Bart Whitaker, The Texas Son Who Planned His Family's Murder — And The Father Who Saved Him From Execution

On the evening of December 10, 2003, the Whitaker family of Sugar Land, Texas, went out to celebrate. Their oldest son, 23-year-old Thomas Bartlett “Bart” Whitaker, had told them he was about to graduate from Sam Houston State University, and his parents, Kent and Tricia, took him and his 19-year-old brother Kevin to dinner at a Pappadeaux restaurant in nearby Stafford. Bart unwrapped a Rolex watch, a graduation gift.

There was no graduation. Bart was nowhere near finishing his degree; according to investigators, he was on academic probation. And as the family drove home that night, a man dressed in black was already waiting inside their house.

What happened next would leave two members of the family dead, put Bart on Texas's death row, and set in motion one of the most remarkable stories of forgiveness Texas has ever seen.

An Ambush In The Front Hall

When the Whitakers pulled into their driveway, Bart said he had left his cell phone in his car and hung back while the others walked to the front door. Inside, a gunman named Chris Brashear, wearing a ski mask, had staged the house to look as if a burglary was in progress.

Brashear opened fire as the family came in. Kevin was shot in the chest and collapsed. Tricia, a 51-year-old elementary school teacher, was shot next. Kent rushed toward the sound and took a bullet to the shoulder that shattered his upper arm. Then Bart ran into the house, grappled with the gunman, and was shot in the arm himself before Brashear fled out the back door to a waiting getaway car.

Kevin died on the floor of the family home. Tricia died while being flown to Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. Kent and Bart both survived. Lying in his hospital bed, Kent did not yet know who had been behind the attack, but he made a decision that would shape the rest of his life.

“The first night in the hospital … I forgave everyone who was involved in this.”— Kent Whitaker, to CBS News’ 48 Hours

A Burglary That Didn't Add Up

At first, Sugar Land police treated the case as a home invasion. “It looks as if it’s a burglary gone wrong,” Detective Marshall Slot later told 48 Hours. But the scene bothered investigators. Drawers had been opened too neatly. Valuable electronics hadn’t been touched. “None of the items of value inside the house had been moved around,” Slot said.

Then, just five days after the shooting, a young man named Adam Hipp showed up in the police station parking lot with a story. Years earlier, he said, Bart Whitaker had asked him to help kill his family. In one version of the plan, Bart wanted to burn down his grandmother’s lake house with his relatives inside. In another, from December 2000, Hipp would wait inside the Whitaker home and shoot the family as they came back from dinner.

Hipp had even sketched it out. When Detective Slot compared his drawing to the crime scene, he called it “the exact blueprint.”

Bart, police now suspected, had stood to collect a fortune. Prosecutors would later argue he expected an inheritance of more than $1 million if his parents and brother were dead. When his father asked him directly, Bart denied everything. “He promised me that there was nothing to it, that he did not have anything to do with it,” Kent recalled.

“Rudy Rios” Of Cerralvo, Mexico

Bart wasn’t charged right away. About seven months after the shooting, with investigators closing in, he slipped across the border into Mexico, taking thousands of dollars from his father with him. He paid an acquaintance named Rudy Rios $3,000 to help him escape, and then borrowed the man’s identity.

As “Rudy Rios,” Bart settled in the small town of Cerralvo, in the state of Nuevo León, and went to work in a furniture shop. He began a relationship with a local woman, and he explained away the bullet scar on his arm with stories about military service in Afghanistan.

Back in Texas, the case was coming together without him. In September 2005, police arrested the gunman, Chris Brashear, and the getaway driver, Bart’s friend Steven Champagne.

That same month, the real Rudy Rios, by then aware that there was reward money on offer, told authorities where the fugitive was hiding. Mexican immigration officials picked Bart up without a struggle and handed him over to U.S. authorities at the border in Laredo, where he was arrested for capital murder.

Bart Whitaker On Trial

The trial opened in Fort Bend County in March 2007. The state’s key witness was Steven Champagne, who testified that two months before the shooting, Bart had offered him and Brashear a cut of a $1 million insurance policy to help kill the family. Champagne had waited in the getaway car that night, and he told the jury how he had come to see the family he helped target.

“The way that I looked at it was they weren’t human.”— Steven Champagne, getaway driver

Bart took the stand and admitted he had set the killings in motion. “I am 100-percent guilty for this. I put the plan in motion,” he said. He also said he felt “horrible” about himself, though he struggled to explain why he had done it. Prosecutor Fred Felcman was unmoved. “You’re sorry you got caught and now you’re figuring out how to get out of the death penalty,” he told the jury.

The most unusual figure in the courtroom was the surviving victim. Kent Whitaker had already forgiven his son, and he pleaded with prosecutors not to seek death. “If the state pursues the death penalty and receives it, then they will kill the last surviving member of my family,” he said.

The jury convicted Bart of capital murder and sentenced him to death. The gunman, Chris Brashear, avoided a death sentence by pleading guilty and received life in prison. In 2008, Kent and his father published a book about the ordeal, Murder by Family: The Incredible True Story of a Son’s Treachery and a Father’s Forgiveness.

Forty Minutes To Spare

Bart Whitaker spent the next decade on death row. He earned a college degree by correspondence, began writing about prison life, and won prizes from PEN America’s Prison Writing Program. In late 2017, a judge set his execution date: February 22, 2018.

Kent Whitaker launched one last campaign to save his son. In a letter to the Houston Chronicle, he asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to spare him, writing that “by executing my son, the state is simply making me a victim once again.” On February 20, two days before the execution, the board did something it almost never does: it voted unanimously to recommend clemency.

The final decision belonged to Governor Greg Abbott. Execution in Texas is scheduled for 6 p.m., and the afternoon passed without word. Then, roughly 40 minutes before Bart was to be put to death, Abbott commuted his sentence to life in prison without parole. It was the first time a Texas governor had spared a death row inmate since 2007.

“Mr. Whitaker must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime.”— Texas Governor Greg Abbott, February 22, 2018

Abbott pointed to two reasons: Bart hadn’t pulled the trigger, and his father, the surviving victim, would be harmed all over again if the state executed his last remaining immediate family member. As part of the deal, Bart formally gave up any claim to parole.

“I’m thankful for the decision, not for me, but for my dad,” Bart said afterward.

Today, Bart Whitaker remains in a Texas prison, where he will stay for the rest of his life. His father, the man he once paid to have killed, is still the person fighting hardest for him.

SOURCES

“Father fights to save son from execution,” 48 Hours, CBS News.
“Off death row: Sugar Land convict ‘given new life,’ his dad says,” ABC13 Houston.
“Governor Abbott commutes death sentence of Thomas Bartlett Whitaker,” KXXV.
“Texas parole board recommends killer be spared from death,” CBS Austin.
“A Texas man vowed to forgive whoever killed most of his family. Then he learned it was his son,” The Washington Post via Anchorage Daily News.
“Thomas Bartlett Whitaker,” Wikipedia.