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Man convicted of killing 5-year-old set to die
from: SOURCE
by Mark Agee
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
More photosARLINGTON -- In the cold hours before dawn on a morning in November 1988, Jackie Barron Wilson broke a window of the ground-floor apartment where Maggie Rhodes slept.
As the Roark Elementary kindergartner lay next to her puppy, Wilson pulled her from her bed, which was pushed against the window.
He drove her from the Arlington Village Apartments near Abram Street and Texas 360 to a field near an abandoned road in Grand Prairie, said police, who believe that Maggie was still alive after Wilson sexually assaulted her.
Then Wilson drove the car over Maggie as he fled in the red Mercury Cougar he had borrowed from his sister's boyfriend.
Maggie's body, clad in shorts and a Muppet T-shirt, was found hours later by a truck driver just north of the now-closed International Wildlife Park.
Wilson, 40, is set to die by injection after 6 p.m. Thursday.
The execution will come four days after what would have been Maggie's 23rd birthday.
"I'll just be glad when it's over with," said Maggie's mother, Toni Rhodes, who lives in Grand Prairie. She plans to attend the execution. "It will be hard watching someone die.
"But she was only 5 years old. She didn't have a chance to live. He did."
Wilson had two trials. His first capital murder conviction, in 1989, was overturned on appeal because a juror was wrongfully dismissed during voir dire, the process in which prospective jurors are questioned and challenged for bias.
Wilson was tried and convicted again in 1994.
Jerri Sims, then a Dallas County prosecutor who worked on both trials, said authorities were even more focused on securing the death penalty the second time around.
Wilson knew how to reach Maggie because he had lived in the same apartment complex, in the 2700 block of Harriett Street, and he was friends with her baby sitter.
"I don't know that it makes anything worse," Sims said. "But the fact that he had been around and watched her play, in my mind that makes it worse."
Wilson's guilt was never in doubt, said Mike Bosillo, who led the investigation as an Arlington police detective.
Wilson was caught days after the killing. His fingerprints were on the broken bedroom window, according to police reports and court testimony. Maggie's hair was in the car, and his DNA was on her clothes. Maggie's hair and blood were on the underside of the car. And a rare Korean tire from the Cougar matched a tire track on the child's body.
Several women testified at Wilson's trial that he had raped them or attempted to rape them.
"And this has been going on 18 years now," said Bosillo, who is now deputy chief investigator for the Dallas County district attorney. "He's gotten a free ride. But it ends soon."
From his cell on Death Row, Wilson refused an interview request from the Star-Telegram.
His attorney, Robin Norris of El Paso, said that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declined Monday to hear a petition alleging that Wilson had inadequate counsel at trial.
Norris said Wilson has two avenues left to spare his life.
There is a clemency petition pending before the parole board, Norris said. And the Innocence Network filed a civil case on Wilson's behalf in federal court last week claiming that lethal injection is unconstitutional because it is cruel and unusual, said David Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
Human rights groups have claimed that the drugs used in lethal injection disguise excruciating pain. The U.S. Supreme Court heard a similar case from Florida last week.
The Innocence Network's claim was rejected Monday morning, but Dow said they were appealing to a higher court, hoping for a stay of execution.
Rhodes said she was asked to write a letter to the parole board, offering her view on clemency for Wilson.
She said she wrote the letter in one draft. It took just a few minutes.
"I just want to know that my child's death did not go unpunished. I believe he forfeited his life the day that he took Maggie's life," Rhodes wrote of "the man who took my first-born child's life for his own sick pleasure."
"I'm a single mom with three jobs, and I struggle every day to have what I have," Rhodes said. "It makes me so mad that my taxes are paying to keep him alive."
Maggie had also been abducted and sexually assaulted in June 1987 but released within an hour. Investigators never found a link between that case and Wilson.
News stories at the time said Maggie won a prize for best story in her kindergarten class and idolized rock star JOAN JETT. She liked pork chops and mustard sandwiches. She was buried in Minnie Mouse earrings and a blue velvet dress that she would have unwrapped Christmas morning.
When she died, she had one little brother. Now, she would have been the oldest of four children. Rhodes has two daughters, 15 and 10 years old, whom she calls blessings because they were born after Maggie died.
Her son, who was sleeping in the same room with Maggie the night she was taken, is now 20.
Rhodes remembers him coming to her on the morning of Nov. 30.
"He said, 'Him hit Maggie! Him hit Maggie!'" Rhodes said. "Maggie did all of his talking for him. I could never understand what he said, but she always could."
The prosecutors and investigators who worked the case -- most of whom are in different jobs now -- all remember the case vividly.
Toby Shook, now chief of the Dallas County district attorney's office's felony division, was the assistant prosecutor in the second trial. He called the case "every parent's worst nightmare."
"He stole her out of her bed in the middle of the night and left her on the side of the road like a piece of trash," Shook said. "We were all dedicated to putting him on Death Row."
Sims is now the deputy criminal chief over narcotics and violent crime for the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of Texas. She keeps a photograph of Maggie in her desk. It's a school picture. On the back, Maggie had written her name and age.
Bosillo and Arlington police officer Jim Greenwell, who was the crime scene investigator on the case, plan to attend the execution.
"I saw what that animal did to that girl," Greenwell said. "It was a nightmare. I want to see justice played out. There's no nice way to put this -- it's going to be a good day."
Rhodes has kept in touch with them, often calling on the anniversary of Maggie's death or on her birthday.
"They knew her very well in death, but they didn't know her in life. I like to tell them about her," Rhodes said. "It's not just another case to them."
Bosillo said he'll never forget.
"At the trial, the prosecutors talked about the boogeyman -- the bad guy in her dreams," Bosillo said. "But to Maggie Rhodes he was real. And he came in the form of Jackie Barron Wilson."
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