Murders Texas

One of two men found drowned in the trunk of a car was the son of former astronaut Brewster Shaw Jr. of Huntington Beach. The bodies of Brandon Shaw, 20, and a 25-year-old Austin city employee were found Wednesday in the trunk of a 1982 Volvo owned by Shaw's parents. The car was pulled from Town Lake, a part of the Colorado River that runs through Austin just south of downtown.

A mother accused of killing her 5- and 6-year-old sons must give up custody of her remaining child to the infant boy's paternal grandparents, a judge in Dallas ruled. State District Judge Cheryl Shannon gave temporary custody of 8-month-old Drake Routier to Sarilda and Leonard Routier of Lubbock, Texas. He had been in foster care since Darlie Routier's arrest. Routier, 26, claims a male intruder killed Damon, 5, and Devon, 6, early June 6 in the family's upscale suburban home.

A woman who said an intruder with a knife wounded her and killed her two young sons in their home has been charged with committing the stabbings herself. Darlie Routier had told police that an intruder came through a window two weeks ago and stabbed 6-year-old Devon and 5-year-old Damon while they slept in the living room, then stabbed her before fleeing. She said the attacker was a white man who wore dark clothes and a baseball cap. Police say he never existed.

A 23-year-old mother of five was charged with murder Friday after admitting that she had killed three of her children in incidents dating back to 1986, police said. Claudette Kibble was being held without bond and was ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination, Houston police said. Kibble told police she had drowned two sons and suffocated another. All were infants a year old or younger when they died in 1986, 1988 and 1990. She had told investigators the children had seizures.

She has been dead for four years. No one in her family who says this seems to believe it. Yet there's her bronze statue, by the ocean, a life-sized Selena Quintanilla Perez gazing out at the water. One thousand, four hundred and sixty-eight days. And nights. The sea comes, the sea goes again, lapping at the life left on this shore. Father, mother, brother, sister. The breeze comes hot here. Even in winter it is thick and moist.

Asking forgiveness, convicted murderer and drug lord Juan Raul Garza on Tuesday morning became the second man in eight days to die at the hands of the federal government, which had not carried out any executions in nearly four decades. "I just want to say that I'm sorry and I apologize for all the pain and grief that I have caused," he said, uttering his last words after he was strapped onto the gurney in the execution chamber at the U.S. prison in Terre Haute, Ind.

Jurors took an hour to convict a man of shooting a stockbroker to death, then just 15 minutes to sentence him to the maximum sentence of 99 years in prison. Prosecutors offered no motive for the 1994 slaying of Randy Lawson, who was delivering newspapers less than a block from his house when he was shot. Lawson, 39, delivered the local paper to set an example for his children.

David Gonzales of Houston, the World Boxing Council's sixth-ranked lightweight, was in stable condition Sunday after being shot in the back outside a lounge, authorities said. Gonzales, whose record is 23-1-1, was to fight Darryl Tyson of Ft. Worth June 11 for the North American Boxing Federation Championship. Tyson is ranked fourth in the world by the WBC.

"Lock and load. Let's do it, man," G. W. Green told Warden Jack Pursley just before he was put to death for participating in a 1976 burglary in which the homeowner was killed. Green, 54, was executed by lethal injection at the prison at Huntsville, Tex., just after midnight, seven hours after the U.S. Supreme Court refused, 7 to 2, to grant a stay. Green was one of three men who invaded John Denson's house northwest of Houston to rob him of a gun collection valued at $6,000.

For a time, it looked to Anne Hallberg as if the world was no more interested now in her mother's fate than it had been 23 years before. When she was 9, her mother had simply vanished. One morning in February of 1968, Anne and her three siblings awoke in their Bellaire, Tex., home to find another woman sitting at the breakfast table.