It was December, and Kevin Zimmerman had been preparing to die since July. That’s when he learned his execution date had been set. But actually, he had been waiting to die for more than sixteen years.

It was on an October day in1987 when he stabbed Leslie Gilbert Hooks to death during a drunken brawl at a Motel 6 in Beaumont, Texas. Kevin stabbed Hooks more than 30 times and then left him to bleed to death on the motel room floor.

It was a bloody fight, one that left Kevin injured badly enough that he was in the local hospital emergency room when he was arrested. Kevin always said he was acting in self defense and that the injury to his brain that he suffered as a child -- he had a plate covering his frontal lobe -- made it impossible for him to stop stabbing once he had started. But it is hard to argue that you acted in self defense when the victim has 31 stab wounds.

Kevin was charged with capital murder, punishable by death. The most serious of charges, capital murder is generally reserved for the worst of the worst: cop killers, serial killers, terrorists. Kevin's crime, although horrible and pointless and rash, would not have been charged as a capital case in most jurisdictions. But he killed a man in Texas, which executes more of its prisoners than any other state in the Union.

Then there were the letters. While he was in jail awaiting trial, Kevin learned that his wife was pregnant with another man's child and was going to file for divorce. Despondent, suicidal, powerless, Kevin wrote to the judge and the district attorney, threatening to kill them if he ever got out of prison. He signed the letter to the judge in his own blood.

Kevin didn't actually intended to kill anybody. He wanted them to kill him. The letters were, in effect, suicide notes. And they were successful. The letters sealed his fate. Without them, he might not have been charged with capital murder; he might not have been sentenced to death.

The formal preparation for Kevin's execution began that December Wednesday at noon. A corrections officer came to the visiting room where Kevin sat with his ex-wife (they had reconciled over the years) and his long-time pen pal from Switzerland and said, "It's time to go Zimmerman." Kevin was handcuffed and taken back to the death row area of the prison in Livingston. There he stripped, was cavity searched and scanned with a metal detector. Then he was checked again. A guard handed him a pair of clean white boxer shorts, a scratchy prison jumpsuit and cloth slippers. He changed into the clothes and waited to be shackled.

A belt was secured around his waist. It had chains running down to his feet which were connected to metal cuffs around his ankles. His hands were cuffed in front of him, and those cuffs were attached to the waist belt. Thus shackled, he could walk no faster than a shuffle, nor catch himself if he started to fall, nor scratch his own nose. It also, of course, made it impossible for him to escape.

Kevin was escorted outside by the warden, two captains and more than a dozen other officers. This troop placed Kevin into the back of a caged van for the ride to the Walls Unit in Huntsville where he was to be executed.

Kevin says he felt a deep peace and joy as he sat in the back of the van. He smiled as he watched the scenery of everyday life go by -- people walking, children playing, folks sitting on their porches. He recognized that those people had a physical freedom which he had been denied, but he believed that he was about to experience the ultimate freedom -- freedom from life on death row; release to the great paradise of the afterlife.

His solace was broken only by the conversation of the guards transporting him. They spoke among themselves -- although it was obvious they intended Kevin to hear -- about how murderers deserved to die, about how much they despised the inmates. But even this could not destroy Kevin's mood.