6 Years Ago Today: Francis Newton Executed

On September 14, 2005, the state of Texas executed Frances Elaine Newton, who was convicted murdering her 23-year-old husband Adrian, her seven-year-old son Alton, and her 21-month-old daughter. She was the eleventh woman in the United States and the third in Texas to be executed after the reintroduction of the death penalty in the nation.

After apparently shooting all three of her family members with a .25 caliber pistol she had obtained from a man she had been seeing, Newton claimed that they had been slain by a drug dealer. It was Newton, however, and not any drug dealer, who had taken out $50,000 life insurance policies on each of her three victims just three weeks before the murders, forging her husband’s signature and naming herself as the beneficiary.

Despite the fact that the Houston police believed that Adrien Newton was indeed a drug dealer who was in debt to his supplier, reservations among jury members about information that had been withheld during her trial, evidence that her defense attorney was demonstrably incompetent, and other irregularities, Newton was sentenced to death. All subsequent appeals and writs of habeas corpus were denied by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, as were two appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Newton is one of the three women executed by Texas who appears in "The Women of Death Row," of the of the "Murder" chapters in Texas Confidential: Sex, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem in the Lone Star State.