The final appeals had been exhausted, the last motions denied by judges who had reviewed every page of the fifteen-year legal battle. At 6:26 PM on February 5, 2014, the state of Texas declared Suzanne Basso dead, making her the fifth woman executed in the state since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1982. The lethal injection of pentobarbital ended the life of a 59-year-old woman who had spent nearly half her life constructing elaborate false identities, but it did nothing to answer the question that had haunted the case from its beginning: whether the woman who orchestrated the brutal murder of Louis āBuddyā Musso was a cunning mastermind or a deeply mentally ill victim of her own horrific past.
The execution brought closure to a case that began with a simple love story and descended into one of the most horrifying torture murders in Texas history. Buddy Musso, a 59-year-old man with the mind of a child, had traveled 1,500 miles from his home in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, to marry a woman he had met at a church carnival. Instead of finding love and a new life in Jacinto City, Texas, he found a nightmare of sustained šŖš«š¾š¼š® that ended with his broken body dumped in a ditch in Galena Park.
The woman who waited for him at the end of that Greyhound bus ride was Suzanne Basso, a woman whose own family history included a serial killer uncle and whose life was a tapestry of lies and manipulation.
The story of how Buddy Musso came to die begins in the summer of 1997 at a church carnival in New Jersey, where he met a woman who called herself Sue Basso. She was 43 years old, living in Texas, and she showered him with affection that he had not experienced since his wife died of cancer in 1980. Their relationship developed over the phone over the course of about a year, and she eventually proposed marriage and asked him to move to Texas.
Buddy, who worked bagging groceries at a local ShopRite and was known to everyone in his community, believed her completely. He told his friends and family about the wedding plans, began sending his few possessions to an address in Jacinto City, and asked the local Legion hall to prepare for a wedding reception. Some who knew him worried, recognizing that a man like Buddy was easy to love and easy to deceive, but he was a grown man and happy, and no one had the right to stop him.
On June 14, 1998, Buddy boarded a Greyhound bus wearing his pointed boots, his bandana, and a brand new cowboy hat. It was the last time most of the people who loved him would see him alive. The woman waiting at the other end had been reinventing herself for decades.
Born Suzanne Margaret Burns in May 1954 in Schenectady, New York, she was one of eight children. Her motherās brother was Robert Garrow, a rapist and serial killer whose crimes terrorized the Adirondack mountains in the early 1970s. Her childhood, by her own account and that of her daughter, was filled with šŖš«š¾š¼š®.
One family story claimed that when her mother caught her with a pack of cigarettes, she was punished not by being made to smoke them but by being forced to eat them. She married a Marine named James Beck in the early 1970s and had two children, a daughter in 1973 and a son in 1974. The marriage ended in ššššš¹š¶š when Beck was convicted of molesting a child in 1982, and that child was their own daughter.
The family later moved to Houston, where something strange happened. They changed their name to OāMalley and began presenting themselves as an Irish-American family. Her son James, known as J.
D. , grew into a young man living in a fantasy world about military service. According to the Crime Libraryās account of the case, he wore military uniforms at all times and imagined himself as a special forces soldier.
Sue worked whenever she could, as a seamstress and in security at an apartment complex, and she constantly told stories about her identity. In October 1995, a quarter-page announcement appeared in the Houston Chronicle announcing the engagement of a bride with a nearly twelve-part compound name. The announcement claimed she was one of twelve children, an heiress to an oil fortune in Nova Scotia, educated at a school in England, a gymnastics champion, and a former nun.
The groom was Carmine Basso, presented as a Vietnam veteran and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. The announcement cost more than $1,300, and no one paid for it. The newspaper pulled the announcement within days and began asking its own questions.
Carmine Basso was a real man who ran a small security company. He moved in with her in 1993, and she took his surname, though she had never divorced her first husband and therefore could not legally marry him. In May 1997, she called Houston police and asked them to check on him at his office because she had not heard from him in a week.
Officers found his body. He was 47 years old. The office had no bathroom, and the police report noted trash cans containing human waste.
The medical examiner found he had been malnourished and ruled the death natural. No court ever linked the death to any crime, but it is established that Suzanne Basso was alone, living an empty life, with her partner dead by late May 1997, and two months later she walked into a church carnival in New Jersey and met Buddy Musso. The announcement shows a woman creating a person out of paper.
