A tiny middle-aged woman dabs tears from the corners of her eyes as she sits forlornly in a Plexiglass-encased cage at the Mountain View Unit.
A compassionate female guard hands her a roll of toilet paper to use as tissues. Under the watchful eyes of the prison warden and a public information officer, the gray-haired woman accused of burying 2 husbands in her back yard answers questions.
Wrinkles from a hard-scrabble life etch her face like a road map of sorrow. Here and there, smile lines shine through. Betty Lou Beets is a study in contradictions. Prosecutors and law enforcement officers see her as a methodical, cold-blooded killer. At her trial, co-workers described Beets as friendly, if temperamental.
The judgment that really matter, however, was that of an 8-woman, 5-man Henderson County jury in 1985. The jurors sentenced the grandmother of 9 to death for the brutal shooting death of her 5th husband, Jimmy Don Beets.
From death row Thursday, the former Payne Springs resident granted her 1st interview in 14 years.
Beets, who maintains each of her five husbands were abusive, controlling and violent, appears inconsolable.
"This is not a capital case," she sobbed. "It's about domestic violence.  ... It's about abuse and control and you don't kill people for that. You don't kill the one that survives it."
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Mrs. Beets' final appeal. Shortly afterward, 173rd District Court Judge Jack Holland set her new execution date for Feb. 24, less than a month before her 63rd birthday. Unless she receives an unlikely clemency from Gov. Bush, Mrs. Beets will be put to death by lethal injection at the Walls Unit in Huntsville.
"My faith gives me strength," said Mrs. Beets, who says she is a Christian. "I know it glorifies God to see all the prayers that have been lifted up on my behalf. That's what God's all about is to be there for us, and he's there for me."
Acting on an anonymous tip, Henderson County law enforcement officials unearthed a man's body under a wishing well-style flower planter in 1985 at the Beets' Cherokee Shores subdivision residence near Payne Springs.  A 2nd body was found buried beneath a wooden shed in the back yard.
Forensic testing revealed the two men were Mr. Beets and 4th husband, Doyle Wayne Barker. Both men had been shot in the back of the head with a .38-caliber Colt revolver and shrouded in sleeping bags before being buried near the Beets' mobile home. Barker had been missing since 1981, Beets since 1983.
The grisly discovery sparked national media coverage, and a steady stream of curious onlookers cruised past the Beets' residence.
Mansfield police officers took Mrs. Beets into custody later that day. Also arrested was her daughter, Shirley Stegner. Both were charged with capital murder, but Stegner never went to trial.
When Mr. Beets vanished in August 1983, Mrs. Beets told authorities he had gone on a fishing trip on Cedar Creek Lake and never returned. For three weeks following, Texas Parks & Wildlife game wardens, Henderson County Sheriff's Department deputies, and about 20 volunteers from the Dallas Fire Department combed the lake in search of his body.
When the case went to trial, then District Attorney Bill Bandy lobbied hard for the death penalty, arguing she had killed Jimmy Don Beets, a retired captain with the Dallas Fire Department, to collect on his life insurance policy of $86,000 and his monthly $760 retirement check.
During the trial, Mrs. Beets' son and daughter testified against her, claiming she had masterminded the killings and carried them out.
Mrs. Beets' court-appointed defense attorney, E. Ray Andrews, countered that her son, Robert Branson II, pulled the trigger during a heated argument the day before Mrs. Beets declared her husband missing on Aug. 6. The defense lawyer said his client concocted the story about Mr. Beets' disappearance to protect her son.
