ninth grade, Moore dropped out of high school.

The same court record states that Moore was later forced out of his home and survived on the streets, including eating from trash cans. These background facts became important many years later when his attorneys argued that he was intellectually disabled and therefore constitutionally ineligible for execution.

Before the murder, Moore had prior criminal history. During the punishment phase of his original capital trial, prosecutors introduced evidence of prior convictions, including burglary and aggravated robbery. Prosecutors also presented testimony linking him to two other small grocery store robberies in Houston on April 11 and April 18, 1980, the two Fridays before the fatal Birdsall Super Market robbery.

Murder Story

On April 25, 1980, Bobby James Moore took part in a robbery at Birdsall Super Market in Houston, Texas. The victim was Jim McCarble, a 73-year-old grocery store owner who was working in the store’s courtesy booth.

Moore entered the store with Willie “Rick” Koonce and Everett Anthony Pradia. During the robbery, one of the men demanded money while Moore was identified as the person holding a shotgun. The shotgun fired and struck McCarble in the head, killing him.

After the shooting, the men fled the store. Police later connected the getaway car to Koonce and recovered evidence linked to the robbery, including a wig, plastic bags, and a shotgun found at a home where Moore sometimes stayed. Moore was later arrested in Coushatta, Louisiana, and returned to Texas.

Moore was convicted of capital murder in July 1980 and sentenced to death on July 24, 1980. His conviction remained in place, but his death sentence was challenged for many years. In 2019, after U.S. Supreme Court rulings about his intellectual disability claim, his sentence was changed from death to life imprisonment. Bobby James Moore was granted parole on June 8, 2020, and released from prison on August 6, 2020.