Tracey Beatty called his own death an “advantage”.
Beatty, 61, from Whitehouse, spent nearly two decades on death row after killing his mother two days before Thanksgiving in 2003. Although the final date of his execution has been pushed back several times, Beatty knew his death was drawing near since he was incarcerated in the state prison in 2003. August 2004
“I have an advantage over most people in the world. I mean, you don’t know when you’re going to die,” Beatty told our media partners on CBS19 in an exclusive interview just weeks before the execution. “I know when I’m going to die, and I’ve known I’ve been dying since I’ve been here.”
That moment finally came for Beatty Wednesday night when he took his last breath at 6:39 p.m. in the execution chamber at the Huntsville State Penitentiary, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records.
“Yes, I just want to say thank you… I don’t want to leave you baby, see you when you get there. I love you,” Beatty told his wife during his last words as he wept, according to a CBS19 report. He married a woman who was his pen pal on 25 October.
Beatty’s next words were addressed to his cellmates.
“Thank you to all my brothers in the ward for their support in helping me get my life back on track. Sunshine, Blue, I love you brothers. See you on the other side,” CBS19 reports.
Witnesses included his two daughters, his wife, ex-wife, and spiritual advisor. The adviser prayed over him before his death.
His last days from last Sunday to Wednesday morning were recorded by TDCJ officials. According to CBS19, some of his latest activities have included sleeping, sitting on his bunk, talking on the phone, visiting, listening to music, reading, and interacting with a field chaplain and life coach.
During the weeks waiting for the lethal injection, Beatty said he was not worried about dying.
“I have already made peace with the Man. So I know where I’m going,” Beatty told CBS19 of Polunsky’s Livingston branch, where he spent most of his time in a cell, not including two hours of rest. “I’ll be in a much better place than this.”
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Beatty became the fourth inmate to be executed in Texas and 13th in the country this year. The state’s last execution of the year is set for November 16, with six more executions scheduled for 2023.
Beatty was sentenced in Smith County in 2004 after he was found guilty of strangling his 62-year-old mother Caroline “Kelly” Ruth Click on November 25, 2003 and burying her in the backyard of her pale yellow mobile home on County Road. 2323 at the White House.
According to Beatty, the murder of his mother was an accident.
“That’s why I made peace with the Man Upstairs. I know I will see her again,” he said. Beatty was baptized and also married during his time in prison.
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Assassin
Beatty did not seem remorseful, not 18 years ago during his trial and sentencing, when he drew in a notebook, nor in an interview a few weeks before his death, when he reflected on what happened that day.
Click told Beatty, aged 43 at the time, that he needed to move out of her home, where she willingly invited him to stay after he served time in prison for intentionally harming his 18-month-old niece by electrocuting her. exposed electric cord, burned her with cigarettes, pulled her hair, bit her and punched her in the face, according to court records. As with that incident, Beatty said he was also under the influence when he killed Snap.
“I drank all day and came in drunk,” Beatty recalled in an October 12 interview with CBS19. “She just started talking nonsense and making scandals, telling me that I’m not going to stay at home and all that. ”
He said he tried to leave the room, but Click grabbed his hair, and that’s when he lost control, strangled her and threw her into a chair in the trailer, where his mother invited him, hoping to restore their unstable relationship.
What do you think was going on in her head? Chief Criminal Attorney April Sykes stated during the trial, as reported by the Morning Telegraph in 2004, “Why, what did I do to make you hate me so much?” How about, “I love you, how can you do that?” What is her crime – love for him? Miss Click loved him and it cost her her life.”
Beatty said that at that moment he did not think that she had died, but simply passed out.
The next morning, he felt the cold body of his mother and realized that he had killed her. He took off her clothes and put her body in a bath to wash off the blood. He left her there for three days before deciding he “had to do something”.
“So I just dug a grave in the backyard and put it in it. She always said she wanted to be buried up there on top of the hill,” Beatty told CBS19.
Evidence proves that Beatty brutally murdered his mother, strangling her to death and brutally beating her, breaking her bones and injuring her head, according to news reports by the Tyler Morning Telegraph in 2004. He then burned her personal belongings, stole her car, and according to court records, she emptied all of her bank accounts and credit cards to buy drugs and alcohol.
Shortly after Lyck’s death, Beatty was imprisoned again, this time on charges of car theft. He was placed in Henderson County when he began telling inmates about his mother’s murder. He also asked to speak to investigators to bring them to Click’s body to “get her out of the pit before Christmas,” according to the Morning Telegraph. On December 23, 2003, corpse dogs found her naked, twisted body in a small, shallow grave behind her house. Beatty buried her with mothballs and garlic, filled her with cat litter and lumber, and tied pantyhose around her neck and face.
Too small, too late
Beatty’s lawyers made last-minute attempts to stay his execution, but both failed. The first attempt was a lawsuit filed last month against prison officials alleging that Beatty deserved a psychiatric evaluation without handcuffs to see if he was mentally handicapped, which would make his execution unconstitutional for the state. The second 11-hour attempt came last week when his lawyers said they learned that one of the jurors knew Snap through a similar social circle, but did not confess at the time. The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday morning denied the motion for a stay of execution.
While assessments over the past few months and nearly two decades ago have shown Beatty to have signs of mental illness, nothing has proven mentally retarded.
During the trial, forensic psychiatrists Dr. Edward Gripon and Dr. Tynus McNeil testified that Beatty’s behavior was consistent with a “lifelong state of antisocial personality disorder,” according to the Morning Telegraph. However, they concluded that he was not mentally ill “to any significant degree” and had an IQ of 100, “which places him in the middle of the population”.
Two physicians, Dr. Bhushan Agarkar and Dr. Daniel Martell, examined Beatty on September 19 and 22, respectively, but both gave incomplete results due to the TDCJ’s refusal to remove Beatty’s handcuffs. However, Agarkar said that Beatty was “clearly psychotic and had a complex paranoid delusional belief system”.
“While he seemed logical and linear overall, when the interrogation moved to his current conclusion, a complex delusional world was revealed,” Agarkar said in a letter to Beatty’s lawyers. “He spoke of a vast conspiracy by correctional officers who spread false rumors about him to turn people against him. They ‘torture’ him with a device in his ear so he can hear their threatening voices.”
Beatty believed that his mind was being read and passed on to others, and that correctional officers were trying to turn inmates and others against him.
