Bio

David Lee Holland Sr. was born on July 7, 1935. By 1985, he was reportedly employed as a security officer at a bank branch, a position he had held for eight years. He had recently written a "hot check" to purchase a new car from a dealership, Golden Imports, and was separately already facing felony charges stemming from an earlier check-kiting scheme.

Murder Story

On the morning of July 16, 1985, needing a substantial amount of money to cover his bad debts, Holland left home with the specific intent of robbing a business. He armed himself with a .45-caliber pistol as his primary weapon and a .25-caliber pistol as a backup.

At 9:43 a.m., after waiting for a drive-through customer to finish her transaction and leave, Holland entered a branch of Jefferson Savings and Loan in Port Arthur, Texas, where he spoke briefly with the two women on duty, office manager Helen Barnard, 29, and teller Dianna Jackson, 23. He then brandished his weapon and ordered them to hand over the cash from their drawers. Believing there would be more money in the vault, he moved the two women out of view of the bank's security camera and into the vault area, where, over the next two and a half minutes, they opened a smaller safe and handed him an additional cash drawer. By his own later account to police, Holland vacillated over what to do with the two women before ultimately shooting Barnard once through the head — a wound that was almost certainly instantly fatal — and Jackson once through the chest; emergency resuscitation efforts on Jackson failed. Approximately $8,000 was taken in the robbery.

Bank officials and police reviewed surveillance footage of the robbery and tentatively identified Holland as the gunman. Officers went to his home and asked him to accompany them to the station for questioning; he was not immediately placed under arrest. After police noticed his account of events conflicted with his wife's, and observed blood stains on his shirt and shoes, he was arrested. A search warrant executed at his residence turned up both a .45 and a .25 caliber handgun along with ammunition; a firearms examiner later matched two bullets recovered from the vault area to the .45-caliber weapon.

Following his arrest, Holland asked to speak with Port Arthur Police Detective Edmund Chesson, who had known him previously through unrelated investigations. Holland asked to speak with his wife first, then gave police a detailed confession of the robbery and murders, afterward leading officers to the location where he had discarded the empty cash drawer.

Holland was indicted on two counts of capital murder, one for each victim, but the state elected to proceed to trial only on the charge relating to Helen Barnard's death; he was never tried for the killing of Dianna Jackson. At trial, Holland pleaded guilty to the capital charge in front of the jury, and a single combined (unitary) proceeding was held covering both guilt and punishment, rather than the separate, bifurcated proceeding typically used in Texas capital cases. The jury answered Texas's statutory special sentencing issues affirmatively, and the trial court imposed a sentence of death. On appeal, Holland argued this unitary process had unlawfully denied him a bifurcated trial and that his trial counsel had been ineffective; the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected these arguments and affirmed his conviction and sentence in 1988 (Holland v. State, 761 S.W.2d 307 (Tex. Crim. App. 1988)).

David Lee Holland Sr. was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in the early morning hours of August 12, 1993. He gave no final statement. He was pronounced dead at 12:16 a.m., roughly four minutes after the lethal injection began — the 64th person executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982, the 10th that year, and the second person executed in Texas within a seven-day span.