Teen killers Executed- Murdered Young couple and set them on fire-MUM begs-Don’t kill My son-Please

Well, a Colleen man is about to be executed in Indiana for the killing of an Iowa couple in 1999. US Supreme Court refused a lastminute appeal to stop Christopher Viava’s execution. He’ll be the 17th inmate to be executed after the Trump administration’s resumption of federal executions.

 Fox 44’s Cameron Stewart, he’s live in the newsroom with more background on the case. Hey Cameron. Hey, Adam. Christopher Vavva was 19 at the time of the murders and now aged 40. He expressed regret to his mother today to the family of the couple he killed. Valva was scheduled to be executed at five o’clock tonight at the Terraote Federal Prison in Indiana.

 He was convicted in the year 2000 of killing Iowa couple Todd and Stacy Baggley before burning them in the trunk of their car in Khen. The prosecution in his murder case argued the killing was a way for Valva to upgrade his status within a gang. Vavva’s mother says her son regrets the killings. >> To Todd and Stacy’s family, I am so sorry for your loss.

I’ve never been able to tell you that because I was told I could not have access to you. My son wants you to know that he is deeply remorseful for the pain that he has caused you. President Trump resumed uh federal executions in July after there had been none carried out in the country since 2003.

 Live in the newsroom, I’m Cameron Stewart, Fox 44 News. On September 24th, 2020, after spending more than 20 years on federal death row, Christopher Andre Vialva was executed by lethal injection at the United States Penitentiary in Teroot, Indiana. He was 40 years old. He had lived slightly more than half his life inside a cell waiting for that day.

 11 weeks later, on December 10th, the federal government executed a second man for the same crime. His name was Brandon Bernard. He was also 40. He had been in custody since he was 18. In this video, we will talk about what happened, what both men said in their final minutes, and the 9 hours in June 1999 that put five teenagers in handcuffs on a military reservation in Texas.

 The story begins 21 years earlier on a Sunday afternoon in Khen, Texas, a town that sat at the front gate of Fort Hood and ran on the army’s clock. On June 21st, 1999, a man named Todd Baggley pulled into a convenience store called Mickey’s and got out to use the pay phone. His wife Stacy waited for him in their car. Todd was 26 years old, Stacy was 28.

 They were youth ministers from Iowa, he from Atama, she from a small town in western Tennessee. They had married four years earlier in Texas while Todd was still in the army and stationed at Fort Hood. They had come back that week to attend a revival meeting at the church where they had once worked with the youth group.

That morning, they had gone to worship. Afterward, they had lunch with friends. Two young men walked up to Todd at the pay phone and asked him for a ride to their uncle’s house. Todd said yes. What Todd and Stacy did not know was that five young men had spent that afternoon driving from one parking lot to the next, looking for a stranger who would agree to exactly that.

 They had planned it the day before. They had collected a second gun on the way because the first one did not look frightening enough. They had circled a supermarket, then other stores, and found nobody until they found a man standing at a pay phone with his wife waiting in the car. Over the next 9 hours, that car was driven around Collehen with Todd and Stacy locked in the trunk.

 It stopped at cash machines. It stopped at a burger place. It stopped at a pawn shop and a tobacco store. There was a panel between the trunk and the back seat. Through it, the two people inside could be heard, and they could hear the young men sitting on the other side. They did not scream. They did not beg. Not at first.

 They asked them about God. The young man who planned it was 19 years old. He had no criminal record for violence, a high school diploma, and nowhere to live. The one who followed him was 18, the lowest ranked member of their group with a mother who was a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve.

 The other three were young girl. One of them was sent home that night so he would not miss his curfew. Two of those five would be put to death by the United States government. the other three would not. This is the story of Christopher Valva, Brandon Bernard, and the nine hours that ended two lives on a stretch of dirt at the edge of Fort Hood.

 If you’re drawn to stories of justice, betrayal, and the people who reach a point of no return, make sure to subscribe to No Way Out. This is where true crime meets truth. Real cases, real consequences. Christopher Andre Valvo was born on May 10th, 1980 in Khen, Texas. Khen sat at the front gate of Fort Hood, one of the largest army posts in the country, and the town ran on the base’s clock.

Soldiers arrived for a posting that lasted 2 or 3 years, then packed up and left. Apartment complexes off Rancier Avenue filled and emptied on that same rotation. Stores opened to catch the payday crowd and closed when the crowd moved on. Few families in Collehen had roots going back more than a few years. Most were passing through and everybody knew it.

 Valva’s mother, Lisa Brown, came out of that world herself. Her father served in the Air Force and she grew up moving from base to base the way service families did. She enlisted in the Army straight out of high school. It was the road in front of her and she took it and she served well enough to earn an army commenation medal along the way.

 While stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, she met a soldier from Trinidad. They married quickly. She was 19 years old. The marriage broke apart fast. During the short time they lived together, he was violent toward her. When their son was a newborn, his father bit him. The marriage ended and Brown left with her baby. She raised him and later his younger sister, mostly alone.

Her own father made that harder. When he learned who his daughter had married, he disowned her over it. He held his grandson exactly once. Beyond that single occasion, he never touched the boy and barely acknowledged he was alive. After the divorce, Brown had other relationships. The men treated her badly, and none of them wanted her son around. Every one of them was white.

 one household after another. Her son was pushed to the edge of the family she was trying to build. So he grew up with a mother who loved him without conditions, surrounded by nearly everyone else, letting him know he did not quite belong. Brown believed her son had contracted menitis shortly after birth and that it left him with brain damage.

Nobody ever examined him for it. What was plain to anyone around him was that he could not settle a basic question about himself. At different points growing up, he told people he was white. Then he said he was mixed. Then he said he was black. It was not curiosity. It was real difficulty answering the most basic question a person can ask about who they are at an age when he had no tools to work through it and nobody equipped to help.

 That confusion did not stay inside the house. When he was 6 years old, other kids threw rocks at him and called him names for the way he looked. The word they used most was zebra. Six is young enough that a boy has no defense against something like that. He absorbed it the way anyone that age absorbs things without the ability to sort it or set it down.

 He went through the Khen schools and later enrolled at Ellison High School where he played football. Teachers disciplined him often, not for fighting, for talking, for disrupting the room, for refusing to sit still. He was a handful in a classroom. And he was not a danger to anybody. He made people laugh. He got along easily.

 At home, he looked after his younger sister and stayed close to his mother, the one steady relationship in a life that had offered him very few. He graduated high school. That was more than a lot of young men in his position managed. But Colleen was a town where the population turned over every couple of years, where friendships rarely had time to deepen into anything, and where a young man who had spent his whole life being told he did not fit anywhere might go looking for somewhere he did.

In his teenage years, the Alva found a group of young men who looked like him, who stuck together and who called themselves the 212 Pyro Bloods. The 212 Pyro Bloods operated entirely inside Khen. They were not a branch of anything larger and took no instructions from any organization outside the city.

 There were no formal ranks in the group, no titles, no crowns, nobody positioned above anybody else. Everyone was considered equal because ranking each other caused too much conflict among themselves. In practice, it worked less like an organization and more like a tight circle of friends who covered for one another.

 They spent time together, moved through the same neighborhoods, and stole together. The main activity was burglary. Kick door breakins where a group forces an entry, takes cash and anything portable, and is gone within minutes. Members of the group carried out more than two dozen of them around Khen. Valva stood out inside that circle.

 Gang investigators in the area saw him as a climber, someone working to impress the older members, someone who stepped into a fight rather than walking away from one. He moved easily among them and the others looked toward him when something was being decided. Around the same period, the Keen police were building their own picture of the group.

 A student at a local high school drew a diagram, a pyramid filled in with the first names and nicknames of more than 40 people the student identified as members. A clerk in the police gang unit took that drawing and ran every name and nickname against the department’s database, producing a second version with full legal names attached. Those two diagrams gave the police a rough map of who was who.

 On it, Valva sat several rows up. By the time he turned 19 in May 1999, Vavva no longer lived with his mother. He had been put out of the house and had nowhere steady to stay. He was a young man with disorganized thinking, in a state of near constant panic, surrounded by others whose ideas were no better than his own.

 What he had instead of a home was the group. He was not the only one in it without much holding him in place. The circle around him was made up almost entirely of young men who had come up in the same few square miles of keen who had known each other since primary school and who had very little in the way of prospects. Some were still enrolled in high school.

 Some had been pushed out of it. What they shared was proximity and the sense that the group was the one thing that would not rotate out and leave. They knew each other’s homes. They knew which of them had a car and which of them had a gun. They knew who would show up if something started and who [clears throat] would not.

By June 1999, that circle included Valva, a young man named Terry Terrell Brown, another named Christopher Michael Lewis, a younger one who went by Little Gotti, another named Gregory Harden Lynch, and one more. That last one had come to Colleen from San Antonio. He had a mother who outranked most of the officers on the base, a record with the juvenile courts that went back years, and a reputation among the others as somebody who did what he was told.

