Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Executing 2 killers

Thursday, July 13, 2000 | 9:05 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

When are the anti-death penalty people going to get a credible example? Every time they find a cause to stop an execution, they select just one more loser. You would think that with all of the executions going on in Texas, the death-penalty opponents could have picked a cause more acceptable than Gary Graham's.

Five years ago it was the cause of Jesse DeWayne Jacobs that was used to draw tears from the public. It worked no better then than did it recently for Gary Graham. Jacobs, like Graham, wasn't a nice guy and had earned his conviction and death penalty. Following his execution I wrote about Jacobs' past record of a conviction for murder in Illinois, attempting to escape prison and burglary. This was all before he killed Etta Urdiales, a mother of two children, in Texas.

The murder of Etta Urdiales was set up by Urdiales' husband, who was attempting to get custody of their two children. Jacobs, in jail for the inducement of a 14-year-old girl, was bailed by his sister, who was the girlfriend of Urdiales' husband. Shortly thereafter Etta Urdiales was missing from her blood-splattered apartment.

Let the Federal Reporter take it from here: "On Sept. 9, 1986, Jacobs was finally arrested for car theft in Hudspeth, Texas. Police asked Jacobs about the disappearance of Etta Urdiales. Jacobs told them, and later the district attorney, that he would tell them what they wanted to know if he would be allowed to see Chisholm (the 14-year-old girl) and if the district attorney would seek the death penalty. Jacobs' requests were met.

"Jacobs told the police that soon after his release from jail, he went to the victim's apartment, struck her on the head, abducted her and drove her to a clearing in the woods. She was still 'dizzy' when they arrived in the woods. He took a sleeping bag from her car and put it on the ground for her to sit on, then grabbed her left hand and shot her in the left side of the head with a .38 caliber revolver.

"Jacobs took the police to the victim's grave site, a small clearing in a wooded area in southern Montgomery County, and pointed out an area of the ground covered with pine needles and limbs. After excavating the area, the police found a blue sleeping bag containing the remains of the victim, whose body was in the same position as Jacobs had described: face down with her head pointed southeast. An autopsy showed that her death was caused by a gunshot wound to her left temple and that there was a tear in another part of her scalp."

This year the death protesters returned to Texas seeking to force Gov. George W. Bush, a candidate for president, to spare Gary Graham from the death penalty he earned. Again they picked a loser, as Universal Press syndicate writer John Leo has pointed out, and so have Dianne Clements and Dudley Sharp in their Wall Street Journal editorial comments.

Never did eyewitness Bernadine Skillern waver from her testimony. Clements and Sharp write:

"While Ms. Skillern's veracity has been verified, the same cannot be said for Graham. Supporters touted Graham's assertions, made in his own death-row newspaper, that he had never harmed anyone. That stands at odds with what he said in the past:

There were 28 known victims of Graham's crime spree.

Again, Texas didn't execute a good guy, and an effort to put political pressure on a presidential candidate also failed. There are some religious arguments against the death penalty, but none of them fit Jacobs or Graham.