Carmine was a real man who lived inside that invention for four years, and by May 1997 he was dead. Her lies never stopped, and they would be of critical importance at the end of her story. She claimed she was one of triplets.
She claimed she worked in the office of the governor of New York. She claimed she had an š¶š»š»š¶š¾š with Nelson Rockefeller. When finally asked about these claims under oath, she admitted she had made them up.
The house in Jacinto City was small, a rental on a modest street east of the Houston Ship Channel. Sue lived there with her adult son and a collection of pets, including a dog, a cat, and two ferrets. There was no spare bedroom for her fiancƩ.
Buddy slept on a fold-out bed in the living room. J. D.
slept on a mattress a few feet away. There was no wedding, no reception. There was work.
According to evidence at trial, Buddy was assigned household chores from his first days in the home. When he performed them too slowly or incorrectly, he was punished. The punishments were not scoldings.
Witnesses and co-defendants testified that Sue and her son beat him. His friend Al Baker in New Jersey began to notice something that everyone who loves a vulnerable adult fears. The phone calls stopped coming.
When Baker finally reached the house, Sue answered and refused to let him speak to Buddy. He tried contacting Texas state agencies one by one, asking someone to check on his friend. None of them could tell him anything.
He was a friend of twenty years, the person Social Security had designated to manage Buddyās money. In the summer of 1998, he could not get a single Texas state employee to confirm that his friend was alive. It is the kind of failure that does not make headlines.
No one broke any rules. Each office had its limits, and the question fell between them.
While Buddy was disappearing from the lives of those who loved him, the paperwork about him was growing. In July 1998, Sue tried to appoint herself as the representative payee for his Social Security benefits, taking over the role Baker had held. Her application was denied, but she did obtain two life insurance policies on Buddy with herself as beneficiary.
One contained a clause that prosecutors would focus on later. The insurance company would pay a base amount of $15,000. If the insured died as the result of a violent crime, it would pay $65,000.
Police later found two additional documents on her home computer. The first was a will titled āLast Will and Testament,ā leaving Buddyās entire estate to Sue and stating that no one else was entitled to anything. It was dated 1997.
Computer records showed it was created on August 13, 1998. Her son and two other people signed as witnesses. The second was a copy of a restraining order barring any of Buddyās relatives from contacting him.
There is nothing in the record to suggest any court issued such an order. A neighbor who saw Buddy in the week before his death said his face was covered in bruises, his eye was black, and there were bloody cuts on his face. The neighbor asked if he wanted an ambulance or the police.
Buddy said no. He told the neighbor, āIf you call anyone, they will hit me again.ā
By the third week of August, the šŖš«š¾š¼š® had moved from the house to the street. On August 22, Houston police officer Jeff Butcher responded to an assault call on the east side of the city and found two men driving a third in what the officer described as a military run. The two men were J.
D. OāMalley and a 27-year-old man named Terance Singleton. The third was Buddy Musso, who had black bruises around his eyes and complained that he no longer wanted to run.
He told the officer he had been beaten by three Mexican men. The officer took the three men to a nearby apartment where Singleton lived with his fiancĆ©e Hope Arrons, her mother Bernice, and her brother Craig. There, he met Sue Basso, who identified herself as Buddyās legal guardian.
She scolded her son for making Buddy run, then calmed Buddy down in front of the officer. After that, the officer left. There is no record of any other witness seeing Buddy alive after that moment.
A police officer stood in front of him, looked at his swollen eyes, listened to a story about three imaginary men, and then led him back to the home where the šŖš«š¾š¼š® resumed. The evidence does not suggest the officer did anything but his job. He was shown a concerned guardian and an injured man who supported her story.
That is how things work. It was a successful performance, and everything that happened in that apartment was a direct result of it.
The apartment belonged to Singleton, Hope, Bernice, and Craig, and it was where Sueās circle gathered. The most detailed accounts of what happened inside came from two people who were present. Hope Arrons testified at her own trial and then against Sue.
J. D. OāMalley testified at his trial.
Their accounts differ on motive but agree on the details of the event. Both were trying to blame the other, and both had reasons to minimize their own role. The jury had to weigh that.