When asked about the quality of her defense representation, Mrs. Beets shakes her head. Andrews fell short, she said, never subpoenaing any witnesses, except for her mother and brother, and never presenting pictures of the bruised and battered face given to her by Mr. Beets.
In addition, she said Andrews never presented evidence that her Mr. Beets had been abusive in previous relationships as well.
"He didn't even let them know I couldn't hear most of my own trial," said Mrs. Beets, who is hearing-impaired. "I only heard parts of it, and when I asked questions, Mr. Andrews told me to be quiet and that he knew what he was doing."
"When Mr. Bandy brought up the fact that I shot my second husband, Bill Lane, I asked Andrews, "Why didn't you defend me?'" she said.
During the trial, Bandy brought up the fact that Mrs. Beets had shot her second husband and the charge was downgraded to misdemeanor assault. She said Lane was an alcoholic and "just plain mean." In addition, Mrs. Beets maintained her 2nd husband had beaten her on several occasions and even pointed a gun at her and at her 6 children.
Mrs. Beets explained Lane attacked her one night as her daughter was dialing the police. Fearing for her life, she said she picked up a .22-caliber pistol and shot him.
When asked how she managed to shoot Lane in the back if he was attacking her, Mrs. Beets replied, "I didn't shoot him in the back. I shot him in the side and stomach and across the bottom of his chin."
During Thursday's interview, Mrs. Beets stuck to the version of events she recounted at her trial. She said on Aug. 5, she, Mr. Beets, her son Branson and a daughter returned from a 3-week vacation a day early because "everything was a just in a mess." Problems like the propeller missing from their boat led to short tempers and finger-pointing.
"He was very angry. Jimmy Don was an alcoholic and he got drunk every day ... every day," she said. "And when he would hit on something, he'd just go on and on and on about it and he'd never let up.
"People could have testified to his character, his nature but no one was ever called," she added, her eyes focused on the distant past. "He beat his own son."
When the topic of discussion turned to what happened to Barker in 1981, the second man found buried at the Beets' house, the Death Row inmate again became emotional. On the day he vanished, she said, Barker - a construction worker - went to Dallas to work and ended up drinking all day with his buddies.
Upon returning to their Cedar Creek Lake residence, he and Mrs. Beets got into an argument about some of the children, she said. He was also angry about the fact the telephone repairman hadn't been by to work on the phone.
"He just kept drinking," said Mrs. Beets. "I had cooked supper but he wouldn't eat because he didn't ever eat when he was drinking. And he wanted the keys to my truck. He didn't have a vehicle and he wanted the keys to my truck. I told him no."
Enraged, she said he went through her purse, looking for the keys.
"He started beating me and he beat me and drug me through the house until I couldn't get up," said Mrs. Beets, her voice breaking with raw emotion.  She dabbed at her eyes. "And then he drug me into the kitchen and poured water over my head. And I was just laying there and he walked out and left. I didn't ever see him any more after that."
So how did he, too, end up buried in her back yard, shot in the head and wrapped in a sleeping back just as her 5th husband would be?
"I think Bill Lane did it," she offered, maintaining that Lane, her 2nd husband, had stalked her since their divorce, occasionally leaving notes in her mailbox.

