David Martin Long

David Martin Long (July 15, 1953 – December 8, 1999) was an American serial killer who was sentenced to death for the murders of three women, and later confessed to committing seven murders. His case received media attention after he was placed on life support for a drug overdose two days before his scheduled execution. The New York Times said that the medical personnel who treated Long "found themselves in the odd situation of trying to restore to good health a man with only two days left to live." He had two brothers and a sister, and he lived in California as a child.

Triple murder On September 19, 1986, after being expelled from an alcohol rehabilitation program in Little Rock, Arkansas, Long was hitchhiking when 37-year-old Donna Sue Jester gave him a ride and allowed him to stay at her home in Lancaster, Texas. In exchange for having a place to live, Long agreed to perform repair work on the home.

Arrest, release, and recapture The night of the murders, Long was arrested for drunken driving in Leon County, Texas, about 100 miles south of Lancaster. He was still driving Donna Sue Jester's vehicle, heading north in a southbound lane on Interstate 45. Officers said that Long had run several cars off the road, that he banged his head on the police car until he was bleeding, and that he was "ranting and raving about Jesus or God."

Long told Leon County jailers about killing the three women in Lancaster. However, the women's bodies had not been discovered, so Long's story was not taken seriously and he was released from jail on September 29. A jailer said that before Long's release, he woke up Sheriff Royce Wilson; the jailer said he was told to forget about Long's murder claims. Wilson later said that no one told him about a possible murder confession. Police in Lancaster discovered the murdered women's bodies the same day Long was released from jail. Long became a suspect in the Lancaster murders when officers found an entry in Donna Sue Jester's diary that described how she met Long and allowed him to move in with her. He was apprehended in Austin for public intoxication on October 24. He had hitchhiked, and the driver called police when Long passed out in the vehicle. (Long used an alias at the time of his arrest, but officers in Austin had already been warned to be on the lookout for him.) Fingerprints confirmed Long's identity.

While he was in police custody, Long granted an interview to The Dallas Morning News in which he confessed to killing the three women in Lancaster. He said that he "just got tired of hearing all the bickering" from the women, and he said that the women had objected to his drinking. "I've got something in my head that clicks sometimes. It just goes off," he said.

Trial For the murders of the three women in Lancaster, Long was indicted by a Dallas County grand jury in November 1986. He entered a plea of not guilty, claiming insanity. Psychologist William Hester testified for the defense, stating that Long was likely psychotic – and may have been hallucinating from alcohol withdrawal – at the time of the crime. The prosecution pointed to inconsistencies between two of Hester's interviews with Long, and they highlighted one of Hester's earlier written notes, which said Hester found no evidence that Long was insane. Long first asked Judge Larry Baraka if he was allowed to change his plea from not guilty to no contest. Then, against the advice of his attorneys, he asked to be able to enter a guilty plea. Judge Baraka noted Long's request without ruling on whether he would instruct the jury to automatically find Long guilty.

Long was convicted of murder on February 7, 1987. The jury sentenced him to the death penalty on February 10, 1987.

Time on death row Three years after arriving on death row, Long gave investigators a three-hour confession in which he admitted to starting a 1986 house fire that killed two women in the West Texas town of Iraan. Long said that he set the fire because he was angry at Billy Willis, one of the occupants of the house. Billy's cousin, Ernest Willis, had already been found guilty of capital murder in connection with the fire, and he had been sentenced to the death penalty in 1987. The prosecutor in the case had described the evidence against Ernest Willis as circumstantial.

Willis's appeals lawyers spent several years looking for evidence to support Long's version of the events. They found that Long knew Billy Willis because the two had engaged in criminal activity together for many years. In Long's confession, he said that he used a mixture of Everclear and Wild Turkey to start the fire, and subsequent experiments showed that such a mixture could be used as an accelerant in this type of fire. Long was also associated with arson as a modus operandi, having confessed to the Bay City fire.

In 2004, Willis's conviction was overturned due to deficient legal representation and evidence that the state had unnecessarily medicated Willis during his trial. New fire investigators looked at the case and said that there was no physical evidence from this fire that supported a finding of arson. They said the fire was more likely due to an electrical problem. According to author Welsh White, Long's confession was probably untrue, but it was "the catalyst that precipitated the massive investigation that resulted in Willis's exoneration."

In Long's own death penalty case, he lost a 1991 appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The next year, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his request for writ of certiorari. His execution was scheduled for September 17, 1992, but two days before he was set to die, he received a stay of execution to pursue further appeals.

On December 8, the day of Long's scheduled execution, Long remained on oxygen but his condition was upgraded from critical to serious, and state officials asked intensive care physician Alexander Duarte to sign an affidavit stating that it would be safe to transport Long to Huntsville. Duarte refused, saying that under normal circumstances Long would have stayed in intensive care for another day or two. The doctor warned that Long still required continual medical care. That same day, state officials arranged a medically supervised transport from Galveston to Huntsville via airplane so that he could be executed as scheduled.