But the physical evidence collected later confirmed much of what they said. According to Hope, Buddy was brought to the apartment on Friday, August 21. He had two black eyes and explained them by saying he had been attacked while on a walk.
Sue ordered him onto a red and blue play mat in the hallway. For extended periods, she kept him on his hands and knees, sometimes just kneeling. At some point during that weekend, Sue began slapping him, and J.
D. began kicking him with a steel-toed military boot. Buddy asked J.
D. to stop. When J.
D. stopped, Sue asked him why he had stopped. Hope testified that Sue hit Buddy on the back with a baseball bat, a belt, and a vacuum cleaner, and that the woman, who weighed about 300 pounds at the time, jumped on him.
When Sue left for work, she gave J. D. instructions.
He was to watch the others and make sure no one left the apartment or touched the phone. J. D.
did not let Buddy off the mat. When Buddy tried to move, he was hit. Hope said Buddy was moving slowly and was clearly in pain, and that at one point he asked someone to call an ambulance, but no one responded.
OāMalleyās testimony added another dimension of cruelty, saying that during Buddyās final days, he was handcuffed repeatedly, sometimes in the apartment and sometimes in the back seat of a car while the group stopped to eat at a restaurant. He added that Buddy was forced to kneel on the mat, denied food and water, and denied use of the bathroom. When Buddy cried or urinated on himself, he was hit.
He said something that is almost impossible to believe, that when asked why he participated, he said he was afraid of his mother. The group offered an explanation for how it started, with Hope telling the jury she hit Buddy twice because he broke one of her Mickey Mouse figurines and said he wanted her and her mother to die. At first, police believed the fatal beating began over a broken ornament, a motive so trivial and domestic compared to what the autopsy would reveal.
It would not survive the evidence, because by the time the group began beating Buddy over a figurine, someone had already purchased the insurance policy.
At some point, J. D. took Buddy to the bathroom.
According to Hope, he bathed him in bleach, Comet cleanser, and Pine-Sol, scrubbing his skin with a wire brush. Court records and press reports remain vague about whether Buddy died before, during, or after the chemical bath, and about when Sue returned from work. These gaps are not minor.
They are the heart of the controversy that ended with her in a Texas death chamber. It is worth pausing to consider how ordinary the setting was. This was not a dungeon but an apartment in a Houston suburb with a phone, a hallway, and a childrenās play mat.
Her fiancƩ, her mother, and her brother lived there. Sue went to her job. A man was tied to a mat in the hallway for days while family members moved around him, and the testimony shows no one inside asked for help.
One of the most disturbing facts of the case is not the single blow but the length of the event. From Friday to Tuesday, a man was in pain in a room full of people, while those people ate, slept, and talked. Prosecutors asked the jury how a group could reach an agreement that none of them would have reached alone.
OāMalleyās answer was fear. But what the medical examiner found was clear. Buddy Musso was bruised from head to toe, and the pattern of injuries indicated they were inflicted over approximately five days.
He had been hit on the head eighteen or nineteen times. There were burn marks on his back, which OāMalley said were from cigarettes. There were strap marks on his back and buttocks.
His nose and ribs were broken, and his skin was eroded. The cause of death was a skull fracture from an unknown object that left a large X-shaped wound on his scalp. Investigators recovered from the apartment a wooden baseball bat and an aluminum one, along with handcuffs and sections of a bloodstained mat.
The weapon that caused the fatal injury was never identified. After Buddy died, the group dressed him in clean clothes, put his body in the trunk of Bernice Arronsās car. Sue drove the car, and J.
D. , Singleton, and Craig Arrons carried him out and left him in a ditch in Galena Park, a few miles from the home. Then they went to a dumpster and disposed of the bloodstained clothes, plastic gloves, and other evidence.
On the morning of August 26, 1998, a passerby found him. It had been about ten weeks since the Greyhound bus left New Jersey with a man wearing a new cowboy hat. He had left a town where people knew him, a job where customers welcomed him, and a reserved hall.
He returned to the world as a corpse in a ditch, identified by the son of the woman he had come to marry. The Legion hall sat empty, and the only celebration Buddy Musso received in Texas was identification at the morgue. Sue Basso did not wait for the police to come to her.