         FROM DALLAS MORNING NEWS
.
Betty Beets, a soft-spoken great-grandmother with hearing aids tucked beneath her gray hair, faces execution this month with a few tears, no admission of guilt and a plea for understanding for battered women.
Betty Beets, 62, is to die Feb. 24 for killing her 5th husband. In an interview Thursday, she did not admit guilt but expressed regret for the slaying, which she said resulted from a series of abusive relationships.
One of the most infamous murderers in modern Texas history, Ms. Beets said in an interview Thursday that she does not admit guilt in the 1983 slaying of her fifth husband, who was found buried near her fourth husband outside the couple's home in Henderson County.
Instead, she pointed to years of abuse and "all the problems of my life that caused the family pain."
"I'm deeply sorry for what happened," Ms. Beets, 62, said from the women's death row at the Mountain View prison unit. "I'm sorry for the pain my husband's family has gone through and the pain my own family has gone through."
If Ms. Beets is executed as scheduled Feb. 24, she will be the oldest inmate executed by the state and the 3rd woman executed in the last 100 years. The last, Karla Faye Tucker, was put to death in 1998.
Ms. Beets was sentenced to death 15 years ago for the murder of Dallas fire Capt. Jimmy Don Beets. At trial, she said one of her sons killed her husband and helped her bury the body under a wishing well. She was also
indicted but not tried in the death of her fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Barker, who was found buried beneath a tool shed at the same home, near Gun Barrel City.
Ms. Beets says that through 7 marriages to 5 men, she endured a vicious cycle of abuse that started in childhood.
She said she tried to leave but could never escape. "You don't run very fast with 5 children," she said.
Though media-shy through much of her time on death row, Ms. Beets said she is speaking out now to bring attention to the problem of domestic violence.
"I have carried a heavy burden for battered women and children and domestic violence," she said. "I'm going to be the one to put a face on that, as a real human person."
The issue of domestic violence has become more prominent since she was convicted, Ms. Beets said. She stressed the need for stringent enforcement of anti-battering laws and counseling for women caught in
abusive relationships.
Ms. Beets' contention that she is a victim rankled James Donald Beets of Barry, Texas, the son of her slain husband.
"The only way she was a victim is because of the choices she made," he said. "She made her own self a victim. . . . She wasn't a victim of abuse."
3 husbands shot
He pointed out that 2 of her 5 husbands died from gunshots to the back of the head. In addition, she shot her 2nd husband in the back and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault for the attack in 1972.
Rodney Barker of Ferris, son of the late Doyle Wayne Barker, also snorted at the idea of Ms. Beets as a victim.
"She's just grasping for some little something to get her sympathy," he said. "I don't see why the world should give her sympathy when she took two lives."
Both men said their fathers were never violent toward them or their wives.
Ms. Beets said if her case were tried today she probably would be exonerated. Even if jurors had found her guilty, they probably would not have imposed the death penalty if they had heard the extent of the abuse she suffered, she said.
Domestic violence was mentioned but was not a key issue in Ms. Beets' trial. Prosecutors said she killed Mr. Beets to collect $100,000 in insurance benefits. The issue of domestic violence has been raised by her
lawyers on appeal and is the core of her recent plea for clemency.
"This is a case that cries out for compassion," said her attorney, John Blume, in a prepared statement this week. "Knowing what we know now about this syndrome, a fully informed jury would never sentence a battered
woman to death today."
Several local and national organizations have rallied to Ms. Beets' defense. "Her long history of abuse, beginning as a child and continuing throughout adulthood, it certainly sounds like she suffered from battered
women's syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder," said Bree Buchanan, public policy director for the Texas Council on Family Violence.
Waiting for death
Ms. Beets said she didn't know about battered women's syndrome - in which abused women feel unable to leave or help themselves because of low self-esteem - until she arrived in prison.
Now, she said, waiting for her execution date is akin to waiting for an abusive husband to come home.
"I'm waiting on a bad night," she said. "There won't be any beatings, there won't be any rapes. I'll be killed."
Ms. Beets said she didn't want her children to be present at her execution.
"There's no way I will allow my family to be there, especially my children," she said. "My children have seen me beat half to death. . . . There's no way I would ask them to come and watch someone kill me and be just as helpless as adults as they were as children."
Ms. Beets said she has had little contact with her children in recent years and has forgiven the 2 children who testified against her at trial.
Church support
She has asked her pastor, the Rev. Paul Carlin and his wife, Jeri, of Shady Grove Baptist Church in Crockett, Texas, to attend her execution.
She met the Carlins, who run a prison ministry, about eight years ago and later joined their church by proxy. Her picture is on the wall in the church's Sunday school room, and the class pulls an empty chair up to the
table every week.
She regularly crafts dish towels and tissue holders for the class.
"I think it's wonderful to have someone love you so much," Ms. Beets said. Mrs. Carlin calls Ms. Beets a "sweet spirit." Mr. Carlin said Ms. Beets wants to use her remaining time to focus attention on the issue of
battered women and "is not doing this to try to get her case commuted."
As the Carlins plan to witness Ms. Beets' execution at her request, James Donald Beets and Rodney Barker intend to witness it on behalf of their deceased fathers in a separate room reserved for victims' families.
They said that the appeals process has gone on long enough and that it is time for her death sentence to be carried out.
"It's a hard thing to think about, anybody dying, whatsoever," Mr. Beets said. "But until we can come up with a way to stop people from murdering people, this is something we have to go through."
Nevertheless, Mr. Beets said, he has forgiven Ms. Beets for his father's death.
"I would like to tell her, on behalf of my dad and my family, that I forgive her, and I've asked God to forgive her," he said.
Told of his comment, Ms. Beets' blue eyes filled with tears.
"Oh, bless his heart," she said. "It means a lot."

