The state of Texas executed Edward Busby Jr. by lethal injection on Thursday evening for the 2004 murder of Laura Lee Crane, a retired Texas Christian University professor, after a series of last-minute legal challenges over his intellectual disability claims were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. Busby, 48, was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. at the Huntsville Unit prison, becoming the 600th person put to death in Texas since capital punishment resumed there in 1982.
Prosecutors said Busby and co-defendant Kathleen Latimer abducted Crane from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot in January 2004, bound her face with 23 feet of duct tape, and left her in the trunk of her car, where she suffocated. Busby was later arrested in Oklahoma City driving Crane’s car and led authorities to her body just north of the Texas state line. Latimer is serving a life sentence for murder.
According to court records, experts retained by both the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office and Busby’s defense team had evaluated him and concluded that he was intellectually disabled. The district attorney’s office had previously recommended that his sentence be reduced to life in prison. In 2023, however, the trial judge reviewed the evidence and found that Busby did not meet the legal standard for intellectual disability, allowing the death sentence to stand.
The execution had been uncertain after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of execution last week to allow further review of the disability claims. On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted that stay at the request of the Texas Attorney General’s Office, which had argued that similar appeals were previously rejected and were meritless. Busby’s attorneys quickly sought another stay, but it was denied by a lower court. The Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia barred the execution of intellectually disabled individuals, but it gave states discretion in determining how such disabilities are established.
In his final statement, Busby apologized repeatedly, according to a media witness account provided by the Associated Press. “Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her,” he said from the death chamber gurney. “I’ll take the blame if that helps.” He said he had surrendered his life to God and urged his sister, who was watching through a window, to “pick up your cross.” As the lethal dose of pentobarbital began, he took a sharp breath, gasped, then made snoring sounds that grew quieter until movement ceased within 40 seconds. He was pronounced dead 38 minutes later.
Bryan Mark Rigg, an author and historian who attended the execution as a representative of the Crane family, said the family neither supported nor opposed the death penalty but was united in respect for the rule of law. Rigg, who had been Crane’s student as a child, recalled her decades of work helping children overcome learning disabilities. “The execution was not about vengeance,” Rigg said, “but accountability under the law and about remembering the life of an extraordinary educator.”