Convict set to die for ‘91 slaying A convicted killer whose violence spree 15 years ago left two people dead and a third seriously wounded was scheduled to be executed Tuesday. Farley Charles Matchett, 43, was set to die for the fatal beating and stabbing of his 52-year-old uncle, Uries Anderson, in Houston. Matchett also had a life prison term for killing a 74-year-old woman in Huntsville and a 99-year sentence for a beating that left a 91-year-old Huntsville woman with brain damage. All three crimes were committed the same week in July 1991.
Matchett would be the 21st Texas prisoner to receive lethal injection this year. The total already exceeds the 19 condemned inmates put to death in 2005 in the nation’s most active death penalty state. A record 40 were executed in 2000.
Lawyers for Matchett, acknowledging his severe addiction to crack cocaine prompted his violence, were in the courts to try to block the punishment. They also asked Gov. Rick Perry for a reprieve.
In appeals, lawyers said Matchett, who went to trial in 1993, was denied the benefit of a law passed in 2005 that allows juries in capital murder cases the option of choosing life without parole over a death sentence. They also said Matchett was sentenced to death in part because he is black, and that his more than a decade in prison waiting to die is unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
At the advice of his trial lawyer, Matchett said he pleaded guilty to the Anderson slaying.
“I trusted him but in all actuality, he set me up to get the death sentence,” Matchett said on a Web site devoted to his case.
Evidence showed Matchett used a hammer to beat Ola Mac Williams, 91, whose Huntsville yard he had mowed. Then he went to the house of a neighbor, also in Huntsville, Melonee Josey, 74, and fatally beat her with a meat hammer after she refused to give him $10.
He took her car to Houston, where police say it was involved in a hit-and-run accident. When police later found the car abandoned, his driver’s license was in the glove box.
Also stolen from Josey’s house was her purse, jewelry box, television, stereo and a box of meat. Evidence showed Matchett wrote and cashed an $80 check drawn from Josey’s bank account.
A witness at his trial testified he saw Matchett buy or smoke about $1,000 worth of crack cocaine in the days immediately after Anderson was killed. According to his confession, which Matchett accused police of beating out of him, the slaying culminated an argument the pair had over Matchett’s drug use.
“I made an attempt to leave, but I was abruptly stopped at the door by the victim who spun me around and struck me with his fist,” Matchett said on his Web site, arguing the killing was in self-defense. “At some point, he grabbed a knife and had it very close to my throat as he pushed to slash my throat. At this point, I kicked him in the groin area and pushed the knife back towards him. It lodged in his chest and he immediately fell.”
An autopsy showed Anderson died of stab wounds to the back, not chest, and a skull fracture caused by blows from a hammer.
Matchett said he called paramedics to help his uncle. Prosecutors said a call never was made. Anderson’s body was discovered by a relative two days later.
Matchett was arrested the next day after he tried to cash a $500 check written on Anderson’s account. He was carrying a pad of Anderson’s blank checks when police nabbed him.
At his capital murder trial, his lawyers argued he should be given a life sentence for killing Anderson. Matchett already had accepted a plea bargain in the Huntsville cases and the long prison terms. A Harris County jury deliberated about two hours before returning with the death sentence.
At the time of his arrest, Matchett was on probation for theft and was facing charges of check forgery, of assaulting a 14-year-old boy with a television cable and of biting a police officer in Madisonville.
Other evidence showed he had repeated arrests for theft, drug offenses and forgery and was booted from the military for misconduct. While awaiting trial in Houston, he attacked a jailer at the Harris County Jail.
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