Bio

Dale Devon Scheanette was born on May 7, 1973, in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. He grew up in a family that faced challenges and hardship. As a child, little is known about his early environment or relationships. He only completed twelve years of formal education, which suggests he may have faced difficulties during his schooling.

At some point in his life, Scheanette moved to Texas, specifically to the Arlington area, where he resided in an apartment complex called the Peartree Apartments. Living in this complex would later associate him with two tragic events that would mark his criminal history.

By 1999, Scheanette faced legal troubles. He was arrested and charged for criminal mischief, which led to his first imprisonment. This would be significant as it resulted in him being fingerprinted and entered into a criminal database for the first time.

As Dale Devon Scheanette's story unfolds, it sets the stage for the events that would lead to his future actions and crimes, marking him with the label of a notorious figure in criminal history.

Murder Story

On September 17, 1996, the body of Christine Vu, a 26-year-old teacher, was discovered in her Arlington, Texas, apartment. She was found face down in a half-filled bathtub, bound with duct tape around her wrists, ankles, and neck. An autopsy revealed that she had been raped, strangled, and drowned. Though fingerprint evidence was collected, it did not initially lead to a suspect.

Three months later, on December 24, 1996, Wendie Prescott, a 20-year-old woman living in the same apartment complex, was reported missing. Her family grew concerned when she did not arrive for a planned shopping trip. An uncle went to her apartment and found her body in a similar position—face down in her bathtub, with her wrists and ankles tied with duct tape. Like Vu, Prescott had been sexually assaulted and strangled. A high-quality fingerprint was recovered from a television stand in her apartment, along with DNA evidence during the autopsy.

For years, the cases went unsolved. In 2000, Arlington police resubmitted the fingerprint and DNA samples to the FBI. This time, they matched Dale Devon Scheanette, who had been arrested for a burglary in 1999, during which his fingerprints were taken. Scheanette was arrested later that day, and his DNA was shown to match the samples from both Prescott and Vu.

During his trial, it was revealed that Scheanette was also linked to multiple sexual assaults in the Dallas-Fort Worth area from 1998 to 1999. A jury convicted him of the capital murder of Wendie Prescott in January 2003 and sentenced him to death. He was charged with Vu's murder but was not tried for it.

After appealing his conviction, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his conviction in 2004. All subsequent appeals were denied. Scheanette was executed by lethal injection on February 10, 2009. In his final words, he stated, “No cases ever tried have been error-free."