Bio

David Earl Gibbs was born on March 17, 1961. He served time in a Michigan prison from 1978 to 1980 for auto theft, and beginning in March 1981, served part of a five-year Texas sentence for robbery and theft, of which he served three years before being paroled early. By 1985, at age 24, he was living and working at an apartment complex in Conroe, Texas — reports vary on whether his role there was as a maintenance worker or as a nursing aide caring for mentally ill residents.

Murder Story

Marietta Bryant, 29, and her roommate, Carol Ackland, 46, lived at the same Conroe apartment complex where Gibbs worked and lived. Both women were outpatients of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation and had recently been released from a mental hospital; Bryant was described in later court testimony as having the emotional maturity of an adolescent.

On the night of July 1, 1985, Gibbs entered the women's apartment. He got into an argument with Ackland and forced her to have sex with him; in his later written statement to police, he described what happened next: "While I was having sex with her, I cut her throat. I don't know why I did it." He then raped Bryant as well and slashed her throat with a butcher knife. Afterward, he ransacked the apartment to make the scene look like the women had been killed during a burglary.

Gibbs was arrested about a month after the murders at a friend's home in Cleveland, Texas, where he gave police a voluntary statement. Investigators also recovered his fingerprints from the scene and found what was determined to be human blood on his boots. Gibbs was tried and convicted only for the murder of Marietta Bryant; despite his confession implicating him in Carol Ackland's death as well, he was never separately tried or convicted for killing her. He was sentenced to death in 1986, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction and sentence on direct appeal in 1991 (Gibbs v. State, 819 S.W.2d 821).

In 1990, while awaiting execution on death row, Gibbs strangled a fellow death row inmate, Calvin Williams, 30, in a prison recreation yard. Gibbs later described this killing as an "initiation hit," carried out to gain membership in a racist prison gang; Williams was Black. Gibbs pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for this killing and received an additional 20-year sentence.

Gibbs pursued federal habeas corpus relief, arguing that prosecutors had failed to disclose evidence relevant to the jury's sentencing decision and that the trial judge had improperly admitted evidence of an offense for which he had actually been found not guilty; these claims were rejected, with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the denial of habeas relief in 1998 (Gibbs v. Johnson, 154 F.3d 253). He sought permission to file a second federal habeas petition just weeks before his execution, which remained pending at the time he was put to death.

David Earl Gibbs was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas, on August 23, 2000, at age 39. His execution was one of 40 carried out in Texas that year — a state record at the time.