On the 25th, a day before the body was found, she called several people, including Buddyās niece and local police, to report him missing. She told them he had run off with a small Mexican woman he met at a laundromat, and that she was frantic with worry. Prosecutors would later consider that call part of the performance.
A woman reporting a man missing a day before his body appears in a ditch had prepared her answer in advance. The imaginary woman at the laundromat gave police a reason to look for Buddy in the wrong direction and gave Sue a narrative that he had left on his own. It was a small lie built on a big lie, and it collapsed the moment a second question was asked.
After the joggerās body was discovered, she went to the Jacinto City police station to follow up on a missing person report she had filed. When she arrived home, Assistant Police Chief Robert Pruitt was waiting for her. She invited him in and allowed him a tour of the cramped home with its dog, cat, and ferrets.
Pruitt asked her and her son to accompany him to identify the body. At the morgue, J. D.
identified it as Buddyās body. Then Pruitt took him aside, away from his mother, and asked if he knew what had happened. J.
D. said, āWe killed him.ā Officers led to a dumpster where they found the bloodstained clothes and gloves.
Sue, interviewed separately, gave a written statement in which she admitted much. She said she drove Bernice Arronsās car with Buddyās body in the trunk, that she drove it to the dump site and then to the dumpster, and that she and her son and the others beat and abused Buddy before his death. But she did not confess to killing him.
She described a woman who helped her son and friends dispose of a body and participated in beatings that lasted for days. Pruitt then went to the apartment and asked Bernice Arrons if she knew why he had come. She said, āItās about Buddy, isnāt it?ā
Officers collected evidence from the apartment that day, based on the statements of those inside. They seized a wooden bat and an aluminum one, handcuffs, cut sections of bloodstained carpet, and took a rug from the trunk of Bernice Arronsās car, where the body had been transported hours earlier. No one needed to look for a motive anymore.
The motive appeared at the Jacinto City home, in a computer and a pair of pants. Two weeks later, on September 9, officers executed a search warrant on the Jacinto City home. In Buddyās pants, they found the note.
Six people were charged with murder, and the details of what followed deserve explanation. Texas law provides that murder is a capital offense if committed during a kidnapping or for remuneration, and the prosecution relied on both provisions. The Texas definition of kidnapping does not require forcing anyone to go somewhere against their will; it includes any unlawful restraint by force.
A man handcuffed to a mat, forbidden to leave, fits that definition. A murder committed for insurance money fits the second provision. But the prosecution made a decision that would define everything that followed, deciding to seek the death penalty against only one defendant.
The defendants were tried one after another, and the order of the trials was of critical importance. J. D.
OāMalley went first in April 1999, trying to blame his mother, claiming he was afraid of her and did not know what to do. The jury convicted OāMalley of murder and sentenced him to life in prison. Terance Singleton pleaded guilty to kicking Buddy and hitting him with a bat, was convicted of murder, and sentenced to life.
Bernice Arrons, who admitted to hitting Buddy, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 80 years. Her son Craig, who admitted to the same crime, was sentenced to 60 years. Hope Arronsās murder trial ended in a hung jury.
Then prosecutors offered her a deal: plead guilty to murder and serve 20 years in exchange for testifying against Sue Basso. She accepted. The trials continued through the spring and early summer of 1999, one defendant at a time, and each defendant gave the next a glimpse of what the jury would hear in Sueās case.
J. D. OāMalleyās trial began in April.
According to Houston Chronicle coverage of those proceedings, he testified and tried to blame the crime on his mother. The Arronses, mother and son, were tried together in May and tried, in the paperās words, to minimize their roles. Singletonās life sentence followed.
By June, a Harris County jury could not agree on Hope Arrons, the only reason she was available to testify against Sue. The pattern repeated in every courtroom. Each defendant insisted that someone else had committed a worse crime.
That is what people say when they are trying to save themselves, and a careful juror listens with skepticism. But when five people with different stories, motives, and lawyers all point to the same person, those stories cease to be a defense tactic and become evidence. They all said Sue and J.
D. committed the worst acts, and that Sue was the one in charge. The district attorneyās office studied the death penalty for months.
In December 1998, newspapers reported that prosecutors were still deciding. What they chose in the end was not to treat the six defendants equally. They justified it by saying J.
D. committed most of the violence, but his mother made the plan. She found the victim, brought him to Texas, bought the insurance policies, wrote the will, and set the rules of the house.
