Texas executes convicted killer Bobby Lee Hines for 1991 slaying

Convicted killer Bobby Lee Hines was executed Wednesday for strangling and repeatedly stabbing a suburban Dallas woman at her apartment 21 years ago.

Hines, 40, was 19 and on probation for burglary when he stabbed 26-year-old Michelle Wendy Haupt 18 times and strangled her with a cord. Haupt had moved from the Pittsburgh area to Carrollton to work at a computer company in Dallas, and Hines was staying next door with a maintenance man for her apartment complex.

Asked by a warden to make a final statement, Hines repeatedly asked for forgiveness.

"I know that I took somebody special from y'all,'' he said as Haupt's father stood a few feet away, watching through a window. "I know it wasn't right, it was wrong. I wish I could give it back, but I know I can't.

"I wish there was something I could do.''

He said he loved his family, believed life in prison would be a worse punishment, and then declared that he was "going home.''

As the lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered, he said he could feel it and was stopped in midsentence. He snored once, then slipped into unconsciousness. Twelve minutes later, at 6:28 p.m., he was pronounced dead.

"It's like a backache, it never goes away,'' Harold Haupt said afterward about the pain of losing his daughter. "It's always there.

"On the upside of this, Bobby Hines paid the ultimate price, a life for a life, and that's the good news. The bad news is it took 21 years, a lot of taxpayer money and all he did was go to sleep. He didn't suffer like my daughter did. He got like a forever sleeping pill.''

In the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 20, 1991, a neighbor heard screaming and called police, but officers were unable to find the source. When other residents told the apartment manager later that day about screams and loud noises that sounded like a bowling ball being dropped repeatedly, they persuaded him to open Haupt's door and found her dead.

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