http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2666347
HUNTSVILLE -- The heavy metal rock group Metallica exploded into pop culture in the early 1980s with the album Kill 'Em All, which depicts a pool of blood on the record cover and includes a song called No Remorse.
According to testimony at his capital murder trial, then-18-year-old Troy Kunkle chanted the song's refrain -- "Another day, another death, another sorrow, another breath" -- after fatally shooting a man in the head in Corpus Christi and robbing him of $13.
Kunkle, a San Antonio high school student at the time in 1984, is now 38 and set to die tonight. An appeal was before the U.S. Supreme Court to keep him from becoming the 11th Texas prisoner executed this year.
Leslie Poynter Dixon, a former assistant district attorney in Nueces County who prosecuted the case, last week recalled a hearing about whether the Metallica song could be used as evidence.
"As this album was being played for the judge so he could make his decision on whether it would be admitted, Mr. Kunkle was playing an air guitar," said Dixon, now the district attorney in Van Zandt County in East Texas. "That really struck me. It suggested to me that Mr. Kunkle had no regard for human life -- even his own -- because this was his trial and the state was seeking the death penalty."
Kunkle, who declined to speak with reporters in the weeks preceding his execution date, told the San Antonio Express-News in 1996 his life was transformed while on death row thanks to prison religious ministers.
"I feel better about myself now," he said. "I get along better with others, which I had a problem with in the past. ... But I do think about my victim every day." "I can't forgive him," Mary Horton, mother of the victim, Steven Horton, 29, told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in a story published this week. "He had no reason to do that. ... I guess the worst thing is it was a senseless murder."
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Cannibal Corpse makes me want to commit necrophilia.
HUNTSVILLE -- The heavy metal rock group Metallica exploded into pop culture in the early 1980s with the album Kill 'Em All, which depicts a pool of blood on the record cover and includes a song called No Remorse.
According to testimony at his capital murder trial, then-18-year-old Troy Kunkle chanted the song's refrain -- "Another day, another death, another sorrow, another breath" -- after fatally shooting a man in the head in Corpus Christi and robbing him of $13.
Kunkle, a San Antonio high school student at the time in 1984, is now 38 and set to die tonight. An appeal was before the U.S. Supreme Court to keep him from becoming the 11th Texas prisoner executed this year.
Leslie Poynter Dixon, a former assistant district attorney in Nueces County who prosecuted the case, last week recalled a hearing about whether the Metallica song could be used as evidence.
"As this album was being played for the judge so he could make his decision on whether it would be admitted, Mr. Kunkle was playing an air guitar," said Dixon, now the district attorney in Van Zandt County in East Texas. "That really struck me. It suggested to me that Mr. Kunkle had no regard for human life -- even his own -- because this was his trial and the state was seeking the death penalty."
Kunkle, who declined to speak with reporters in the weeks preceding his execution date, told the San Antonio Express-News in 1996 his life was transformed while on death row thanks to prison religious ministers.
"I feel better about myself now," he said. "I get along better with others, which I had a problem with in the past. ... But I do think about my victim every day." "I can't forgive him," Mary Horton, mother of the victim, Steven Horton, 29, told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in a story published this week. "He had no reason to do that. ... I guess the worst thing is it was a senseless murder."
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Cannibal Corpse makes me want to commit necrophilia.