Her son was the tool, and the design was hers. That reasoning is the most controversial decision in the case, and it deserves careful consideration from both sides. Critics saw a stark disparity.
J. D. kicked a defenseless man with a steel-toed boot, scrubbed him with a wire brush, and confessed at the first sign of police interest that they had killed him.
He was sentenced to life. His mother, who was never proven to have struck the blow that shattered Buddyās skull, was sentenced to death. The prosecution responded that J.
D. was 23 years old and acting under the control of a mother who had dominated him his entire life, and that she was the one who profited financially. Both claims are supported in the case file.
Neither proves the other wrong. What the case shows is that a murder charge can depend on a prosecutorās judgment about who is the center of a crime, and that judgment, however careful, is not proof. By the time her trial began in the summer of 1999, the woman in the courtroom was not the one who met Buddy Musso at a church fundraiser.
She arrived in a wheelchair. At arrest, she weighed about 350 pounds, according to one report. But by trial, she weighed about 140 pounds and spoke in a loud, high voice like a childās.
She said she had regressed to childhood. She said she was partially paralyzed as a result of being beaten by Harris County jail guards. She claimed she was blind.
A court-appointed psychiatrist examined her and testified that she was faking mental illness. The judge, Mary Lou Keel, found her competent to stand trial. Assistant Harris County District Attorney Colleen Barnett said years later that she saw Sue for who she was.
Barnett said, āI was determined not to let her get away with it.ā The stateās case relied on a repeated pattern more than a single moment. The jury heard Hope Arrons talk about the mat, the bat, the belt, the vacuum cleaner, and the weight of a 300-pound woman falling on a manās back.
They heard testimony from neighbors who saw Buddyās wounds and heard his answer when asked if he wanted help. They heard that the insurance would pay more if he died violently. And they saw a will written on her computer in August 1998 and dated the previous year.
Midway through the trial, prosecutors read aloud the note found in his pocket: āYou have to come down here and get me out of here.ā The note raises a question the trial could not answer: when was it written? Where did he hide it?
From whom? The record does not answer that. What it suggests is that Buddy Musso, the man described by those around him in childlike terms, was fully aware of what was happening to him.
He knew he needed to be rescued. He knew who to ask for help. He wrote the note, folded it, and kept it in his pocket until someone found it.
His abusers spent weeks telling the world that Buddy was a confused man who ran off with a stranger from a laundromat. But the note in his handwriting suggests otherwise. Witnesses described a man who refused help.
A neighbor told the jury that Buddy refused offers to call someone on his behalf. And the prosecutor told the jury that she used a false promise of love to lure a man to his death. And her daughter would tell them, during the punishment phase, that the woman sitting at the defense table had been a domestic abuser for decades.
Throughout it all, Sue sat in her wheelchair crying in a high, childlike voice. The defense did not have much to offer in response. In her written statement to police, Sue admitted to participating in the beating.
Her lawyers argued that the state had not proven she personally delivered any fatal blow, that the medical examiner could not identify the weapon, and that the other defendants had every reason to blame her. In late August 1999, the jury convicted Sue of murder. The punishment phase was shorter and in some ways worse.
Prosecutors called her daughter to testify. Kristiana Hardy told the jury about a childhood filled with šŖš«š¾š¼š®. Other witnesses told the jury that Sue preyed on the vulnerable.
What the jury did not hear is equally important. According to later filings by her appeals lawyers, her trial lawyers presented no mitigating evidence and conducted virtually no investigation into her background. They called no witnesses about the šŖš«š¾š¼š® she suffered.
They did not examine her family history, her delusions, or decades of fabricated identities that an expert in mental health could have been asked to explain. Consider the price of that silence and what it might have contained. A mitigation case is the story of how a person became capable of what they did.
It does not excuse the act, but it gives jurors something else to weigh. In Sueās case, the evidence was there for the taking. There was the notorious killer uncle.
There was the mother who, according to family accounts, forced a child to eat cigarettes. There was the husband convicted of molesting their own daughter. There was a lifetime of identity-building, nun, heiress, gymnast, confidante of governors.
The jury could have heard all of that and still sentenced her to death. With fuller information, the decision might have been different. But instead, her daughter, speaking for the prosecution, was the only one who described her childhood.