(source:  Dallas Morning News)

Staff Columnist Ruben Rosario

                   Politics looming over clemency bid for Texas woman

                    After 15 years on death row, the 11th hour has arrived for Betty Lou Beets. On Feb. 24,  the 62 -year -old Texas grandmother of nine is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection for the 1983 murder of her fifth husband.
                    Her last hope, if she has any, may now very well rest on the efforts of a legal team led by a lawyer from Minneapolis.
                    Tomorrow, Joseph Margulies will board a plane for Dallas and spend the  next 10 days trying to do what many say is highly unlikely: persuade a state board and a law-and-order Republican governor/presidential  candidate that granting clemency to a convicted killer during an election year is the right and just thing to do. Since Bush was elected governor in 1994, Texas has executed 119 people. Bush has not pardoned or granted    clemency to anyone on death row since he took office. And you thought Powerball has tough odds.
                    But George W. Bush may have a thorny political problem in Beets. She is being billed as the oldest inmate and the first battered woman in Texas history to be executed. With the CBS Evening News and other national  prime-time TV outlets flying in to interview her Thursday, the Beets case  may well become a campaign issue Bush will have to confront.
                    ``This is going to be the first occasion in the modern era since the death  penalty was reinstated when a governor is going to be called upon to consider whether to allow the execution of a battered woman,''      Margulies, a criminal defense attorney, said last week at his downtown Minneapolis office.
                    ``George Bush does not have to prove himself to law-and-order  conservatives,'' Margulies added. ``He has the political capital to say,  `Hey, fellas, I'm with you, but this is the exception.' And clemency is all      about exception. It is about the declaration of mercy in appropriate cases.
                    And if this isn't one, I don't know what is.''
                    Beets made national news 15 years ago when the bodies of Doyle Wayne Barker and Jimmy Don Beets, her respective fourth and fifth husbands, were found buried on her mobile home property. Both men had   been shot in the back of the head, placed in sleeping bags and reported missing. She was charged with killing Beets,a retired firefighter, in order to receive more than $100,000 in insurance and pension benefits. She was convicted Oct. 13, 1985, and sentenced to death. She was indicted  but never stood trial in connection with Barker's death.
                    But the jury that convicted Beets never heard testimony about her history as a battered and sexually abused woman with diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and battered woman's syndrome.
                    Beets, according to a 31-page clemency petition filed by Margulies last week, was raped at the age of 5 and endured repeated beatings that left her learning disabled, hearing impaired and with permanent brain       damage. One husband would ``sexually'' brand Beets by biting her on the breast, thighs, stomach and buttocks to ``ensure that she would not show her body to anyone'' while he was out of town, the petition states.
                    ``By the time Betty met and married Jimmy Don Beets in 1982, her mind and body had been ravaged by maltreatment, chronic illness and neglect as a child, constant threats of annihilation by those who swore their love,  and repeated head injuries,'' Margulies argues in the court document.
                    The petition also points out that Beets' lawyer, in an apparent attempt to retain movie and book rights to Beets' story, never revealed that it was he who first brought up the subject of insurance benefits 18 months after the fifth husband's disappearance. Had he done so, he would have been forced to testify as a witness in her defense and thereby forced to  withdraw from the case.
                    Relatives of the two murder victims portray Beets as a cold-blooded killer and deny she was a victim of spousal abuse.
                    On Feb. 4, the day after the clemency petition was filed, Margulies and a staff of lawyers helping him in the case discovered a glaring omission that could delay the execution.
                    Texas passed a law in 1991 that required all family violence-related murder cases involving battered women to be thoroughly investigated for mitigating circumstances. Beets' case was not reviewed. Margulies is
asking that Beets be granted a 180-day reprieve to allow the state to conduct the review.
``Betty met the criteria, but somebody dropped the ball,'' Margulies says.   ``You have to remember that at the time of her trial, there was a bias in admitting battering evidence in criminal cases. Governors in 21 states, as
 a matter of executive clemency, pardoned or released outright battered women who can show a relationship between the battering and the offense.''
                    Beets acknowledges that she may have killed her last husband, but she doesn't remember the circumstances except turning over her husband's body and finding the gun lying under him. She remembers that there had  been a violent argument between her husband and her stepson before the incident. She also doesn't remember details surrounding the other husband's shooting.
                    ``As often happens with battered women,'' Margulies says, ``she went into a dissociative state where they are capable of volitional conduct but don't remember what happened.''
                    Margulies says he is not arguing for Beets' outright release. He is requesting that her sentence be commuted to life in prison without parole.
                    ``She is not asking for one day outside prison walls,'' he says. ``She's scared. She doesn't want to die. She wants to live out her remaining years.''
                    Beets will be transported next week from her maximum-security jail cell in Gatesville, 35 miles west of Waco, to the Huntsville facility, 70 miles north of Houston, where all state executions take place.
                    If his efforts fail, Margulies will do something he has never done in the 75 death row cases he has worked on in the past 11 years as a post-conviction appeals lawyer.
                    ``She has asked me to witness her execution,'' Margulies says. ``I  promised her that I would.''
© 2000 PioneerPlanet / St. Paul (Minnesota) Pioneer Press - Staff Columnist Ruben Rosario