 His name was Brandon Bernard. Brandon Anthony Micah Bernard was born on July 3rd, 1980 in San Antonio, Texas. He was a few weeks younger than Valva. Both grew up in Khen. Both went through its schools. Both ended up in the same circle of young men. But Bernard did not start there. He came to Khen as a boy and spent the bulk of his early life in the town.

 His mother, Thelma Bernard, served as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Reserve. That is a serious rank. It meant she had spent years in uniform, had been trusted with command responsibility, and had built the kind of career that requires consistent discipline over a long stretch of time. She was a present and serious parent.

 She tried to raise her son around Christian principles. She took him to church. She stayed involved in his life through every stage of it, including the stages when he gave her nothing back for it. None of that held him. Bernard began committing crimes as a young teenager. Property crimes, burglary, above all, the same kick door breakins the circle carried out together.

 He was not stealing out of hunger. He was stealing because the people around him stole and because it filled the hours. His behavior got him removed from school, then from another school, then another. He was expelled from several over the course of his teenage years, and each removal pushed him further from any structure that might have caught him.

 A young man who is out of school by the middle of the afternoon has a great deal of unsupervised time, and Bernard filled his with the group. He passed through the juvenile justice system more than once. That system exists to intervene early before patterns harden. In Bernard’s case, it processed him and returned him to the same streets, the same friends, and the same routine.

Somewhere in those years, he joined the 212 Peru bloods. He was not a hesitant member. He took part in the burglaries alongside the others, more than two dozen of them, run with Valva and Terry Brown. He was involved in at least one confrontation with members of a rival group. He owned a 40 caliber Glock handgun which he had lent out to Gregory Lynch.

 But on the pyramid the Khim police had built from that students drawing, Bernard’s name did not sit near the top. It sat at the very bottom. Several rows below Valva, several rows below others as well. The people who knew him outside the gang saw a different young man than his record suggested. They found him pleasant. He attended church.

 He was respectful and kind to the people around him. And he was not a leader. He followed stronger personalities and went along with whatever the group in front of him decided. He drank. He used drugs. Both were common in the circle he ran with. There was one more thing about him. Less flattering than kind and less damning than criminal.

 Bernard had difficulty with complicated tasks, with anything that required attention to detail across several steps. He was not slow in conversation and he was not incapable of function. He was the kind of person who could carry out an instruction and would struggle to build the instruction himself. By June 1999, Bernard was 18 years old.

He had a mother who had never given up on him, a juvenile record that had never slowed him down, a gun he had loaned to a friend, and a place near the bottom of a group of young men he spent nearly all his time with. The others in that group were younger. Tony Sparks was the youngest of them.

 Among the others, he went by Little Gotti, a name borrowed from a New York crime boss who had been famous a decade earlier and who had nothing whatever to do with a group of young men in central Texas. It was the kind of name a young member picked up when he wanted to sound like more than he was. Sparks was 16 in June 1999.

 He was still in school. He still lived under a curfew set by the adults in his home and he kept it. He had grown up in Khim the same way as the rest of them, moving through the same apartment complexes and the same schools, and he had attached himself to the group early. He also held German citizenship through his family.

Christopher Michael Lewis came from the same few streets. He was younger than Valva and Bernard, and he had been part of the circle for as long as any of them. There was one thing about Lewis that set him apart from the rest. At some point in his life, he had gone to Grace Christian Church in Kein. Terry Terrell Brown grew up in the same circle. He was close in age to Lewis.

Like the rest of them, he ran the burglaries, the two dozen and more that he, Bernard, and Valva carried out around Khen. He used drugs regularly, and he smoked with the others when they had it. Gregory Harden Lynch was the last of them, and the most distant from the rest. He was young. He was not close to the center of anything.

 His main connection to the group at that moment was an object sitting in his house. Bernard’s 40 caliber Glock led to him at some point earlier that year. That was the group. Six young men from the same town, all under 20, tied together by geography and habit rather than by any structure. Between them, they had a small 22 pistol that none of them thought was frightening enough, a borrowed Glock at Lynch’s house, and a car that Bernard drove. None of them had steady work.

None of them had anywhere in particular to be. What they had was time and each other and a town where nothing much changed except the people passing through it. In June 1999, the summer was already hot in central Texas, and the group had run out of money. 600 m north in a small Iowa town built on meatacking and railroads.

 A man named Todd Baggley had grown up, joined the army, and been sent to a post in central Texas. Todd Alan Baggley was born on April 28th, 1973, and grew up in Atamwa, Iowa. Awa sits in the southeast corner of the state on a bend of the De Moines River about 90 miles from De Moines itself. It had been a meatacking town and a railroad town for as long as anyone could remember.

The John Morell plant on the south side of the river had employed thousands of people and set the wage that everything else in the county measured itself against. The rail lines ran through the middle of town and gave it a reason to exist. Through the 1970s and 1980s, both of those things came apart.

 The packing industry restructured. Wages were cut, then cut again. Jobs that had supported a family on one income stopped supporting one. Families who had counted on that work for two generations found themselves looking for something else in a town that did not have anything else. That was the atom Todd Bagley grew up in.

 It was a place where people stayed because their families were there and where a young man looking for a way forward usually had to leave to find one. Todd took the route many young men from towns like Atama took. He joined the United States Army. The army sent him to Fort Hood. That posting put him in Khen, Texas, the same town where Christopher Valva was moving through the school system a few miles away.

Fort Hood held tens of thousands of soldiers, and Colleen held tens of thousands of civilians, and the two populations passed through each other every day of the week without meeting. A soldier could serve three years there and never learn a single civilian’s last name. Todd did something during that posting that many soldiers stationed at Fort Hood never did.

 He put down roots on the other side of the gate. He started attending a church in Ken called Grace Christian. And he did not just attend on Sundays. He got involved with the church’s youth group and began working with the young people in it. That was not a light commitment. and anyone who has done it knows the shape of it.

 Church youth work in a garrison town meant week nights and weekends. It meant being available to teenagers who often did not want an adults attention and occasionally needed it more than they could say. It meant showing up week after week for people who could give nothing back and would not think to try. Many of those teenagers were military kids themselves, moving every few years, arriving in Khen already knowing they would leave it.

 In a town where most soldiers counted down the months until reassignment and spent their off hours accordingly, Todd Baggley spent his on other people’s teenagers. His faith was not a compartment of his life. It organized the rest of it. It set his schedule. It determined who he spent his time with. It shaped what he did when nobody was watching him do it.

 The people who knew him in Khen did not describe a soldier who happened to go to church. They described a man whose church work was the main thing and whose army service ran alongside it. Somewhere during those years in Texas, he met Stacy Lynn Woodard. Stacy came from Newburn, Tennessee, a small town in Dyer County in the western part of the state up toward the Mississippi River.

That is flat farming country, cotton and soybeans, long straight roads, small towns spaced out along the rail line. Newburn was the kind of place where a few hundred families knew each other’s business completely and mostly did not mind. She was born on April 1st, 1971, which made her about 2 years older than Todd.

 Her faith worked exactly the way his did. It was the center of her life rather than a component of it. Anyone asked to describe Stacy Woodard would have started there before getting to anything else about her. Todd and Stacy married on January 12th, 1996 in Travis County, Texas. He was 22, she was 24. He was still in uniform and still stationed at Fort Hood.

 And the two of them settled into the life that came with that. The base, the church in Khen, the youth group at Grace Christian, the community of people who orbited both. They did the youth work together from then on. And that is how Khaleim came to know them. Not as a soldier and his wife, but as a pair who arrived together and worked as a unit.

 Two people in their early 20s, barely older than some of the teenagers they were responsible for, doing a job most people that age would not want. When Todd’s enlistment ended, they left Texas and went to Iowa. They settled in the southeast corner of the state, the part Todd came from. He found work at the Bos Landon Athletic Club in Pella, a town about half an hour northwest of Oscaloosa.

 Pella is a Dutch heritage town, tidy and prosperous in a way a Tumbla was not, and the club sat alongside a golf course on its edge. For a while, the two of them lived near Pella. In February 1999, they moved back to a Tumbla where Todd had grown up. And in Iowa, they did precisely what they had done in Texas.

 They found a church and they went to work inside it. The church was Jubilee Family Church in Oscaloosa, a non-denominational congregation on South D Street. Todd and Stacy became its youth ministers. That title carried a particular weight in a congregation of that size. Youth ministry in a small Iowa town is not a salaried career with an office and a support staff and a budget line.

 It is a job somebody takes because the young people in the church need adults who will show up consistently and because nobody else has volunteered to be that. It means Wednesday nights. It means Sunday mornings before the service and Sunday afternoons after it. It means summer trips planned and paid for out of whatever the church can spare.

 It means long drives with a van full of teenagers and the conversations that happen in a van at 11 at night that do not happen anywhere else. It means being the adult a 15-year-old calls when there is nobody else to call and being reachable when that call comes. Todd and Stacy did that work in Oscaloosa, while Todd held his job in Pella, and the two of them lived in a Tumbla.