Later, her appeals lawyers argued that the jury received only partial testimony. On September 1, 1999, the jury sentenced Suzanne Basso to death. She burst into tears and said in a small voice, āIām innocent.ā
In the courtroom, Kristiana Hardy told a reporter that justice had finally been served, saying, āSheās off the streets, she canāt hurt anyone anymore.ā A headline in the Houston Chronicle the next morning described her reaction as tears of joy. It is a painful image, but a true one.
The most important witness against Suzanne Basso was her daughter, and the verdict against the mother was a release for the daughter. Nothing in the court record suggests anyone in the courtroom questioned why.
After that, the case moved slowly. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in January 2003, more than three years after the verdict, finding no reversible error. With that ruling, the direct appeal was closed.
What remained were years of habeas petitions, state and federal filings that death row lawyers use to raise claims. All subsequent state and federal appeals failed. Over the next decade, Sue Basso lived on the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, where Texas houses its female death row inmates, and she waited.
The case can now be sorted into what was settled, what was claimed, and what no one will ever know. After the settlement, Buddy Musso died in August 1998 after about five days of sustained beating. Sue Basso held insurance policies on him, wrote a will in his name on her computer, and drove the car that carried his body.
She admitted in writing to participating in his beating. Six people were convicted. It was claimed that she was the mastermind, which five other defendants, each with his or her own motive, confirmed, and the jury accepted this claim.
It was claimed on her behalf that she was too ill to understand her punishment, which a judge and a court-appointed psychiatrist rejected. It is not known which blow fractured his skull, whether he was alive when the chemical submersion began, and at what moment during those final hours Sue returned from work. The careful observer must distinguish among these three categories.
The verdict rests on the first two, while the doubt lies in the third. One of these claims is the one the jury never heard. Her lawyers later wrote that her trial lawyers presented no mitigation evidence and barely investigated her background.
None of the courts that reviewed these claims granted relief. The legal test asks whether the missing evidence would likely have changed the outcome, and the law has deliberately set that bar high. Her final real battle began in January 2014 as the execution date approached.
Her lawyer, Winston Cochran, argued that she was mentally incompetent to be executed. He asked the court to consider what Texas law calls ācompetency,ā a legal standard that determines whether a death row inmate understands that he or she is about to be executed and why. He also argued that the state statute used to decide the issue was constitutionally flawed.
The stateās response was identical to what it had said at trial. At the hearing, Sue testified from a bed that had been moved into the courtroom. She repeated her claim that prison guards had paralyzed her.
She testified that someone had tried to šš¾šš her in prison by hiding a snake in a book that was smuggled into the hospital. Her lawyer said the paralysis was the result of a degenerative disease, and that the delusions were the product of genuine mental illness. Prosecutors said she had a long history of fabricating stories to gain attention and manipulate people, and that she had manipulated psychological tests.
She admitted under oath that she had lied about being a triplet, about working for the governor of New York, and about her relationship with Nelson Rockefeller. Judge Keel, the same judge who had presided over her trial, ruled that Basso was competent to be executed. Cochran raised another argument, the one he had been preparing for a decade.
Speaking to reporters, he said the prosecution had never proven how Louis Musso died, or whether Basso herself was personally involved. He said, āThey canāt tell you to this day who did it.ā He also raised questions about the credibility of the former Harris County medical examiner who testified at the 1999 trial.
The question of whether a death row inmate with serious mental illness can be executed is a narrow one in American law. The Supreme Court has stated that the Constitution prohibits executing anyone who cannot rationally understand the reason for the punishment. But it has not held that everyone with a delusion is protected.
A woman who believes someone hid a snake in a book may still understand that the state intends to execute her for murder. The court-appointed doctors, the prosecutors, and the judge concluded that she did. Her lawyers said one cannot be rational about oneās own death while believing that prison guards have paralyzed you.
That is a real disagreement, and judges on both sides relied on good faith in their arguments. The final ruling did not turn on whether she was ill but on whether she was capable of understanding why she was being executed, and on that point, the records showed a woman with a documented habit of fabricating symptoms when it served her interests. It was a fair and limited question.
