A convicted murderer who beat a 12-year-old boy to death before slitting his throat and drinking his blood has been executed.
Pablo Lucio Vasquez told police he was drunk and high when voices convinced him to kill David Cardenas.
The teenager was brutally beaten with a pipe in Donna, a Texas border town 360km south of San Antonio in 1998.
Pablo Lucio Vasquez told police that voices convinced him to kill a 12-year-old boy and drink his blood. Photo: Texas Department of Criminal Justice / AP
Vasquez also told detectives in a videotaped statement that he drank some of the boy's blood, leading to media nicknaming him "the vampire killer".
Asked by the warden if he had a final statement to make, Vasquez, 38, told relatives watching through a window that he loved them and thanked them for being there.
He then turned his head to look through an adjacent window where four of his victim's relatives stood.
As the lethal dose of pentobarbital began taking effect, he said he was a little dizzy."I'm sorry to David's family," he said. "This is the only way that I can be forgiven. You got your justice right here."
"See you on the other side," he said, raising his head off the gurney pillow and looking toward two of his sisters, a brother-in-law and a cousin.
He snorted loudly once, then dropped his head back to the pillow and took a few quiet breaths before all movement stopped.
He was pronounced dead 24 minutes later at 6:35pm.
Cardenas' relatives declined to speak with reporters following the execution, the 11th this year in the US, six of them in Texas.
The punishment was carried out about four hours after the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Vasquez' lawyer James Keegan.
The lawyer was seeking a reprieve so justices could review whether several potential jurors were improperly excused from Vasquez' capital murder trial because they either were opposed to the death penalty or not comfortable making such a judgment.
However, State lawyers opposed any delay, arguing the potential jurors' exclusion was legally proper and that the latest appeal was similar to an unsuccessful one 12 years ago and amounted to "nothing more than a meritless attempt to postpone his execution," Assistant Texas Attorney General Jeremy Greenwell told the high court.
Earlier, unsuccessful appeals, including one rejected last month by a federal judge, focused on whether Vasquez was mentally ill and should be ineligible for the death penalty.
Court records showed Vasquez, his 15-year-old cousin, Andres Rafael Chapa, and Cardenas, Chapa's friend, all attended a party in Donna, a Texas border town where Vasquez and Chapa lived.
Cardenas was from nearby Alamo, also in the Rio Grande Valley, and was spending the weekend with Chapa.
The killing occurred on April 18, 1998, after the three left the party. Vasquez told authorities as they reached a wooden shed, he started hearing voices telling him to kill Cardenas.
"Something just told me to drink," Vasquez said in the statement to police.
"You drink what?" a detective asked.
"His blood," Vasquez replied.
Police received an anonymous tip about the killing that led them to Chapa and eventually to Vasquez, who was arrested in Conroe, a Houston suburb more than 520km north of Donna. Authorities found the mutilated body five days later under some scraps of aluminium in a vacant field.
"It was really horrendous," Joseph Orendain, the lead trial prosecutor, recalled last week.
Vasquez declined an interview request from The Associated Press as his execution date neared. His statement to police about the devil and drinking blood fuelled speculation about Satanism, but the subject never came up at Vasquez's trial or in appeals.
"Did he drink it? I don't know," Mr Orendain said.
Chapa pleaded guilty to a murder charge is serving a 35-year prison term. Three other relatives of Chapa and Vasquez received probation and a small fine for helping cover up the slaying. One of them was deported to Guatemala.
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