 Look at those three towns on a map. A Tumbla to Oscaloosa is about 25 mi. Oscaloosa to Pella is another 15 or so. Three towns spread across two counties connected by two-lane highways through farm country. All of it held together by a car and a schedule. Todd drove to work in one town. The two of them drove to church in another, and they slept in a third.

 Anyone who has done that kind of driving in rural Iowa in February knows what it costs in hours and in tires. They kept it up anyway. The result was that people in all three communities knew them. Awa knew them. Oscaloosa knew them. Pella knew them. That is an unusual thing to be able to say about two people still in their 20s.

And it did not happen by accident. It happened because they showed up in all three places week after week and made themselves useful. They were not wealthy, and they said so plainly to anyone who asked. A club job in Pella, an unpaid ministry in Oscaloosa, does not produce savings. What they had instead was the work, each other, and a set of convictions.

 they lived by without any visible strain about it. In June 1999, they made a trip back to Texas. The occasion was a revival meeting at Grace Christian Center in Collehen, the same church where they had worked with the youth group during Todd’s Army years. Revival meetings ran across several days, sometimes a full week with services most evenings and preaching that went longer than a normal Sunday.

 For a congregation, it is the high point of the year. For Todd and Stacy, it was a return to the church that had shaped the first years of their marriage and to the people they had worked alongside there. They arrived about a week ahead of the meeting. They stayed with people they knew. They visited friends from the old days and settled back into the rhythm of a place they had once called home.

 Some of the teenagers they had worked with in that youth group would have been in their 20s by then. On Sunday, June 21st, they went to the morning worship service. Afterward, they had lunch with friends. Then Todd pulled into a convenience store called Mickey’s to use the pay phone, and Stacy waited for him in their Buick Lasab.

The day before, on June 20th, Valva had sat down with Lewis and Sparks to plan a robbery. The plan required almost nothing of them. They would find someone in a parking lot and ask that person for a ride. They would get into the car. Once inside, they would pull a gun, take the driver’s money and belongings, get the PIN number for a bank card, and force the driver into the trunk.

 Then they would drive the car somewhere out of the way, and leave it there with the person still locked inside. That was the whole of it. No scouting of locations, no timeline, no agreement about where the car would be abandoned or how they would get away from it afterward. No thought at all given to what happens to a person locked in a trunk in central Texas in June, or to what that person might say afterward about the faces they had seen.

 It was the kind of plan that could be assembled in an afternoon by people who had never worked one through in their lives. The following day, June 21st, the three of them brought in two more, Bernard and Terry Brown. Then there was a problem with the weapons. The only gun on hand was a small 22 pistol. Passed around and looked at, it did not seem like enough.

 Among themselves, they agreed it looked too small to frighten anyone into cooperating. And the entire plan depended on frightening someone into cooperating. They decided they needed a second one. Bernard owned a 40 caliber Glock, a full-size handgun, and unmistakable at close range. But he had lent it to Gregory Lynch, and it was sitting at Lynch’s house.

 So all five of them drove over. Lynch handed the Glock back. With two guns between them, the group set out. Sometime after 2:00 in the afternoon, Bernard drove the other four to a supermarket in Khen to look for someone. They found nobody who suited them. They pulled out of that lot and circled through the parking lots of other stores around town, still without settling on anyone. Time passed.

 They kept driving. An afternoon went by this way. Five young men in a car looking for a stranger who would say yes to them. The search ended at Mickey’s. A man stood at the pay phone outside. A woman waited nearby in a car. Lewis and Sparks got out and walked toward him. They told him they needed a ride to their uncle’s house. Todd said yes.

There was nothing remarkable in the request or in the answer. Two young men in a parking lot needed a lift across town. And a man who had spent years driving teenagers around that same town said he would take them. That was how Todd and Stacy operated. And everyone who knew them said the same thing about it.

 When a chance came up to help someone, they took it. They saw the good in people first and asked questions second. Valva had been standing off to the side. As Lewis and Sparks climbed into the back seat, he got in with them. Todd and Stacy took the front. Bernard and Brown did not get in. The two of them went into a store nearby and started playing video games.

 Todd began driving. Valva gave directions from the back seat, and Todd followed them. Then Valva pulled out the 40 caliber Glock, pointed it at Todd, and told him the plans had changed. At the same moment, Sparks raised the 22 and pointed it at Stacy. On Valva’s order, Todd stopped the car. The group made both of them get out.

They took Todd’s wallet and Stacy’s purse. They took the jewelry the couple was wearing. Valva demanded the PIN numbers for their bank cards. Then he forced Todd and Stacy into the trunk of their own car and closed it. What followed was not a quick escape. Valva got behind the wheel and drove around Khen for hours with the couple locked in the back.

 He went to ATM machines to withdraw money from their account. It produced almost nothing. The Bagleys had less than $100 on deposit between them. Two people in their 20s, one working a club job and both doing unpaid church work in small Iowa towns, did not have money in the bank. The entire point of the plan had been the money, and there was none.

 Valva drove to a Wendy’s where Lewis and Sparks used what they had taken to buy food. He drove to a pawn shop and tried to sell Stacy’s wedding ring. He stopped at a tobacco store and bought cigars and cigarettes. Ordinary errands run across an ordinary Sunday evening in Collehen with two people locked in the trunk the whole time.

 And in the trunk, Todd and Stacy found a way to talk to the young men in the car. There was a panel between the trunk and the back seat, and through it they could be heard. Lewis and Sparks were sitting on the other side of it. What the couple did with that opening was not what most people would have done. They did not scream.

 They did not start by bargaining. They asked the two of them questions about God, about Jesus, about church. The conversation went on for a while. Todd and Stacy told them they were not wealthy people and that what they had instead was their faith. They mentioned the revival meeting happening that week at Grace Christian.

 Lewis said he had been to that church himself. They encouraged the two young men to have faith of their own. They told them God’s blessings were available to anyone who wanted them. At one point, Stacy read to them from the Bible. Then the conversation ended and Sparks made a decision. He told Vava he did not want to go through with the rest of it. Valva disagreed.

 He said the couple had to be killed and the car burned to remove the witnesses and to destroy any trace of the group’s fingerprints. Sometime in the course of that evening, Sparks was taken home. He had a curfew and the others dropped him off so he would not miss it. He got out of the car and went inside and the rest of them drove on.

The Alva drove to his own house and went in. While he was inside, Todd and Stacy spoke through the panel again. By this point, they had been in the trunk for several hours. This time, they were not asking about Faith. They were pleading with Lewis for their lives. Valva came back out carrying a ski mask and extra clothing.

 He met up with Bernard and Brown, who had been apart from the group since the parking lot at Mickey’s. Va told them what he had decided. The couple had seen his face. They had to be killed and the car had to be burned. Bernard and Brown left to buy fuel. They went to a convenience store and bought two cans of lighter fluid, the kind sold for charcoal grills, on a shelf near the front.

 Cheap enough that two cans cost less than a meal. Then the group drove out of Khen toward the Fort Hood Military Reservation. The destination was the Belton Lake Recreation Area on the far edge of the post near what was then Quarry Road. The army used that ground for training. Families from the base used the lake shore for weekends. On a Sunday night in late June, with the training areas quiet and the day visitors long gone home, there was nobody out there.

 The road in was unpaved and had been rained on. The Alva drove the Bagley’s Buick to the top of a small rise and parked it. Bernard and Brown opened the cans and poured lighter fluid through the inside of the car. Todd and Stacy were still locked in the trunk. They had been in there since the afternoon.

 They could hear what was happening. They sang and they prayed. Stacy spoke to the men outside. She said, “Jesus loves you.” Then she said, “Jesus, take care of us.” Valva answered her with a curse. He put on the ski mask he had brought from his house. He told Lewis to open the trunk. He shot Todd in the head with the 40 caliber Glock.

 Todd died instantly. He shot Stacy in the right side of her face. The shot knocked her unconscious. It did not kill her. Bernard set the car on fire. The four of them ran down the rise to Bernard’s car and got in. The road was wet. Coming off the rise, the car slid sideways off the edge and dropped into a muddy ditch and the wheels turned without moving it.

They got out and started pushing. Behind them, on the top of the rise, a car was burning in the open on a clear night. On a military reservation, on flat ground in the dark, a vehicle fire is visible for miles. Two Nolanville police officers saw the column of smoke from about 2 mi off. It was around 8 in the evening.

 They turned toward it and drove. They found the burning vehicle on Quarry Road and roughly 150 yards from it, close enough to see from where they stopped, four young men stood in the road beside a car sunk in the mud, rocking it back and forth and getting nowhere. The officers stopped and detained all four for questioning about the fire.

 At that moment, nobody knew what was in the trunk. The four were being held because they were standing next to a burning car in a place nobody was supposed to be, which is reason enough to ask questions. Then the firefighters reached the vehicle and put out the flames. When they got the trunk open, they found Todd and Stacy inside.

 The four young men in the road 150 yards away were arrested at the scene. There was no manhunt. There was no search for suspects, no canvas, no weeks of investigation narrowing a list of names, no tip line. Officers responding to a report of a vehicle fire had driven directly into the people responsible for it.

