Bio

Raphael Deon Holiday was born on July 20, 1979, in Grimes County, Texas. He dropped out of school after the ninth grade and later worked as a cook and a forklift operator. At the start of 2000, he was living with his common-law wife, Tami Lynn Wilkerson, in a secluded log home in the woods of Madison County, Texas, roughly ten miles from the main highway, along with their infant daughter, Justice, and Wilkerson's two daughters from a prior relationship, Tierra Lynch and Jasmine DuPaul. A psychiatrist who later evaluated Holiday found he suffered from depression and had poor coping mechanisms for stress and frustration.

In March 2000, Wilkerson became suspicious that Holiday had sexually assaulted Tierra. She took the girl to a doctor, who confirmed the assault, and the case was referred to Child Protective Services; Tierra told a nurse that her "step daddy" had warned her not to tell anyone or he would get in trouble. Wilkerson filed charges against Holiday and obtained a protective order, and he moved out of the home. He was subsequently indicted on the sexual assault charge. From prison, Holiday later maintained he knew nothing about the assault allegation.

Murder Story

On the night of September 6, 2000, one of Wilkerson's daughters heard glass breaking outside the home. Wilkerson called her mother, Beverly Mitchell, who lived a mile or two away, and asked her to come over; Mitchell arrived along with Wilkerson's uncle, Terry Keller, who was armed with a shotgun and began walking the perimeter of the house and yard. Mitchell placed Tierra and Jasmine in her car for safety, then went back inside to get baby Justice and call 911.

As Mitchell held the phone, Holiday entered the house, grabbed the phone from her hand, and threw it against the wall. Wilkerson saw him and ran out of the house to seek help. Holiday asked Mitchell how she had known to come, since he had cut the phone line, and told her he intended to make Wilkerson "pay" for taking his daughter away from him. When Terry Keller came inside, Holiday put Mitchell in a headlock and forced Keller to hand over the shotgun. Holiday then took the weapon and began ranting about killing everyone present. He went outside and poured gasoline on and around the car where Tierra and Jasmine were sitting, but was unable to get it to ignite. He then forced Mitchell to drive him to her own house to get more gasoline, ordering everyone else to remain behind. By the time he returned, Terry Keller had left the scene.

Holiday ordered Mitchell to pour gasoline throughout the home's interior, then set it on fire himself. Mitchell was blocked from reaching the children inside and was forced to flee outside as the flames spread. Wilkerson, who had run to a neighbor's home to call police, returned to find her house engulfed in flames, with all three children trapped inside; none survived. As Holiday fled the scene, he rammed a police car that had just arrived and led officers on a car chase that ended two counties away when he crashed.

At trial, Holiday's defense attorneys argued that the fire could have started accidentally, from an electrical problem or a faulty pilot light, rather than being deliberately set. This was directly contradicted by Mitchell's testimony, in which she told the jury she watched Holiday bend down just before the flames erupted. A Walker County jury (the trial having been moved from Madison County on a change of venue) convicted Holiday of capital murder and sentenced him to death on June 21, 2002.

Holiday spent the next thirteen years on Texas's death row, consistently maintaining that he did not know how the fire started and denying he would ever have intentionally harmed his children. In the days before his execution, his case drew additional attention when an Austin-based attorney, Gretchen Sween, argued Holiday's court-appointed lawyers had effectively abandoned him after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his case earlier that year, advising him that further appeals and a clemency petition would be pointless. Hours before the scheduled execution, the trial court judge briefly halted proceedings after Holiday's attorneys filed a new appeal challenging aspects of his conviction and trial testimony. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately rejected the request to delay the execution.

Raphael Deon Holiday was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville "Walls" Unit in Huntsville, Texas, on November 18, 2015, becoming the 13th person executed in Texas that year — a year in which Texas accounted for half of all executions carried out in the United States. In his final statement, he thanked his "supporters and loved ones," said "I love y'all. I want you to know I'm always going to be with you," and thanked the warden. He did not look toward or address the witnesses present, who included the children's grandfather and their mother, Tami Wilkerson. He was pronounced dead at 8:30 p.m.