Hankins, 34, surrendered at his girlfriend's Arlington apartment in 2001 after a five-hour standoff with police who wanted him for gunning down his estranged wife, Tammy, 34, and her children, Devin Galley, 12, and Ashley Mason, 11. Hankins then told officers he'd also killed his father and half-sister almost a year earlier.
Hankins was the 16th condemned prisoner executed this year in Texas, the nation's most active death penalty state.
Hankins' admission about killing Earnie Lee Hankins, 55, and Pearl "Sissy" Stevenstar, 20, led to the gruesome discovery of their remains.
Police went to the elder Hankins' mobile home and found he'd been shot to death. His body was left for 10 months in a recliner surrounded by air fresheners. Stevenstar was found stuffed into a plastic ice chest hidden in a car at Earnie Hankins' auto repair shop. She'd been fatally beaten with a jack stand. Court documents later would show Stevenstar was the mother of Terry Hankins' child and was pregnant again by him.
"When you think about what he did, when you sit and really think about it, it was really horrible," said Sheila Wynn, who prosecuted Hankins for capital murder.
Before his arrest, Hankins had told people he'd sent Stevenstar to a home for pregnant mentally challenged women and that his father had moved out of state.
In a diary recovered by officers, Hankins wrote he had become a "non-caring monster" and rambled about his troubled childhood with a divorced inattentive father and two stepmothers who molested him.
"I just didn't like myself," he wrote.
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