                   By Mary Alice Davis                   Austin American-Statesman
                   Wednesday, February 16, 2000

                   For years she made the speaker-circuit rounds as "that death penalty nun." If 10 or 15 people      turned out to hear Helen Prejean speak against  capital punishment, she considered it a pretty  good night.
                   The audiences grew larger after she wrote the  book "Dead Man Walking," larger still after Susan   Sarandon starred in the movie by the same name and played the author's part  -- a Roman Catholic nun ministering to convicts and families on Louisiana's Death Row.
                  So, the front pews at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church were fairly full,  and the television lights bright, last week in Austin when Prejean explained  why she thinks capital punishment is costly, a poor deterrent to crime and  morally wrong. It wasn't her first visit to Austin -- world capital of execution  politics -- but she struck a fresh note. Her message: "A thaw is coming."
                   Texas, of course, might look like frozen territory. The state executes more  prisoners than any other, sometimes at the rate of seven or eight a week.
             Bulletins about another last meal eaten, final words spoken and lethal chemicals injected seem routine, hardly more startling than news of a  presidential candidate's stump speech.
                   But the governor of Illinois recently stopped executions in his state, saying that the criminal-justice system too often goes wrong. Gov. George Ryan, a  moderate Republican and a death-penalty supporter, announced that he would  send no more prisoners to death unless his state's criminal justice system changes. He said he wants certainty that only the guilty are sentenced to die,  not just the poorly defended. He had watched as 13 convicts walked away from death row after someone took the trouble to discover they weren't guilty.
                   He was sickened.
                   Pennsylvania starts legislative hearings on a possible death-penalty  moratorium this month. Suddenly, many are wondering: Might George W.  Bush, who as governor of Texas has overseen the executions of more than 110 men and one woman, have a similar epiphany?
                   "I sense the waters moving," says Prejean, animated behind big glasses and  wearing a sensible suit and silver crucifix --symbol of history's most famous  execution. Another crucifix rises behind her over the altar of the East Austin  church.
                   The public, she says, is ambivalent about the death penalty. Given a choice between execution and life in prison, people would choose the latter if there  were no possibility of parole for dangerous criminals and if restitution for  victims' families were part of the deal.
                   Justice does not require the state to kill those who kill, she says. We don't sentence rapists to be raped or batterers to be battered. People want justice  and safety, she says. They don't want an error-ridden and bloodthirsty system in which the state kills only those too poor to afford a good defense. They're shocked when they learn that in recent years the nation's 38 death-penalty  states have admitted error and freed 87 people from death rows. Seven were  in Texas.
                   She urges the audience to write Bush and his Board of Pardons and Paroles to suggest a death-penalty moratorium. And she hopes the state will call off  plans to execute Betty Beets on March 24.
                  Beets, a great-grandmother with a hair-raising life story, was convicted in 1985 of murdering her fifth husband near Gun Barrel City in eastern Texas.
       When the remains of husband No. 4 also turned up, any compassion for  Beets virtually vanished.
                   But advocates of commuting her death sentence to life in prison find several  reasons for clemency. They say, among other things, that the defense  attorney in her four-day trial was incompetent. They also say the state inexplicably failed to review her case after a 1991 legislative mandate. That resolution required review of all murder and manslaughter cases in which the killer had been a victim of domestic violence.
                   The state reviewed about 300 cases in which a victim of battering -- usually a woman or a juvenile -- killed someone "when the offense was directly related to victimization by domestic violence." Beets' case slipped through the cracks.
                   The lawyers who filed Beets' application for clemency describe her as the victim of "brutal domestic violence that included rape and torture."It started  when she was 5 and continued throughout five marriages. Partial deafness  and hallucinations are just a few of the woman's disabilities.
                   Prejean thinks Gov. Bush, in the national limelight as a presidential  candidate, may have trouble executing this frail-looking battered woman just  weeks before her 63rd birthday, as scheduled.
                   Other troubling executions are scheduled in coming weeks. But the Beets  case stands out because it involves killing a woman (the Karla Faye Tucker  execution drew international attention) and because of the state's failure to include the case in the review ordered by the Legislature.
                   Prejean is asked if the Beets case might be "the one," the case in which  clemency is granted and that marks the start of a thaw in Texas.
                   "I think it may be," she says intently, standing in front of the altar and shaking hands warmly. "I really think it may be."
 
 

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