Why San Angelo Hasn't Seen a Death Penalty Case in 15 Years

The lightly-colored sketches of a courtroom artist hang framed on the walls of a small office on Beauregard, relics of a capital murder trial that played out in Midland in 1994 and still haunts the man pictured.

Law books, stacks of legal papers and briefcases of files stand neatly stacked on the desk, behind which sits Bryan Clayton, 119th Assistant District Attorney, 10 years older and a little more gray than when he was captured by the artist’s colored pencils.

Clayton has been prosecuting for over 30 years, and in that time has “seen a lot of ugly”. He served as lead and assisting attorney on over 25 murder trials, seen everything from home invasion to abduction to murder-for-hire, and has been an assistant DA in Tom Green County for the past 17 years.

His office is telling of his career: to his left, held up by a thin stripe of tape, hangs an execution order for TDCJ death row inmate #999309. The six-digit number, and the placeholder as 351st on the list of inmates executed in Texas since 1976, make Luis Ramirez just one of many put down by the criminal justice system over the span of almost four decades. But here in Tom Green County he's known as the last individual from these parts to receive the death penalty, in 1999, and be executed some six years later. 

Note: Bryan Clayton emphasized at the onset of the interview for this article that the ideas and opinions expressed by him are soley his own and do not represent the opinions or feelings of the DA's office as a whole.

“Luis got executed on the 20th day of October, ’05,” Clayton said, motioning to the execution order. “I’ve got two in the ground, two on the row, as they might say. That was the last one I did.”

Ramirez was sentenced to death by a Tom Green County jury on May 14, 1999, a week after a guilty verdict resulted in his conviction for the murder of San Angelo fireman Nemecio Nandin. Clayton served as second chair in the trial, led by former 51st District Attorney Steve Lupton, in what would become Clayton’s fifth capital case where the death penalty was sought.

In the 15-year lapse since Ramirez’s jury-elected execution, capital murders have been scarce in Tom Green County. That scarcity may lead some to believe that when it comes to the death penalty, well, ‘we don’t do that here’.

The fairly recent and vile murders carried out by Matthew Salazar, Johnny Garcia and Daniel Uvalle and Isidro De La Cruz, however, have started a community discussion about execution, with many wondering who will be the next county nominee for lethal injection, or if it’s even an option locally.

“We don’t have many capital murders, at all,” said 51st District Attorney Allison Palmer. “We have gone for periods of years without even murders, and those (years) are blessings. Unfortunately, just in the last two years we’ve had several capital murders and we’ve had to evaluate those, of course. It’s not that we don’t seek the death penalty, it’s that we have not had that many capital murders between 1999 and 2013….It’s always an option.”

Six Feet Under

In May 1991, a Collin County grand jury indicted four men for the home invasion and murder of 55-year-old Helen Ayers. News reports about the killing state that Kenneth Lynn Bruce, 19, Eric Lynn Moore, 23, Anthony Bruce (Kenneth’s cousin) 15, and Sam Andrews, 19, approached the Ayers’ home in Prosper on Dec. 10, 1990, under the ruse of needing jumper cables. But instead of receiving help, they proceeded to invade the home and shoot both Richard and Helen Ayers in their bedroom.

Richard Ayers survived the ambush but was paralyzed from the waist down; he waited next to his wife’s body for hours, unable to move, until their son came home and found them lying on the mattress.

The perpetrators stole $10 of cash and several jewelry boxes before leaving the scene. All four were arrested and taken into custody within a week of the crime.

Bryan Clayton was 32 years old at the time of the Ayers capital murder, and worked in the Collin County District Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor. After the four suspects were indicted, the DA chose to seek the death penalty for the three adults and certified the juvenile—who was not eligible for the death penalty due to his age—as an adult for the trials.

Clayton took on the role of lead prosecutor. It was the first time he would try a death penalty case—in fact he’d be trying three of them—and he still remembers the feeling he had as he prepared for trial.

“As a prosecutor, not having ever done one…I remember at the time feeling on the one hand a sense of excitement,” he said. “That’s kind of the super bowl of trials—any kind of trials—a capital murder case. Very, very few people have ever gotten to try one where the death penalty was sought. So I felt some excitement [and] challenge, I felt a lot of responsibility. Especially after I met Mr. Ayers, the survivor of this thing, knowing his wife was killed there with him in his own home. I felt a huge a sense of responsibility to represent [his family] to the best of my ability. I knew that the whole community would be watching. What I did and how I performed would be a reflection upon my boss that I worked for as well, so I knew I was taking on something pretty heavy.”

Clayton said he didn’t really consider whether or not he had a choice in prosecuting his first death penalty case, rather “I just knew it was part of the job…I don’t relish it, I don’t look forward to it, I hope I don’t ever do another one. But if duty called and it was there, I certainly would, but at that time that thought never crossed my mind.”

On Feb. 26, 1992, a jury in Collin County found Kenneth Bruce guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to death the following day. After 12 years of appeals, he was finally executed on Jan. 14, 2004, by lethal injection. He was the 315th inmate executed in Texas since 1976.

Co-defendant Eric Lynn Moore was also sentenced to death, while Sam Andrews and Anthony Bruce both received life without parole, or “death by prison” sentences.

The Worst of the Worst

Since the Ayers homicide, Clayton has tried two more death penalty cases; one in 1993 on a change of venue in Midland and one in 1999 in Tom Green County. With five trials behind him and four death penalty sentences under his belt, Clayton is currently the most experienced local prosecutor on capital death penalty cases still in office.

The decision to seek the death penalty is not made alone, Clayton said, and should be reserved for the worst of the worst. Before the DA makes that decision, he or she talks to other prosecutors, the victims, and looks at the overall facts of the case to determine if the person’s conduct and background warrant execution.