 Still there, still trying to leave, still within sight of what they had done. Their names were Christopher Valva, Brandon Bernard, Christopher Lewis, and Terry Brown. The fifth, Tony Sparks was at home where he had been dropped off to make his curfew. Investigators reached him separately. The killings had taken place on the Fort Hood Military Reservation.

 That was federal ground and it changed who owned the case. It did not belong to Bell County or to the state of Texas. It belonged to the United States government. Army criminal investigators worked it alongside local police and federal agents. Todd Begley had once been stationed on that post. He was found on it.

 The autopsies were carried out in the days that followed. Todd’s cause of death was the gunshot wound. Stacy’s was different and the findings were specific. Examiners found soot in her larynx, in her trachea, and in her bronchi. A toxicology examination of her blood showed a high level of carbon monoxide.

 Soot in the airway and carbon monoxide in the blood mean one thing. Both are taken in by breathing. She had been alive and breathing after the car was set alike. Her cause of death was smoke inhalation. That finding did more than establish how Stacy Bagley died. It separated two acts that had happened within a minute of each other and made them into two different crimes with two different people responsible.

One person fired the gun. A different person lit the fire. And it was the fire that killed her. In Colleen, word of what had happened moved fast. Five young men from the town were in custody. Two visitors from Iowa in Texas for a church revival were dead on Army land. Investigators began taking statements. The statements came quickly because the people who could give them were already in custody.

 Four had been arrested standing in the road. The fifth was picked up at home. There was no question of who had been there. And within hours, the younger members of the group were talking. They described how the plan had come together, how Valva had put it to them the day before. Bind a stranger, ask for a ride, rob whoever agreed.

 They described the drive to Gregory Lynch’s house to collect the Glock Bernard had lent him. They described the supermarket lot and the other lots after it and the long stretch of afternoon spent looking for someone. They described the pay phone at Mickey’s, the ride, the words Valva used when he brought the gun out.

They described the trunk and the ATMs and the hours of ordinary errands run across Khen. And they described the conversations through the panel of the car, the questions Todd and Stacy had asked them about God, the answers they had given, and what the couple had said back. Their accounts lined up on the shape of the day.

 They did not line up on everything. Terry Terrell Brown had been in the car for most of it. He was the one who had gone with Bernard to buy the lighter fluid and the one who helped pour it through the vehicle at Belton Lake. He gave investigators more than one version of certain events. Details moved between tellings.

 Where he had been standing, what he had seen, and from what angle, what he had done with his own hands. Some of what he told investigators early on, he acknowledged under questioning had not been true. One of those early accounts concerned the fire. Brown told the government that Bernard had started it by throwing a lit match into the car through an open window.

 When investigators examined the vehicle, the window was closed. Christopher Michael Lewis had been there from the beginning. One of the two who sat down with Valva on June 20th to plan the robbery. One of the two who walked up to Todd at the pay phone, one of the two the couple had talked with through the panel of the trunk, and the one Valva told to open that trunk at the end.

 His statements shifted too, where he had been that day, what he had been doing, which parts of it he had taken part in. His accounts of these moved between tellings as well. Neither young man was giving these statements as a neutral witness. Both were in custody. Both had been standing on that rise.

 Both understood exactly what they were exposed to. Investigators went after the physical evidence. And this is where the case turned out to be thinner than the confessions made it look. Gunshot residue was collected from the scene. It was never tested. Too much time passed before anyone processed it, and the window for that testing closed.

No fingerprints were recovered linking any of the group to the Bagley’s vehicle. No trace evidence tied them to it either. The fire had run through the passenger compartment with two cans of lighter fluid poured through it. And what fire did not destroy, the water used to put it out did. The only DNA evidence obtained in the entire case came from the ski mask Valva had worn.

 That was the sum of the forensic case, a mask and nothing else. Which meant that what the government actually had was people. Five young men who had been there. Four of them arrested within sight of the burning car. All of them able to describe the day from the inside because they had lived it. The question became which of them would say it in a courtroom and what it would cost them.

 Federal prosecutors made the calculation that prosecutors make in cases with multiple defendants and thin physical evidence. Some of the people in custody would be needed as witnesses against the others. To get them, the government would have to give something up. The answer came in December 1999. Brown and Lewis both pleaded guilty to seconddegree murder.

 Lewis pleaded guilty to a carjacking charge as well. In exchange, both agreed to testify truthfully against Viala and Bernard. That agreement took a capital trial off the table for both of them. Brown had bought the fuel and poured it. Lewis had planned the robbery and opened the trunk. Neither would face the death penalty. They would testify instead.

Tony Sparks, the youngest of the group, the one the others called Little Gotti, the one who had pointed the 22 at Stacy and later told Valva he wanted no part of the rest of it, and who was driven home to make his curfew before it happened, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting a carjacking that resulted in death.

He had been certified to stand trial as an adult despite his age, which meant he faced the adult consequences of that plea, whatever the law required them to be. Gregory Harden Lynch, who had not planned anything and had not been present for any of it, pleaded guilty to possession of a stolen firearm. That charge flowed from one act, handing Bernard’s Glock back to him on a Sunday afternoon.

 There was one more prosecution and it happened in a state courtroom rather than a federal one. Stacy’s wedding ring, which Valva had tried to pawn during the hours of driving, had ended up with a man named Sherwin Matthew Simple, 34 years old, from Brisia, with no connection to the gang and no part in the crime. Sparks had passed the ring to him.

 Semble pleaded guilty in Bell County District Court to a felony theft charge involving it and received the maximum sentence available, 2 years. The ring was recovered and returned to Stacy’s family in Iowa. Todd’s ring was never found. That left two defendants facing a federal capital trial. A grand jury in the Western District of Texas returned a 4-count indictment against Christopher Andre Vialva, 19, who had planned the robbery, held the Glock, and fired both shots.

 And Brandon Anthony Micah Bernard, 18, who had driven the group through the parking lots that afternoon, played video games during the abduction, bought the lighter fluid, and set the car a light. Count one charged carjacking and aiding and abetting the same. Count two, charged conspiracy to commit murder. Count three, charged the murder of Todd Begley within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States and aiding and abetting it.

 Count four charged the murder of Stacy Baggley on the same terms. Those last two counts existed in that form because of where the road had ended. Murder is not ordinarily a federal crime. It becomes one when it happens on land under federal jurisdiction. a military reservation, for instance, on a stretch of ground near Quarry Road.

Had the car been driven a few miles in the other direction that night, the same acts by the same people would have been a Bell County case in a Texas courtroom under Texas law. The government gave notice that it would seek the death penalty against both men. Neither had ever been convicted of a violent offense before that June.

 Their records were burglaries, property crimes, the kickor breakins the group ran together. No one had ever received a federal death sentence in the Western District of Texas. The case was assigned to Judge Walter S. Smith Jr. who had sat on the federal bench in Waco since the mid 1980s. Under federal law, when a court appoints counsel in a capital case, it is supposed to consider the recommendation of the local federal public defender before making the appointment.

 That office keeps track of which attorneys in the district are qualified to try a death penalty case because not every good criminal lawyer is one. Nobody contacted that office. Not the court and not the attorneys who took the case. Valva was assigned two lawyers. The lead was B. Dwight Goings.

 He had come to law as a second career after years running a business that sold medical supplies to surgeons outside Houston. By 1999, he had a reputation for taking difficult cases and had handled capital work before. He was board certified in criminal law. One of his former clients was already under a death sentence in Texas.

 His co-consel was Stanley Schweer, a criminal defense attorney based in Waco with less capital experience than Goings. Brandon Bernard was assigned Russell David Hunt senior who had chaired three prior death penalty defenses and worked one capital case from the prosecution side and Hunt’s son Russell D. Hunt Jr. who had tried more than two dozen state felony cases and had assisted his father on two capital trials.

 In August 1999, Schweer, co-consel for Christopher Valva, reached out for help. He contacted Richard Burr, a veteran capital defense attorney who worked under contract to the federal courts as a resource for lawyers handling death penalty cases. Burr came and met with both of Valva’s attorneys. What Burr saw in that meeting troubled him.

 He came away believing that Goains was hostile to the idea of investigating and developing mitigation evidence, the material a defense puts before a jury at sentencing to argue for a lifetime instead of death. Schwigger, in Burr’s view, understood why it mattered. He grasped the need to build a full psychosocial history of the client and to run down the reports that Viala had mental disorders and brain dysfunction.

Goains, as Burr read him, treated all of that as a distraction from the fight over guilt. Burr left the meeting feeling he had spent it trying to persuade a man who had already decided. Then there was the money. Federal law set a ceiling of $7,500 for investigators and experts in a capital case. It was not a hard limit.

 Attorneys could apply to the trial judge and to the circuit court for more. And in a case like this one, they were expected to. The Alva’s own budget made clear that the defense would need more than the cap allowed, particularly to pay a mitigation expert to do the work Burr had described. The attorneys prepared the funding request. It was denied. They pressed.

