Kenneth Granviel

Kenneth Granviel was born on August 4, 1950, in Fort Worth. He, along with his older brother and half-brother were raised solely by his mother in a small house on Charlotte Street.[2] From an early age, Granviel was considered an odd, reclusive child who was often by himself, had few friends and almost never interacted with girls.[2]

On March 22, 1967, Granviel entered his mother's bedroom, where he grabbed her by the throat and attempted to rape her.[2] During their scuffle, he managed to come back to his senses, before Granviel stumbled to the front porch and collapsed onto the yard. Soon after the incident, his mother called the police who took the 16-year-old into custody. Due to his odd behavior, he was temporarily interned at the John Peter Smith Hospital, where he remained for ten days.[2] After being temporarily released, Granviel had sexually assaulted his brother. As a result, he was sent to the Gatesville State School, where he spent the next two and a half years.[2]

After his release, Granviel found a job at a letter manufacturing company, where he was described as a reliable and kind employee. His neighbors considered him friendly towards children and active in church activities, and was overall well-regarded by his friends and acquaintances. At one point, he was drafted to serve as a machine gunner in Vietnam, but was dishonorably discharged after being accused of beating up fellow soldiers.[3] At the time, he was dating Everlene Gould, the oldest of three sisters belonging to the McClendon family, who would later claim that he was occasionally violent towards her in arguments.[4]

Out of an apparent feeling of guilt, Granviel forced his rape victim into the car, where they drove to the local Pilgrim's Galilee Baptist Church and picked up the presiding pastor, Rev. Roy Lee Spearman. On the way to the police station, Granviel said that he "wanted to be taken out of society" and he did not want to harm any more innocent people.[2] Once they arrived at the station, Granviel and Spearman asked for a homicide detective, to which Detective F. D. Raulston responded and brought Granviel to an office.[5]

In there, Granviel took out a pistol and a butcher knife, placed them on the table and asked for Lt. Oliver Ball, the lead detective investigating the Riverside Village murders.[5] Ball, along with district attorney Rufus Adcock, were called into the office, and in front of all three of them, Granviel readily confessed to all seven murders.[5]

Following his confession, Granviel was immediately detained. On the next day, he led officers to his apartment, where they discovered Williams and Hill's bodies.[6] As a result, he was subsequently charged with seven counts of capital murder and one count of aggravated rape, which made him eligible for the death penalty.[6]

As part of a routine investigation, Granviel was investigated as a potential suspect in other killings committed in the Texas area, including the then-unsolved murder of Carla Walker.[10] While he was ruled out in several, he was considered a credible suspect in two: the 1967 murder of 18-year-old Mildred May, whose nude and battered body was found along the I-35W near Fort Worth, since he had already been questioned in the death at the time.[11] The other was the 1974 murder of 18-year-old Cheryl Callaway, who was stabbed 47 times with an ice pick at a parking lot in Arlington.[12] However, he was never charged in either murder, both of which remain unsolved.

In Granviel's subsequent trial, numerous witnesses came forward to testify regarding his odd behavior before and after the murders, including Gould, who was the first witness brought forward.[4] Just days after the trial, Justice Tom Cave allowed the prosecutors to admit Granviel's four-page long confession as evidence, over the objections of his attorneys.[7]

During the proceedings, conflicting testimony was given regarding Granviel's sanity, as psychiatrists on the defense claimed that he was a paranoid schizophrenic driven by uncontrollable sexual impulses, while the prosecuting side claimed that he was well aware of what did.[9] Granviel himself, who had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, said before the jury that while he acknowledged he was solely responsible for the killings, he was unable to control himself in the moment.[8] In the end, he was unanimously convicted by jury verdict, who recommended that he be given the death penalty.[13]

His sentence was automatically appealed, but subsequently upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals the following year.[14] With his initial execution date set for September 14, 1977, Granviel was scheduled to be the first inmate to be executed under Texas' new lethal injection protocol.[15] This motion was challenged by his attorneys, who argued that this was unconstitutional, as they considered it "even more cruel" than the previous method of electrocution.[16] Eventually, they succeeded in granting him a stay of execution, allowing him to remain on death row for more than 20 years.[1]

After several delays and stays of executions, Granviel was executed via lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit on February 27, 1996.[1] He declined to make a final statement.[1]

• Capital punishment in Texas
• List of people executed by lethal injection
• List of people executed in Texas, 1990–1999
• List of serial killers in the United States

• FindAGrave
• Granviel v. State (1976)
• Granviel v. State (1986)