Texas Is Executing a Man Tonight for a Murder and Rape Experts Say He Didn't Commit

A little after 6 p.m., the state of Texas will execute Larry Swearingen for a crime experts believe he was unable to commit.

Journalist Andrew Purcell detailed the events leading to Swearingen's impending death in a thorough investigation.

A 19-year-old college student named Melissa Trotter disappeared from her Montgomery College campus, north of Houston, in December 1998. Police set their sights on Swearingen, an electrician who was witnessed having a conversation with Trotter in the college library. Montgomery County law enforcement also found a scrap of paper with the name "Larry" and his phone number in one of Trotter's books.

After a few days went by, officers tailed Swearingen in an unmarked car and eventually arrested him at his mother's house over unpaid speeding and parking tickets. His bail was set high. Though Swearingen was questioned about Trotter's whereabouts, he maintained that he saw her last on campus.

Three weeks later in January 1999, while Swearingen was sitting behind bars, Trotter's body was discovered in Sam Houston National Forest. Trotter had seemingly been strangled to death by one leg of pantyhose. With the discovery of the body, Swearingen was charged with murder.

A number of errors in Swearingen's trial doomed him to death row. At least two involving DNA sealed his fate.

The Washington Post reports that the second leg of pantyhose was discovered in Swearingen's trailer by a landlord, even though it was searched twice before by law enforcement. A Texas Department of Public Safety lab technician testified in court that it was "a unique physical match" to the pantyhose leg found on Trotter's body.

Since that time, the legs have been retested. Two experts have reported that the pantyhose don't match. A third expert has refuted the original technician's testimony.

The second major piece of convicting evidence was the timeline offered by medical examiner Joye Carter. When Carter performed Trotter's autopsy, she was able to cut samples of Trotter's internal organs. Carter later told the court that she estimated Trotter's death to be on the day she disappeared, about 25 days before her body was discovered. However, medical experts note that if Carter's assumption were true, a number of the organs she was able to cut would have already been liquified by the time the body was discovered. Pictures of the crime scene also show Trotter's body intact, not heavily decomposed.

Since Carter gave her testimony, seven different forensic pathologists have offered a new timeline. Trotter was missing for several weeks, and likely died within two weeks of her body being found—not the same day she disappeared.

The new timeline gives Swearingen a flawless alibi: he was behind bars at the time of death.

Determined to pin the case on him, the prosecution accused Swearingen of raping Trotter before she died, despite the absence of semen, defensive wounds, or any other indication that she was involved in a physical struggle. Lacking in the forensic evidence to tie Swearingen to the murder, the prosecution painted his odd behavior as the result of his obvious guilt.

The prosecution was not the only party at fault. The Innocence Project, which has spent years trying to save Swearingen from facing capital punishment, has spent years pushing for DNA testing that should have been performed by investigators. As The Intercept reported in 2017, the state didn't perform DNA testing on Trotter's clothes, swabs from her rape kit, cigarette butts found near her body, or even the pantyhose identified as the murder weapon.

Rather than grant Swearingen and the Innocence Project the DNA tests that could shed additional light on the case, Texas responded by scheduling his execution.

"They are going to execute someone that the legitimate forensic science has proven innocent," James Rytting, Swearingen's attorney, told The Texas Tribune on Tuesday. "And the execution is going through on the basis of other forensic science that is borderline quackery—in fact it is quackery."

Kristin Houle, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, tells Reason "It is a sad day for justice in Texas. If his execution proceeds, Larry Swearingen will join several other individuals who were put to death by the state despite credible evidence of innocence."

he state’s evidence against 41-year-old Swearingen was compelling. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen him with Melissa Trotter on the day she went missing, December 8th, 1998, from the Lone Star College-Montgomery campus in Conroe. The pair had been dating and Swearingen had been on the wrong side of the law before: His ex-girlfriend accused him of kidnapping her; he had admitted to stealing a truck; and fibers from Trotter’s clothing were found on the seat of his vehicle. After his arrest for Trotter’s murder, he penned a fake letter to investigators purporting to be from her real killer in the bizarre hope it would absolve him. (It didn’t; it just handed the state more evidence against him). And, most damning of all, investigators claimed they found half of Trotter’s panties on her body, which had been dumped in the Sam Houston National Forest, and the other half in a dumpster at the trailer park where Swearingen lived.