Additional money was eventually approved in part, but the approval did not come through until jury selection was about to begin. In the months between when the defense hit the $7,500 ceiling, the funding stopped and the work that money would have paid for stopped with it. And then there was a third thing.

 In early February 2000, 4 months before the trial, Dwight Goens applied for a job at the United States Attorney’s Office, the same office prosecuting his client. He was rejected about a month later. He let them know he remained interested. A few weeks before trial, Schwigger sent an email to Lisa Brown, Viala’s mother.

He wanted her to hear it from them. Goane had become a frontr runner for a position in the Waco field office. He assured her it had not affected their work on her son’s case. Goains had spoken to her son about it personally, he wrote, and her son wanted him to stay on. On May 3rd, 2000, Goains obtained a written waiver from Viala.

 On May 12th, Goains requested a hearing. Judge Smith laid out Viala’s options for him in open court and Valva confirmed the waiver. Nine days later, jury selection began. Jury selection in a capital case works differently from an ordinary trial. Before anyone hears a fact about the crime, each prospective juror is questioned about the death penalty itself.

 Anyone whose views would prevent them from voting for it can be struck for cause removed without the government spending one of its limited challenges. Dana Pate filled out her questionnaire honestly. She wrote that she did not believe she had the right to decide whether another person lived or died. She wrote that she could not do it.

 The government moved to strike her. brought into the courtroom and questioned. Pate said her position had changed since she wrote that. She had talked it over with people in the time between if the facts warranted it. She told the court she would return a death verdict. She was asked again.

 Twice she said she could not be sure. Judge Smith sustained the objection and removed her from the panel. When selection ended, 12 jurors were seated. 11 of them were white, one was black. Christopher V. Alva was black. Brandon Bernard was black. So were Terry Brown, Christopher Lewis, Tony Sparks, and Gregory Lynch.

 Every young man who had been in the car that day, and the two who would testify for the government. The people who would decide whether these two teenagers lived or died were seated, sworn, and told to report back. The following morning, the trial began. The government’s case did not rest on physical evidence because there was almost none of it.

 It rested on Terry Brown and Christopher Lewis. Both took the stand. Both had pleaded guilty in December. Both were testifying under agreements that had taken the death penalty off the table for them. The jury was told all of this. Between them, they walked the jury through two days in June, the meeting on the 20th where the robbery was planned, bringing in Bernard and Brown.

 The next afternoon, the drive to Lynch’s house for the Glock because the 22 did not look like enough. The supermarket lot and the lots after it. The pay phone at Mickey’s. The ride. The words VVa used when he brought the gun out from the back seat. The trunk. The ATMs that produce nothing. The Wendy’s. The pawn shop. The tobacco store.

 The conversations through the panel. The return to Valva’s house for the mask. The two cans of lighter fluid. And the rise above Belton Lake. Defense council for both men went at their credibility hard. They took Brown through his prior statements one by one. Brown had pleaded guilty to seconddegree murder the previous December in exchange for his testimony and had been standing on that rise pouring lighter fluid through the car.

 They established that he had given investigators many statements, that they contradicted each other, and that several of the contradictions concerned the events of that night directly. They got him to acknowledge in front of the jury that things he had told investigators earlier were lies. And they established one more thing.

 Brown had not actually seen Bernard set the car on fire. They did the same with Lewis, who had taken the same deal, a guilty plea to seconddegree murder and a carjacking charge in exchange for testifying against the two men now sitting at the defense tables. They took him through his own inconsistent statements where he had been that day, what he had been doing, and drew out the same admission.

Lewis had not seen Bernard set the fire either. Neither of the government’s two central witnesses had watched the act Bernard was charged with. The cross-examinations produced other admissions. One of the two testified that the group had no leader. One of them said he had not believed Valva was actually going to kill the Bagleys.

Gregory Lynch testified as well. Lynch had pleaded guilty to possession of a stolen firearm, the charge that came from handing Bernard’s Glock back to him on the afternoon of June 21st, the only part of the day he had any hand in. Among other things, he told the jury that Brown had been smoking before the day’s events began.

 The defense theory for both men was the same and it was built entirely on what the government did not have. Council argued that no forensic evidence connected either defendant to that scene. No fingerprints, no trace evidence, gunshot residue collected and never tested. One DNA sample from a mask.

 Everything else in the case came from the mouths of two young men who had just admitted lying about this exact night and who had been given their lives in exchange for saying it. In closing, the prosecutor came at that headon. He told the jury the investigation had been so thorough that it had left the defense with nothing to work with and that they had been reduced to manufacturing doubt where none existed.

 He said council had spent an hour and a half trying to lead them down a rabbit trail. If the defense had another hour, he said they would try to convince the jury it was midnight outside. Before closing arguments, Judge Smith mentioned something to the attorneys. A juror had reported that while walking past a group of people on the sidewalk that morning, a woman had said to them that someone was going to die in that trial today.

 The judge told council they might notice additional security around the courthouse as a result. No attorney responded. Nobody asked for a hearing. Nobody moved for a mistrial. The trial went forward. On June 1st, 2000, the jury returned its verdict. Guilty on all four counts for both defendants. 7 days later, the same 12 people came back to decide whether the two young men would live.

 The government’s case for death rested on aggravating factors, findings the jury had to make unanimously before either man could be sentenced to die. Prosecutors put forward several that the offense was committed in an especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner involving torture or serious physical abuse. That it involved substantial planning and premeditation.

 that the defendants were likely to commit future acts of violence and would remain a continuing threat, that they had caused injury, harm, and loss to the victim’s families, that they had killed the Beagleys to prevent them from giving information to police, and that they had committed the offense in expectation of receiving something of monetary value.

To support the future dangerousness finding, the government called Dr. Richard Coons, a forensic psychiatrist from Austin. Coons reviewed Valva’s records and testified about what he found. He told the jury that if a person is a gang member outside prison, he will be a gang member inside prison. He explained that gangs band together for protection and control, that members are asked to take part in criminal and violent acts, and that this was simply how it worked.

 He offered his professional opinion that Christopher Valva was a man without a conscience. Kunz’s testimony concerned Viala. He said nothing about Brandon Bernard. The government also presented evidence of gang activity. Brown testified that he, Bernard, and Valva had carried out more than two dozen kick burglaries around Khen.

 Evidence was introduced about Bernard’s involvement in a confrontation with a rival group. Then came the victim impact statements. The government offered five. Four came from parents. The fifth came from a friend and former co-orker of Todd and Stacy. Stacy’s father spoke about what had been taken. He told the jury he believed his children had been recklessly stolen from their families.

 There had been no profit to gain, he said, and no argument that had escalated. It had been a useless act of violence and a total disregard for life. He said Stacy and Todd had seen a chance to witness to two young people and had put themselves in harm’s way to take it. He also told the jury what allowed him to bear it, his belief that he would see his daughter again.

Stacy’s mother, Donna Mccclure, submitted a written statement, and in it, she addressed the two defendants directly. She told them she was sorry for them, that their hearts had been hard enough that they could not see the innocence of the two people they had killed. She warned them that heaven and hell were real.

 She called on them to put their faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. Todd’s father described the harm that had come from sitting through the trial itself and hearing what had been done. Because Todd and Stacy’s faith had shaped nearly every part of their lives, it ran through all of the testimony about them. There was no way to describe who they had been without it.

 Neither defense team objected to any of it. Then the defense began its case for the lives of the two young men. Bernard’s attorneys had chosen a strategy and built the whole phase around it. They set out to show the jury an ordinary young man who had gone wrong rather than a person defined by the worst night of his life. They called witnesses who had known him.

Those witnesses testified that Bernard was a nice young man, that he had attended church, that he was respectful and kind, and they said in different words and repeatedly that he was not a leader, that he followed stronger personalities rather than setting the direction himself. His attorneys had hired private investigators, a firm called Criterion Investigations, and worked from a list of names his mother had given them.

 They had also retained a psychologist, Dr. James Schinder, who evaluated Bernard 2 days before testimony began in the guilt phase. The most powerful witness they had was Thelma Bernard. She took the stand as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and as a mother, asking 12 people not to kill her son. She testified about trying to instill Christian principles in him as he grew up.

 She asked the jury to reject the death penalty. She told them that Jesus wouldn’t do lethal injection. Bernard’s council also made a decision about Dr. Coons that would be argued over for years afterward. Coons had testified about Valva’s future dangerousness and had said nothing at all about Bernard. Rather than object or ask the judge to instruct the jury that the testimony did not apply to their client, Bernard’s lawyers used the silence in closing, they asked the jury to think about it. Dr.

 Coons was the psychiatrist from Austin who had testified about Mr. Valva. What had he said about Brandon Bernard? The jurors would have to think about that one, council told them, because he had not said one word. He had said nothing that made Brandon Bernard a future threat. And there was a reason for that. The Alva’s defense took a different shape.