The records did not require the jury to determine who caused the skull fracture. Under what Texas calls the law of parties, a person who solicits, directs, or aids in the commission of a crime can be held responsible for it, and the jury was asked to determine whether Sue Basso had done so. The state argued that it had proven that and more.
The courts agreed. The Supreme Court refused to consider the competency appeal about an hour before the scheduled execution time. According to the Houston Chronicle, courts rejected three of her final appeals in the days before the execution.
The last appeal, the competency one, went to the U. S. Supreme Court, which denied it without comment about an hour before the scheduled time.
By that hour, Sue had been moved from Gatesville, where Texas holds its female death row inmates, to the holding cells in Huntsville. The state apparatus had been working toward this date for fifteen years, and simple administrative procedures could not delay it. Texas had stopped providing special last meals for death row inmates.
Sue Basso ate what the other inmates ate that day: roasted chicken, fish, boiled eggs, carrots, green beans, and sliced bread.
The price of life in this case was $65,000, and that amount assumes that death should be considered a violent crime. It is a paltry sum compared to what the state spent on trials, appeals, and hearings over fifteen years, and far smaller than what Buddy Musso lost. Prosecutors do not need a strong motive to prove a murder for hire.
All they need is a policy, an interest, a fishing expedition, and a death. The papers in Jacinto City provided the three elements. On the evening of February 5, 2014, she was taken to the Huntsville unit and strapped to a gurney.
She was 59 years old. Colleen Barnett, the prosecutor who had put her there fifteen years earlier, was in the witness room. Two of Sueās friends watched from behind the glass.
The warden asked if she wished to make a final statement. She said, tears in her eyes, āNo, sir.ā She smiled at her two friends.
Whatever it meant, she spoke no other word. The warden signaled, and the injection of a single š¹ššš, pentobarbital, began. Her breathing slowed.
Witnesses on both sides watched in silence. After 11 minutes, at 6:26 PM, Suzanne Basso was pronounced dead. She was the fifth woman executed in Texas since the death penalty was reinstated in 1982, and the fourteenth in the United States since 1976.
Afterward, Barnett spoke to reporters, saying, āThis case was special to me. Buddy meant so much to me. He wanted to marry Suzanne.
He loved her. He was a grown man who wanted to get married. Thatās the whole crime if you ignore the details.
The details are what make it unbearable.ā That last sentence is the one people usually remember, and it is also the heart of the case. An ordinary man in a small town did what millions of lonely people do.
He believed a woman who said she wanted him. He packed his bags and got on the bus. And when he realized what he had gotten into, all he had left was a scrap of paper and one request, to go home.
Texasās death row is a place where exceptions rarely occur, and the Basso case is proof of that. The prosecutor, the jury, three levels of appeal, and a federal judge all looked at the same woman and saw a manipulator. Her supporters, a handful of death penalty opponents, looked at the same woman and saw a mentally ill survivor of a childhood so harsh it is no surprise she was broken.
One of them said she had been delusional since childhood. Both descriptions may be partly true. A person can be abused as a child, become ill as an adult, and still be the one who decided that a vulnerable manās life was worth $65,000.
What the law asks is: did she do it? The jury said yes. Her execution recorded a particular statistic.
It came after Kimberly McCarthy, executed in Texas in June 2013, and before Lisa Coleman, executed in Texas in September 2014. Texas, which executes more people than any other state, had executed only six women between 1982 and the fall of 2014. Women make up about 10 percent of murder arrests and about 2 percent of death sentences.
Bassoās case was rare, sentenced to death for a crime in which the medical evidence never identified the killer. Hope Arrons served her 20-year sentence and was released. J.
D. OāMalley, Terance Singleton, Bernice Arrons, and Craig Arrons were still in Texas prisons according to the last public records found, which date to 2015. Whatever the debate over Suzanne Bassoās mind, her guilt, or the stateās right to execute her, Buddy Mussoās last request was not granted.
He never returned to New Jersey. Texas has executed more people than any other state, but the cases that linger in investigatorsā minds are rarely those with the most victims. They are those in which the victim told someone exactly what was happening, and no one was able to intervene.
Buddy Mussoās friends in New Jersey asked the right questions. A neighbor in Jacinto City asked if he needed help. A police officer noticed the bruises around his eyes.
Each of them had a piece of the truth, and none of them had the whole truth until a passerby found the rest of the evidence in a ditch.
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