The thing about Texas is that it executes perhaps a dozen people per year. Murders in 2016? 1,247. That’s 1 execution out of 100 homicides. Point being that convicts on TX’s Death Row are the worst of the worst.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/txcrime.htm
https://tcadp.org/get-informed/texas-death-penalty-facts/

As to the evidence that put Swearingen on Death Row, from Murderpedia:

https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/swearingen-larry.htm
[Evidence showed the pantyhose came from Swearingen’s home, and that Trotter also had an injury on her neck that could have been caused by a knife. She had no injuries that indicated she had struggled with her assailant, but did have a bruise on her face, and a discoloration in her vagina that could have been a bruise, though there was no evidence of penetration.

Swearingen wrote a letter to his mother in Spanish purporting to be from a female who implicated her boyfriend was the murderer. At trial, the state proved the letter was written in Swearingen’s handwriting.
...
On July 11, 2000, Swearingen was sentenced to die for the kidnaping, rape and strangulation of Melissa Trotter. A summary of the evidence presented at trial follows.

After meeting Trotter, a nineteen-year-old college student, in December 1998, Larry Swearingen told his co-workers and friends that he had met an attractive college girl and hinted that he wanted to have sex with her. In the early afternoon of December 8, Swearingen and Trotter were seen departing together from Montgomery College in Conroe after talking to each other in the school library.

Trotter’s friends and family never again saw the college student alive. Swearingen became the focus of an investigation into the woman’s disappearance, because he was the last person seen with her. On December 11, Swearingen was arrested on unrelated outstanding warrants.

On January 2, 1999, Trotter’s partially nude body was discovered in Sam Houston National Forest. She had been strangled with a piece of torn hosiery found around her neck. Evidence showed she had been raped.

Fiber evidence showed that Trotter had been in Swearingen’s trailer, on the floor and perhaps on the bed, and in the cab of his pickup truck. And evidence in the truck cab showed that some of her hair had been pulled from her head. Although neither Swearingen nor his wife smoked, a pack of cigarettes, Trotter’s brand, was found in Swearingen’s trailer. A piece of hosiery, the companion to the piece used to strangle Trotter, was found in a trash heap beside Swearingen’s trailer. Hair evidence linked the hosiery to Swearingen’s wife. Cell phone records showed that on the day that Trotter disappeared, Swearingen traveled from his trailer to the area where the body was found. After Trotter disappeared, Swearingen told friends that he was in trouble and that the police would be after him.

While in jail awaiting trial, Swearingen, using a Spanish-English dictionary, composed a letter in crude Spanish, purportedly written by an individual named “Robin.” In the letter “Robin” identified Trotter’s killer as an individual named “R.D.” The prosecution alleged that Swearingen composed the letter, arranged for it to be hand-copied by a cellmate, and had the letter delivered to authorities, to deflect blame from himself.]

There’s a lot of additional evidence pointing to Swearingen as the murderer at the link, including details he could not have known if he were not the perpetrator in the fake letter he wrote to exonerate himself.

[Don’t know enough about this case to know if it happened here but saying generally because I’ve seen it more than once.]

My experience is that juries are extremely reluctant to convict in homicide cases even when the evidence is overwhelming, and there is no possibility of a death sentence. A lot of the overturned cases are on the basis of technicalities, political interventions by liberal prosecutors or dubious claims of guilt by convicts already sentenced to the maximum penalty, possibly in exchange for favors rendered. The Central Park 5 case is one of the more egregious instances of prosecutor abuse in favor of obviously guilty perps. I know of someone through an acquaintance who served as a criminal defense attorney who turned prosecutor because all of this person’s clients were guilty. This was a staunch far leftist in every other respect who despised criminals.

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