His mother testified at length. Lisa Brown described her own background, the sheltered childhood, the army, the marriage at 19, the abusive relationships that followed. She described her difficult pregnancy. She described her son’s childhood illnesses, and his attention deficit disorder. She described the relationships he had with the men she brought into the house.

 and she testified about his race, about a son with one black parent and one white parent, and the conflicts that came with it. Then his attorney asked her whether her son had gotten into fights and whether she believed those fights came from his mixed background. She said yes. She started to explain.

 She told the court there had been kids who called him zebra. The prosecutor objected before she could finish. Judge Smith ruled the answer speculative and sustained the objection. The defense’s expert was Dr. Mark Cunningham, a psychologist who had testified frequently for the defense in capital cases.

 Cunningham had reviewed Viala’s educational records, psychological records, medical records, and criminal records. He told the jury what he had found. Valva had been exposed to domestic violence and criminal behavior. He had mild physical abnormalities and possible brain damage. He had experienced a series of emotionally damaging events across his childhood.

 Cunningham described the identity confusion in detail. At different points in his childhood, VVA had identified as white, then as mixed, then as black. The psychological records showed a great deal of turmoil around that essential question of who he was. Asked how something like that affects a person, Cunningham explained that it had been compounded by bigotry VVA experienced early on and by rejection from other kids.

 There had been no peer group he blended into easily. At 6 years old, other kids were calling him names and throwing rocks at him. That Cunningham said was not simply a boy feeling different. That was a boy being actively discriminated against. Cunningham also told the jury what Valva had managed despite it. He had graduated from high school.

 He had kept a bond with his mother. He had continued to protect his younger sister. He had maintained a long-term relationship. Then Cunningham took on the government’s central sentencing claim. Using statistical models, he presented the jury with evidence about the actual rates of violence among inmates serving long federal sentences, arguing against the prediction that Valvo would be dangerous in prison.

The prosecution cross-examined those models hard. On June 13th, 2000, the jury came back with its sentencing recommendations. The jury had been given a special findings form. Before reaching a sentence, they had to work through the aggravating factors and then the mitigating ones. On the aggravating side, they found unanimously that the offense had been especially heinous, cruel, or depraved.

 They found substantial planning and premeditation as to Bernard. They found that VVA’s conduct constituted a single criminal episode involving multiple killings. They found unanimously that both men were likely to commit future acts of violence, that both had caused injury and loss to the families, and that both had killed the Baguley’s to keep them from talking to police.

 They also found the monetary gain factor as to both. Then they turned to mitigation. The form asked them to write down the number of jurors who found each mitigating factor established. One of the listed factors read that Christopher Valva was 19 at the time of the offense. Another read that Brandon Bernard was 18.

 In the blank next to each, the jurors wrote the number zero. Not one of the 12 found the age of either young man to be a mitigating circumstance. 10 of the 12 found that Valva had suffered an abused childhood and accepted that as mitigating. Every other mitigating factor offered on his behalf was rejected. For Brandon Bernard, the jury found no mitigating factors at all.

 The witnesses who had called him kind, the mother who had asked for his life, the testimony that he was a follower, none of it produced a single juror finding on the form. On the first day of deliberations, the jury recommended that Bernard be sentenced to life imprisonment on the carjacking count, on the conspiracy count, and for the murder of Todd Baggley.

 On the second day, they recommended death for the murder of Stacy Begley. For Viala, they recommended death on three counts: the carjacking, the murder of Todd, and the murder of Stacy. Judge Smith imposed those sentences. Valva received life on the conspiracy count and death on the other three.

 Bernard received life on three counts and death on one. Christopher Valva was 20 years old. Brandon Bernard was 19. They were the first people ever sentenced to death in the Western District of Texas. The other cases were resolved separately. Terry Brown and Christopher Lewis were sentenced in Waco federal court the following March after their testimony had been given.

 Both had pleaded guilty to seconddegree murder in December 1999. Neither faced a capital sentence. Gregory Lynch, who had handed over the borrowed Glock, received 5 years. Tony Sparks pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting a carjacking that resulted in death. Federal law at that time required a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment for that offense, and the judge imposed it.

 Sparks had been 16 years old on the day of the crime. dropped off at home before it ended so he would not break his curfew. He received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. At his sentencing hearing, an FBI agent testified about his conduct in custody. The agent described an escape attempt from the Bell County Juvenile Detention Center that had left a guard unconscious, other disturbances while he was being held, and gang graffiti he had written in a United States Marshall Service holding cell in the federal courthouse in Waco. Tony Spark sentence

complete the sixth sentence. Two on federal death row, one serving life, three serving terms of years. Valva and Bernard were transferred to the United States Penitentiary in Teroot, Indiana, where the federal government held the men under sentence of death. Both filed notices of appeal.

 The federal death row at Teroot held about 20 men when Valva and Bernard arrived. The place was new to the federal system in a practical sense. The government had not carried out an execution in decades. Congress had expanded the federal death penalty in 1994, and the sentences had begun accumulating, but no one had yet been put to death under the modern statute.

The men on that range were waiting for something that had not happened in living memory. Lisa Brown made her first visit not long after her son arrived. Walking toward the restroom, she passed a visitation room and saw a man sitting with his attorneys, pale with a military haircut.

 She recognized him immediately from television. It was Timothy McVey. Until that moment, she said McVey had been an abstraction to her, a person whose crimes were too large to take in. Seeing him in a jumpsuit like anyone else was, in her word, shocking. Her son was 19 when he committed the crime and 20 when he was sentenced.

 He was among the youngest men on the range. He told his mother that another inmate had spotted him in the recreation yard and shaken his head, saying they were putting babies in there. Now, Valva’s first appeal went to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and Bernard’s went with it. The two cases were argued together.

 The appeal raised 10 separate grounds. That the trial court had wrongly struck Dana Pate from the jury. that the penalty phase should have been severed because Bernard’s evidence of a Christian conversion prejudiced the jury against Viala, who had no comparable evidence to offer. That the court had failed to investigate the sidewalk comment overheard by a juror.

 That the victim impact statements had gone beyond what the law allowed. That certain aggravating factors had been wrongly defined or were unsupported. that the jury had acted arbitrarily in refusing to treat their ages as mitigating, that the court had wrongly excluded Lisa Brown’s testimony about the word other kids had used, that the prosecutor’s closing argument had denied Viala a fair trial, that these errors together had made the punishment phase unfair, and that Bernard’s indictment had been legally insufficient.

The panel was circuit judges Edith Jones, Jock Weiner, and Robert Parker. Judge Jones wrote the opinion which issued on July 19th, 2002. The court rejected almost everything. On the excluded testimony about the word zebra, it held that even if the ruling had been wrong, the error was harmless. Because Brown had been permitted to testify at length about racial tension in her son’s life. And because Dr. life.

 Cunningham had testified about the effects of racial harassment and because council had argued the point in closing. The jury, the court said, had not been kept from considering it. On the ages, the court held the jury had been entitled to right zero. Neither the statute nor Supreme Court precedent required a jury to give weight to any particular piece of mitigating evidence.

 And the court offered a reason the jury might have reached that conclusion. It had an evidentiary basis to believe these two men’s acts capped a pattern of gang activity that made them in criminal terms older than their years. On the sidewalk comment, the court noted that no attorney had objected, requested a hearing, or moved for a mistreal, which the court took as an indication the incident had been trivial.

 On the victim impact statements, the court did find problems. It held that Donna Mccclure’s direct address to the two defendants, the warning about heaven and hell, the call to accept Christ, was irrelevant and could have been excluded had anyone objected. It held that parts of both her statement and Stacy’s father’s testimony were inadmissible under Supreme Court precedent because they characterized the defendants and offered opinions about the crime.

 It found the error plain, but it held that none of it had affected the defendant’s substantial rights and let the sentences stand. There was one argument the court accepted outright. Both men had challenged the monetary gain aggravating factor. They argued that Congress had intended it for murders committed for payment and that it did not apply where the killings themselves produced no gain. The fifth circuit agreed.

 It held that the factor applies only where the murder itself was committed in expectation of monetary gain and that the evidence in this case did not support it. The motive for the killings, the court wrote, had been to prevent the Bagleys from reporting the crime to police. It was unrelated to money. The jury had found an aggravating factor it should never have been asked to consider.

 The court then examined whether that error had changed the outcome and concluded it had not. Stripping the invalid factor still left two statutory aggravating factors for Bernard and three for Valva, plus three more that the jury had found unanimously for both. The government had barely mentioned monetary gain in its closing. The jury had found at least five other aggravating factors against each man and almost no mitigating factors at all.

 The error, the court held, was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The convictions and sentences were affirmed. The following year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. With the direct appeal exhausted, both men moved to a motion under section 255, the statute that lets a federal prisoner raise what cannot be raised on direct appeal.

 Ineffective counsel evidence. The government withheld everything outside the trial transcript. In 2003, Susan Otto was appointed to represent Viala. She was the longtime federal public defender for the Western District of Oklahoma, and she knew the federal death penalty’s short history from close range. How carjacking became a federal crime in 1992 after a research chemist named Pam Bassu was killed in Maryland during one, and how Congress made it death eligible 2 years later.

