Bio 

Emanuel Kemp Jr. was born on September 19, 1965. Before the murder of Johnnie Mae Gray, Kemp had already served prison time for armed robbery offenses. Kemp was 21 years old when the crime occurred. He had been released on parole shortly before the attack. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram report included in the supplied case material stated that he had been paroled about two weeks earlier after serving prison time for three armed robberies, including a robbery in which he stabbed a liquor-store clerk.

At the time of the 1987 murder, Kemp was in Fort Worth, Texas. His later legal and psychiatric history became a major part of the case after conviction. Prison psychiatrists diagnosed him with chronic paranoid schizophrenia in the early 1990s, and later reports described severe delusions, disorganized behavior, and questions about whether he was mentally competent to be executed.

Murder Story

On May 28, 1987, Emanuel Kemp Jr. boarded a Fort Worth public transit bus. The bus driver was David V. Jeanfreau, and the only passenger was Johnnie Mae Gray, a 34-year-old medical clerk at John Peter Smith Hospital. Kemp pulled a knife, robbed both the driver and Gray, and forced Jeanfreau to drive the bus to Trinity Park.

At the park, Kemp sexually assaulted Gray and stabbed her to death. Later reports state that she suffered nine stab wounds to the chest and throat. Kemp also stabbed Jeanfreau in the neck, but the driver escaped and survived.

Kemp was arrested about three days later. He was charged with capital murder in Tarrant County. Prosecutors tried the case in 1988, and a jury convicted him of the intentional murder of Johnnie Gray during the course of aggravated sexual assault. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later summarized the conviction as capital murder under Texas Penal Code section 19.03(a)(2).

After the punishment phase, the jury answered Texas’s capital sentencing questions in a way that required a death sentence. Kemp was sentenced to death and was received on Texas death row in July 1988.

Kemp appealed, raising issues involving jury selection, judicial recusal, extraneous-offense evidence, and the constitutionality of Texas’s capital punishment statute. On September 16, 1992, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction and sentence. His later federal habeas appeal was also unsuccessful.

Kemp’s case later drew attention because of his mental-health condition. Reports stated that prison psychiatrists diagnosed him with chronic paranoid schizophrenia and that he developed severe delusions while on death row. His attorneys argued that he was too mentally ill to be executed under the constitutional rule that bars execution of prisoners who do not understand their execution or the reason for it.

In 2018, Texas set an execution date for November 7, 2018. That date was later withdrawn, not because of a final ruling on competency, but after the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office agreed to a request for further DNA testing.