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Arthur Lee Burton was executed in Texas Wednesday for the murder of mother-of-three Nancy Adleman after apologizing to those he’d harmed with his horrific actions.
“To all the people I have hurt and caused pain, I wish we didn’t have to be here at this moment, but I want you to know that I am sorry for putting y’all through this and my family,” he said. “I’m not better than anyone. I hope that I find peace and y’all can, too.”
Burton was first convicted one year after the July 1997 murder, in which the 48-year-old mother, who had been jogging near her Houston home, was brutally beaten and strangled with her own shoelace just off her running trail along the Brays Bayou. His death sentence was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2000, but it was ultimately reinstated two years later.
According to authorities, Burton confessed to killing and attempting to rape Adleman, saying, “She asked me why was I doing it and that I didn’t have to do it.” But he later renounced that confession at trial.
In his final words before his excecution by lethal injection, the 54-year-old apologized and said: “I want to say thank you to all the people who support me and pray for me.”
“For those of you I know and do not know, thank you for your support and prayers.”
“Bird is going home,” he added.
The 54-year-old is the third person to be put to death in Texas this year, and the 11th in the US.
As of 2011, death row inmates in Texas cannot request a final meal, meaning Burton had to choose from the same menu as all other inmates at the state penitentiary in Huntsville before he was given the lethal injection.
That change to final meals was made following the execution of Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist who was executed in 2011 for murdering James Byrd Jr. in 1998. A lawmaker had complained about him asking for an enormous amount of food — including two chicken-fried steaks, three fajitas and a pint of ice cream — before claiming he was not hungry once his last meal was delivered to him.
In his written confession, Burton revealed that he was riding his bike along the bayou when he saw Adleman jogging. He threw down his bike before running up behind her and dragging her into the woods. After choking her with his hands, he attempted to rape the semi-unconscious woman, but said he was “so nervous” that he “couldn’t do it.”
He said she begged him to let her go, claiming she told him, “‘I forgive you.’” He continued, “She told me to just leave. She asked me why was I doing it and that I didn’t have to do it and saying that I was a handsome man.”
He claimed he tried to leave, but to stop her screams the then-27-year-old choked her again before they both “fell in a hole.” When he saw another person on the trail, he went back to her, and ended her life by strangling her with one of her own shoelaces.
Adleman’s daughter, Sarah, revealed in her 2019 memoir The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother’s Echoes that she sent a letter to her mother’s murderer some time after he was sent to death row.
On Wednesday, Sarah told The Independent that she wrote to Burton hoping for answers and information he would only be able to share while he remained alive. She said she told Burton in her note that she “hoped he was at peace, and that it’s available for everybody.”
“I mostly wanted to know that he received my words that I had said, and so I requested a response back,” Sarah said. “And he wrote back, and I still haven’t opened the letter. It’s something that I wrestle with; it’s literally filed in my file cabinets under the file, ‘Life.’”
Sarah, now 43 and a yoga therapist working in the Denver area with traumatic brain injury survivors, shared that she would not attend the execution alongside her father and one of her two brothers, choosing instead to hold a “gratitude and forgiveness ceremony” at a local river with her son and their family friends.
“In thinking about what my mom would want, she always said to choose joy,” Sarah told The Independent.
Burton’s execution came after his lawyers unsuccessfully tried to argue that he “exhibited low scores on tests of learning, reasoning, comprehending complex ideas, problem solving, and suggestibility, all of which are examples of significant limitations in intellectual functioning.”
According to the petition, Burton scored “significantly below” grade-level on standardized testing and struggled in daily activities such as cooking and cleaning, following a report by two experts as well as a review of records, and therefore could have been considered exempt from the death penalty.
Prosecutors said Burton had not previously raised these claims and waited until eight days before his scheduled execution to do so.
In a filing to the Supreme Court, the Texas Attorney General’s Office denied that the state appeals court was refusing to adhere to current criteria for determining intellectual disability. His request was rejected just hours before he was pronounced dead at 6:47 pm local time.