She met her client that year. He was 23, angry and bitter, the way people are when they arrive in prison very young. Two problems met her at the door. The first was the clock. She had one year from appointment to file. Judge Smith took over a month to approve that appointment and every day came out of her year. The second was the file.

Capital attorneys must preserve their records for later council. Otto drove to Alpine, Texas to collect Viala’s records from Dwight Goains, who had joined the United States Attorney’s Office after the trial and whom Smith would appoint a federal magistrate judge in 2007. Goings told her he did not know what had happened to them.

 She filed without them and supplemented in 2005 after the Supreme Court decided Roer v. Simmons, barring death for crimes committed before 18. Valva had been 19. Bernard, 18. Neither fell inside the rule, but its reasoning that adolescent brains are unfinished, that the young are impulsive and easily led, became the spine of everything they argued afterward.

Viala’s petition raised the conflict from Goains’s job application. the collapse of the funding, the thin investigation, and a mitigation case that should have included his mother’s illness, symptoms of bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, and depression. Bernard’s raised the two-page letter his lawyers sent the Justice Department opposing a death authorization, a mitigation investigation handed off and never finished, and the absence of any independent expert on how the fire started or how Stacy died. Both raise

Brady claims that the government had withheld what it owed them about Terry Brown, his criminal history, his prior inconsistent statements, his drug use, medications given him in a juvenile facility. Repeated interviews conducted without official statements. Bernard raised the match through the open window.

 Both asked for an evidentiary hearing so the claims could be tested under oath. Judge Smith, who had presided over the trial, kept the petitions. Years passed. In 2012, he denied everything. No hearing, no discovery. By then, Otto had spent a decade on the case and had never argued it in front of a judge, not once in any courtroom.

 Nothing like that had happened to her before. Both men applied to the fifth circuit for a certificate of appealability. It went to circuit judges E. Grady Jolly, Patrick Higin Bothotham, and Edith Jones, the same Edith Jones who had affirmed the convictions 12 years earlier. She wrote this one, too. It issued on August 11th, 2014.

To get a certificate, a prisoner need only show that reasonable jurists could disagree with the district court. It is a low bar, and in a capital case, doubt is supposed to favor the prisoner. The panel granted nothing. On competence, it found all four attorneys experienced. Gaines had extensive death penalty experience and was board certified.

 Hunt Senior had shared three prior capital defenses and one as a prosecutor. In a footnote, the court called it odd at best that Richard Burr had furnished an affidavit challenging their competence. On the conflict, it walked the timeline, applied in February, rejected in March, hired only after trial, and held there was no actual conflict.

 A lawyer’s future employment plans, standing alone, do not create one. Any perceived conflict had been waved on the record, and nothing showed prejudice. On funding, council had asked, been denied, and eventually been granted part. Steering limited money away from forensic experts was reasonable when the whole defense was the absence of physical evidence.

 On the failure to cross-examine, the record contradicted the claim. Council had gone hard at Brown and Lewis, drawn out the inconsistencies, and elicited that the gang had no leader. On severance, VVA’s council had moved three times, once with an 18-page memorandum. All three denied. On mitigation, Dr. Cunningham’s testimony had been strong.

 Calling him was not ineffective. Then the court reached prejudice and put it plainly. Valva had led the group. He had decided the Bagleys must die because they had seen his face. He had decided to burn the car. He had shot them after they begged for their lives. The Brady claims failed as cumulative, immaterial, or not suppressed.

 Brown’s drug use came out through Lynch. His gang membership, his possession of the weapon, and his guilty plea were all before the jury, and Brown had told the jury himself that he never saw Bernard light the fire, and that his earlier statements were lies. So, the match through the open window was not material. The Alva’s argument that he had been operating far below 19 found no legal support. Roer’s line was chronological.

Both applications were denied. In early 2016, the Supreme Court refused the case a second time. Direct appeal exhausted. Collateral review exhausted. Two petitions to the Supreme Court both refused. Neither man had ever had an evidentiary hearing on anything. Then something happened to Judge Walter Smith.

 In 2015, the judicial council of the fifth circuit publicly reprimanded him over an incident from 1998. Unwanted sexual advances toward a court employee 2 years before he presided over this trial. He lost two cases for a year and was ordered into counseling. The United States Judicial Conference then opened its own investigation into whether the first inquiry had gone far enough.

 In a deposition, the employee said Smith had smelled of alcohol at the time. Evidence emerged of a drinking problem going back years. In September 2016, before it concluded, Smith retired. He had been Waco’s federal judge for 32 years. For Otto, it recast everything he had touched. He presided over the trial. He ruled on the conflict 3 days before it began.

 He took a month to approve her appointment, cutting into her filing year. He held the petitions for years, then denied them without a hearing. And in 2007, he put Viala’s former trial attorney on the federal bench. Bernard and Valva filed a 32-page motion asking the court to vacate the sentences or hold a hearing on Smith’s unfitness and how it had shaped his rulings.

 The case had been reassigned to Judge Lee Yekl in Austin. He dismissed it for want of jurisdiction without reaching the substance. The men had already had their one collateral challenge. A second needed the fifth circuit’s permission first. Meanwhile, one of the six got relief and it came from the Supreme Court rather than from anything his lawyers argued.

In 2012, the court held mandatory life without parole could not be imposed for crimes committed before 18. 4 years later, it made that retroactive. Tony Sparks had been 16. His life sentence had been mandatory. In March 2018, he was resentenced to 420 months, 35 years, with 5 years of supervised release.

 He had served about 220 of them. At the hearing, his attorney raised Sparks’s German citizenship and the possibility of serving the rest abroad. He told a reporter he had come to know Sparks over the years and considered him someone who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people.

 Terry Brown and Christopher Lewis were nearing the end of their terms. Gregory Lynch had long since finished his 5 years. Christopher Valva and Brandon Bernard remained at Teroot. They had been there since 2000 and were now in their late30s out of appeals with no federal execution carried out since 2003, the year a former Army Ranger named Louis Jones Jr.

was put to death there. After Jones, the chamber went quiet. Drug shortages and litigation over lethal injection kept it closed through an entire administration that set dates and never carried one out. The men waited without knowing what they were waiting for. Vava began to change during those years and the change was not subtle.

 He converted to Messianic Judaism, his mother’s faith, a tradition that keeps Jewish practice while holding that Jesus is the Messiah. He then spent roughly 2 years pressing the prison staff to let him hold weekly services. Federal prisons accommodate recognized religious practice, but a small faith on a range holding 20 men is not a priority for anyone, and getting approval took persistence.

He kept asking until they said yes. For the 7 years that followed, Valva led the Passover seder inside the prison. He also ministered to other men on the range. He became one of the people they came to. And the letters written about him during that period say the same things in different handwriting. That his presence studied the environment around him.

 That men in solitary relied on him for conversation to break the boredom. That he was someone they trusted. He read constantly and he crocheted. He made blankets and stuffed animals and sent them to his mother who kept them at her house in Colleen. When a couple at Brown’s congregation in Texas had a baby, he bartered with other inmates to get the yarn and made blankets for them.

 He made himself a kipa as well. His mother visited when she could make the drive from Texas to Indiana. Over 21 years, she made that trip many times. Bernard changed too in his own way. He earned a reputation among staff and inmates as one of the better behaved men in the unit. He worked. He kept his record clean. At some point, he began sending money to Lisa Brown to help cover the cost of her travel to visit her son.

 In July 2019, the attorney general announced the first federal execution dates in 16 years. The men listed had all been convicted of crimes against the very young or the elderly, and the announcement emphasized that. Lisa Brown read it and drew a conclusion that seemed reasonable to her.

 They were going through those cases first, she thought, because that was what the public would accept most easily. She told her son not to worry yet. Litigation held the dates up for almost a year. Then it cleared. On July 14th, 2020, the federal government carried out its first execution since 2003. Two more followed that same week.

 All three men were white. On July 31st, the attorney general announced two more dates. The first was for William Lcroy on September 22nd. The second was for Christopher Valva on September 24. Valva later described how he learned it. Officers brought him out of his cell to the unit team office where the warden was waiting.

 The warden wore a mask so Valva could not read his expression. There was a sheet of paper on the table in front of him. He sat down and the warden told him he had been scheduled for execution on September 24th. He called his mother that night to tell her. Afterward, he wrote that he spent the rest of the night thinking about her heartbreaking and what was going on with her.

 That same day, he and Lacroy were moved to the death watch range. Two men were already there. Lesman Mitchell, the only Native American on federal death row, and Keith Nelson, both were scheduled to die in August. two days apart. The Alva wrote about that week in letters. Mitchell, he said, did not speak to anyone.

 Nelson talked a great deal in his final two days. It was as though he feared the silence, and it was hard to listen to him move back and forth between emotions. At one point, Nelson’s lawyers won a stay, and the news angered him. Balva explained why. A stay is not always good news when you have been preparing your mind for dying.