“It’s not something you do based upon the emotion of the crime at the time,” he said. “All capital murders are horrible. All murders are horrible. That’s not what you’ve got to look at. You’ve got to look at—in a very sober and reflective approach—the evidence that you have available.”

On April 8, 1998, Edward Bell lured Nemecio Nandin out to a property in Tennyson, stating that he had a washing machine that needed repair. Nandin, a San Angelo fireman and part-time washing machine repairman, drove out to the property, where Bell lie in wait. 

Bell met Nandin with a shotgun, handcuffed him, and led him to a pre-dug grave behind a chicken coop. He then shot and killed Nandin and buried him, all part of a murder-for-hire plot hatched by Luis Ramirez.

“We were able to prove that Luis Ramirez hired Bell to help him do this,” Clayton said. “We also found evidence that indicated that Luis Ramirez was planning to kill a couple of other people as well. The motivation for all of this was Nemecio Nandin had gone out with Luis Ramirez’s ex-wife a couple of times.”

Who Gets Death

Looking back to the Ramirez case, Clayton cites a few different things he looks for when deciding whether to pursue the death penalty. Factors such as age, history of violence, planning, and “the victim pool” come into play.

“I want to have a very good background on the defendant; not just whether they’ve been to prison before, whether they’ve been on felony probation before, but even stuff they’ve not been adjudicated on, like that Luis Ramirez,” Clayton said, “He raped that gal up in Las Vegas. I don’t think it was ever prosecuted, [but] it was reported." 

Key to determining whether the death penalty is suitable is the likelihood that the offender will continue to be a threat to society, both between and beyond prison walls. Clayton scrutinizes the defendant’s history, looking for a record of bad conduct that escalated to the point that they’ve killed somebody intentionally. 

“In that history you want to look at who was the victim,” Clayton said. “Was the victim in that offense an emotion-based thing unlikely to be repeated?”

As example, Clayton names “the wife killer”. Stressing what he’s learned over the years from trying murder cases, Clayton explains the emphasis psychiatrists put on random acts of violence versus emotion-based violence.

“A guy that kills his wife or his girlfriend but otherwise doesn’t have any record or maybe a drug offense or something, probably isn’t going to kill anybody ever again,” he said. “I’m not saying that’s true 100 percent, but most of the time that’s an emotion based [crime].

“His ‘victim pool’ or ‘potential victim pool’ is not big. You want somebody that’s more of a random violence out there,” he explains. “Maybe he did an aggravated robbery and then maybe burglarized somebody’s house, then maybe beat somebody up: men, women, doesn’t matter [to the offender], it’s a wide victim pool."

A high degree of planning is another element that Clayton says psychiatrists have indicated is paramount in determining a person’s tendencies.

“I’ve had psychiatrists say over and over and over again planning is probably one of the one or two biggest factors in being able to say someone in their opinion is going to be a continuing threat to society,” he said.

In his and Lupton’s case against Luis Ramirez, attorneys established a background of violent acts ranging from Ramirez’s first and second wives, death threats, and plots to kill other people. Handwritten notes, license plate numbers and directions were found in Bell’s vehicle that Ramirez had penned, and he’d offered Bell $1,000 to carry out the crime.

“It had all the right elements for a capital case,” Clayton said. “You had a guy with violent patterns as your defendant, a high degree of planning, a totally innocent victim…a bit of a mystery of how it came together, had some science in the evidence, had some shrinks in it. I mean, as that kind of case goes, it was pretty straight-forward once you put it all together.”

Clayton also prosecuted the recent trial of Matthew Salazar, who on Aug. 31, 2013, killed his wife and attempted to kill her lover in Grape Creek. Salazar was indicted for capital murder—although the jury would later return a verdict for first-degree murder—but the death penalty was not sought. 

The reasoning, Clayton explained, were the facts. Salazar had no prior criminal history, the offense was emotion-based, and while there were elements of planning, it wasn’t a high degree.

Other mitigating factors include but are not limited to the age of the offender and his or her mental health, and if the circumstances are right, the law will prevent an offender from being given the death penalty under in those situations.

At the time of the murder in 1998, Luis Ramirez was 34 years old. The Supreme Court has ruled that a defendant who was 17 or younger at the time an offense was committed is not eligible for execution.

When Daniel Uvalle and Johnny Garcia burst into the Greenwood Apartments on Sept. 1, 2013, and executed Tabitha Freeman and Alvaro Carrillo, Uvalle was 17. Garcia, at the time, was 18, and Palmer recently waived the death penalty in his case, although she stated she would not reveal what lead to that decision until after the trial. 

Pending Cases and Those to Come

While the death penalty hasn’t been sought for over 15 years in the county, Palmer acknowledged the rise in capital murders over the past two years and said that execution would always remain an option unless repealed by the legislature.

Palmer was unable to comment on the case of Isidro De La Cruz, who was charged with capital murder after he brutally killed 5-year-old Naiya Villegas on Sept. 2, but he does have a lengthy record in Tom Green County that contains multiple instances of violence.

No word has passed whether the family of the victim wish to pursue death or life in the case, however Palmer says she does take the family’s wishes into account when making her decision.

With regard to future cases, in light of the fact that we’re seeing more capital crimes, she said, “My evaluations will be the same. The same factors I’ve used to evaluate every capital murder case I’ve ever viewed, I’ll continue to use the same evaluation...we have to do just what we believe is the right thing; we do what we believe justice dictates and we try to stay with what we believe our community standards have been."

Due to the scope of the subject matter, our coverage will be broken down into two separate articles. In the next feature, we will cover the major differences between 'typical' felony trials and felony trials involving the death penalty; costs of a death penalty case; and the 'marriage' of an attorney to a case from start through completion.