Inmate executed for killing of girl in Beaumont

In Huntsville, a former flea market vendor was executed Tuesday evening for abducting, raping and strangling a 10-year-old Louisiana girl from a Beaumont flea market where her parents also sold items.

 James Rexford Powell, 56, had a brief final statement, saying only "I am ready for the final blessing."

 Powell smiled, nodded and grinned to friends and relatives who watched through a window a few feet away. He did not acknowledge his victim's father, stepmother and other witnesses for the slain girl.

 When Powell asked for the blessing, a priest among his witnesses made the sign of the cross and led Powell's friends and relatives, including his wife, in a prayer.

 Powell took several short gasps as the drugs took effect. 8 minutes later, at 6:17 p.m. CDT, he was pronounced dead.

 The U.S. Supreme Court, in a ruling about 4 hours before Powell's scheduled execution, refused to block the punishment.

 Falyssa Van Winkle was with her parents when she disappeared 12 years ago this week after telling them she was going to buy some peanuts.

 5 hours later, the Lake Charles, La., girl's body was found 55 miles to the north, face down under a bridge over a muddy creek in Newton County, along the Texas-Louisiana state line.

 A rope was tight around her neck. Her wrists were bound with rope. Her ankles bore marks they too had been tied together. She also had been raped.

 "Anybody who saw photographs of that little child will never get over that," recalls Charles Mitchell, the former Newton County district attorney and now a state district court judge.

 "A crime like that tends to really enrage people," Mitchell said. "It was truly a horrible case."

 Powell was arrested Oct. 8, 1990, 2 days after the killing, at his home in Mauriceville, northeast of Beaumont. He knew the girl's parents because he also occasionally was a vendor, talked with them at the flea market in the hour before the girl disappeared and said goodbye to them as he was about to leave.

 "They watched him walk to his motor home and then watched him drive away not knowing their little girl was unconscious and tied up in the motor home," said Bill Davis, a Beaumont police sergeant who investigated the case.

 A vendor saw Powell near the peanut stand about the time the girl told her mother and stepfather she was headed there. Davis said authorities believed she was lured to the van and was knocked unconscious.

 Powell's distinctive vehicle, seen by a witness near the site where the body was found by a couple riding motorcycles, provided police a lead in the case.

 "It was a cross between a van and motor home, sort of an enlarged van with a sleeping compartment in the back," Mitchell said. "He had this custom-painted red bird on the side of it."

 Detectives tracked down the truck, which a neighbor said Powell had been washing inside, outside and underside the day after the killing. Despite the cleaning, crime scene technicians found dog hair that matched a dog hair discovered on the girl's body and 6 hairs from her. Tire tracks at the scene matched Powell's truck. DNA tests showed sperm in the girl matched Powell.

 A jury took about 45 minutes to find him guilty, then deliberated another 45 minutes to decide on the death sentence.

 "It is frustrating to me that it's taken 12 long years for us to ultimately reach this state," Davis said. "The evidence hasn't changed. The facts of case haven't changed."

 Powell did not testify. He declined to speak with reporters in the weeks before his scheduled execution.

 "I was not the one who committed this crime," Powell said in a letter last year to The Associated Press.

 Disputing the accuracy of the trial evidence against him, he added, "It's not only the 'poor, abused, black man' that gets screwed, sometimes it's us 'poor, old, white folks' who get shafted too."

 Powell had no previous convictions. He was arrested in 1984, tried and acquitted by a jury in Beauregard Parish, La., on charges of attempted murder, attempted aggravated rape and aggravated burglary for beating and shooting a woman at her home in Merryville, just east of the Sabine River in Louisiana.

 Despite objections from Powell's lawyers, the victim in that case was allowed to testify against him at the punishment phase of his murder trial, identifying him as her attacker.

 "He'd gotten away with that deal in Louisiana and I'm fully convinced he thought he would get away this," Mitchell said. "He was really a bad actor, a truly evil person."

 Powell becomes the 29th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Texas, and the 285th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1982. There are no more scheduled executions in Texas in October, but 4 are set in November and 2 more are set for December.

 Powell becomes the 54th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 803rd overall since America resumed executions on January 17, 1977.