 They never last, he wrote. All they do is prolong something already unbearable. Before Nelson was taken on August 28th, he told Valva to get his affairs in order. He told him he was a good man and that he hated that Valva had to follow him. Valva’s last memory of him was difficult. Right before the officers came, Nelson was violently ill.

 Then they chained and shackled him and let him pass. As he went by, he said goodbye to both of them by name. Vava could see the redness in his eyes. He told his mother about it afterward. He called it horrific. A word she said her son did not use often. Five men had now been executed at Teroot in 6 weeks.

 Five of the first six were white. The sixth was Navajo. The Alva would be the seventh and the first black man to die in that chamber since the executions resumed. Susan Otto had one avenue left and it was not a court. On September 10th, she made a clemency presentation to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.

Prosecutors in that office make a recommendation to the Deputy Attorney General, who decides whether to send the application to the president. Normally, the presentation happens in person in Washington. Because of the pandemic, the building was empty, and she did it over video. Otto’s argument to the Justice Department was the argument she had been making for 17 years, and it centered on race.

 Prosecutors had told the jury that Valva led a black street gang faction and had killed to raise his status inside it. Otto contended there was no evidence he was even a full member, let alone a leader. The claim, she said, had served only to summon a set of stereotypes in front of a nearly all-white jury. 11 white jurors and one black juror.

 It played into a narrative, she said, of a dangerous young black man who had killed a lovely white couple. And they were lovely, she added. She described what she believed had actually happened. Valva had been put out of his mother’s house. He had nowhere to go. He and a group of friends made a plan to rob someone.

 This was the product of a young person with disorganized thinking in a state of panic, surrounded by others whose ideas were no better than his. She was also making a broader point about the men on that range. Federal death row, she argued, had been built on a promise of prosecuting drug kingpins and had produced something else entirely.

 Pablo Escobar, as her client put it to her, was nowhere around. There were 57 people under federal death sentence. 26 were black, seven were Latino. None were there for treason, espionage, or terrorism. Every one of them could have been prosecuted in a state court instead. Days before, the death penalty information center had published a study on race and capital punishment in America, tracing it back through lynching and slavery.

 On September 15th, Valva’s attorneys released a video. He sat against a white background in a beige prison uniform, a knitted kippa, and a white and blue prayer shaw over his shoulders. He read from a piece of paper held awkwardly in handcuffed hands, pushing his glasses up as he went. He said he was speaking because the government was trying to execute him and many others using the public’s tax dollars and because there was almost no national coverage of the federal death penalty.

 Americans, he said, were not being told about the racial disparities or the lack of judicial review. People did not know that many of the men there had been arrested before they were old enough to drink. He asked a question directly. How many people did anyone know in their 30s or 40s who had no regrets about what they had done at 19? Then he said the part that mattered most.

 He was not making the plea as an innocent man. He had committed a grave wrong when he was a lost kid and he had taken two precious lives from this world. Every day he said he wished he could write that wrong. He said he was not the stupid kid he had been on the day he made the most desperate and tragic decision of his life.

 But he was, he said, a changed and redeemed man. His mother was making her own appeal, hoping the president would see that her son was not the same person. In his final days, he wrote that he was running on autopilot and running out of emotional gas. He had filled out a witness list, deciding which people would sit behind the glass and watch.

 He had submitted a last meal request. He had gone through his property and divided it up, working out what to give away, what to throw out, and what to leave his mother. What he could not work out was how to say goodbye. He kept trying to find the words for it, and they would not come. He had less than a week, he wrote, and he was tired.

 On Friday, September 18th, Lisa Brown got in her car in Ken and started driving north. Valva’s execution was set for 6:00 in the evening, Eastern time on Thursday, September 24th, 2020. Inside the prison’s media center, five tables had been set out for reporters. A small number of journalists would serve as media witnesses, which is how the public learns what happens in that room.

That morning, across the road from the complex, a group of death penalty opponents had gathered, and Lisa Brown had spoken to them and to the cameras. In the afternoon, she and her older sister went inside to witness her son’s execution. The Bureau of Prisons arranges travel and lodging for victims, families, and gives them a place to speak with reporters afterward.

 It provides nothing of the kind for the family of the condemned. Brown had driven herself up from Colleen the previous Friday. Members of the Bagley family and others close to Todd and Stacy were also there to witness. The Alva was brought into the chamber and secured. The room was pale green. He wore black glasses with unusually thick lenses.

 He was asked if he had a final statement. He offered a prayer for the family of the people he had killed. He asked God to search the hearts of Todd and Stacy’s family to comfort them and to heal their hearts with grace and love. Then he said, “I’m ready, Father.” The drug was pentobatital. As the injection began, he opened his eyes wide.

 He looked up and scanned the ceiling lights. He furrowed his brow. He yawned. Then he turned his head toward the witness room where his mother was sitting behind the glass, and he kept it there. Within a few minutes, he stopped moving. His head stayed tilted toward that window. His mouth was open. White blotches appeared on his hands.

 His arms, his lips, and his nose turned a purple shade, and then went pale. 20 minutes passed. An official walked into the chamber, put a stethoscope to his chest, listened, and walked out. Seconds later, a voice came over the intercom and declared Christopher Valva dead at 6:42 p.m.

 Later, officials corrected the time to 6:46. No explanation was given for the change. The VO County coroner made the pronouncement. He was 40 years old. He was the seventh person executed by the federal government that year, 2 days after William Lcroy. Five of the six before him had been white. The sixth, Lesmon Mitchell, was a member of the Navajo Nation.

 Valva was the first black man put to death in that chamber since the executions resumed. Afterward, his mother sent a text message. “He was looking at me when he died,” she wrote. Brandon Bernard’s execution was scheduled for 6:00 in the evening, Eastern time on Thursday, December 10th, 2020. “It did not happen at 6. His lawyers had gone to the Supreme Court.

The claim they carried there had surfaced late, that the government had withheld evidence from a police officer who considered Bernard the lowest ranking member of the gang. Bernard had not learned of it until after his first appeal was already denied when that officer testified about the matter in an unrelated case.

 It went to the heart of his sentence. his lawyers argued because the jury’s unanimous death verdict had rested largely on testimony that his standing in the gang was equal to the others and that he would remain a danger. A federal appeals court had closed off that argument the previous month. Less than 2 hours before the scheduled time, Bernard’s team filed two unusual supplements with the Supreme Court, notifying the justices that Alan Dersowitz of Harvard Law School and Ken Starr, the former solicitor general, had

volunteered to join his council. They asked for 14 days so the new attorneys could read into the case and file. The day before, Senators Dick Durban and Corey Booker had publicly called on the president to commute the sentence. That afternoon, Bernard spoke by phone with Kim Kardashian West.

 She said afterward that it was the hardest call she had ever had, that he had been focused on his family and on making sure they were all right, and that they had not said goodbye. They had said, “Talk to you soon.” Georgia Begley came to Teroot. She had been there in September and she came again now. The family gave their statements before it was carried out.

Charles Woodard wrote on their behalf. He said he prayed Brandon had accepted Christ as his savior because if he had, Todd and Stacy would welcome him into heaven with love and forgiveness. Georgia Begley wrote her own. It had been very difficult, she said, to wait 21 years for the sentence imposed by the judge and jury on those who cruy participated in the destruction of her children to finally be completed.

She described what had been done as premeditated and pointed out that it could have been stopped at any moment across a 9-hour period. Her position had not moved in 21 years. She believed that when a person deliberately takes the life of another, they suffer the consequences for it. The family thanked the president, the attorney general, and the department of justice for carrying out the sentence.

6:00 came and went. Bernard waited. Around 8, the court ruled. It declined to postpone the execution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a disscent. Justices Steven Brier and Elena Kagan would also have granted the stay. Three of the nine publicly dissented from letting it proceed. Bernard was brought into the chamber and secured.

 He was asked if he wanted to make a final statement. He turned toward the witness room and spoke for more than 3 minutes calmly directing his words at the family of the couple. He said he was sorry. He said he wished he could take it all back, but he could not. That was the only thing he could say, he told them.

 that completely captured how he felt now and how he had felt that day. The injection was administered. Brandon Bernard was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. 3 and 1/2 hours after the time originally set. He was 40 years old. He had been in custody since he was 18. He was the ninth person executed by the federal government that year and the first put to death by the federal government during a lame duck presidency in 130 years.

 His attorney, Robert Owen, released a statement. Many things had gone wrong to put Brandon on death row, he said, including government misconduct in concealing evidence and misleading the jury, which the courts had refused to remedy. Brandon’s execution, he said, was a stain on America’s criminal justice system. He said he prayed that even in death, Brandon would advance his commitment to helping others.

 Kardashian wrote afterward that he had been a reformed person, hopeful and positive until the end, and that he was sorry for the hurt and pain he had caused. Stacy Begley’s family said their lives had been changed forever with her death. The federal executions continued after Bernard. Before the administration ended in January, the government put four more people to death, including Lisa Montgomery, the first woman executed by the federal government in almost 70 years. 13 people in 6 months.

 It was the largest number of federal executions in a comparable period in more than a century. Nearly half of them were black. If you made it this far, thank you for reading.