Indiana man who murdered 2 executed in Texas

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March 11, 2010

By Associated Press The Washington Times-Herald Thu Mar 11, 2010, 08:00 PM EST

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — An Indiana man whose cross-country crime spree with his girlfriend a decade ago ended in a gun battle with police in San Francisco was executed Thursday for robbing and murdering a sheriff’s officer in San Antonio.

No late court appeals were filed for Joshua Maxwell, 31, condemned for gunning down Bexar County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Rudy Lopes and stealing his truck in 2000. The 45-year-old veteran jailer was off duty at the time.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week refused to review Maxwell’s case. Maxwell also was convicted of killing a man in Indiana.

Maxwell, his voice breaking and choking back tears, apologized repeatedly in the seconds before lethal drugs began flowing into his arms.

“The person that did that 10 years ago isn’t the same person you see today,” he said. “I hurt a lot of people with decisions I made. I can’t be more sorry than I am right now.”

Nine minutes later, at 6:27 p.m. CST, he was pronounced dead, making him the fourth inmate executed this year in the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.

Maxwell was among at least 10 Texas death row inmates with execution dates in the coming months, including two more later this month.

In late 2000, Maxwell and his girlfriend, Tessie McFarland, crisscrossed the country in a deadly crime spree, beginning in Indiana with the robbery and slaying of Robby Bott, 45, a FedEx mechanic from Mooresville, Ind. Lopes was killed a month later in October 2000, his bound and blindfolded body dumped behind a San Antonio shopping mall.

“Absolutely cold-blooded murders,” Jim Kopp, the Bexar County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Maxwell, recalled.

Less than a week after Lopes’ body was found, Maxwell and McFarland were arrested after a police chase and running gun battle through downtown San Francisco after Maxwell, driving Lopes’ stolen truck, refused to be pulled over for running a red light.

“There’s really no explanation,” Maxwell told The San Antonio Express-News recently from death row. “All the way from the top to the bottom, just senseless.

“I need to be locked up, no doubt about it. But me dying isn’t going to solve anything.”

He also acknowledged he committed a number of robberies, still unsolved, during the trek from Indiana to Florida, Texas and California.

McFarland, a former stripper, was wounded during the police chase in San Francisco. Lopes’ credit card, badge and service weapon were recovered from the truck, along with a Chinese-made 9 mm pistol determined to be the gun used to fatally shoot Lopes in the top of the head.

In news reports of the time, the couple were compared to the main characters in the 1994 film “Natural Born Killers,” who go on a murderous road trip, and also to Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the Depression-era robbers and killers whose notoriety was rekindled with a namesake movie in 1967.

Maxwell was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in Lopes’ killing. In Indiana, he was convicted of murder, felony confinement, arson and theft in Bott’s slaying.

Maxwell had a juvenile record in Indiana, a history with street gangs and adult convictions for auto theft, firearms possession, criminal trespass and felony theft. Bott’s murder came about five months after Maxwell got out of prison.

McFarland, 30, is serving a life prison term in Texas after pleading guilty to Lopes’ slaying. In Indiana, she initially was charged with murder, criminal confinement, arson and theft in Bott’s killing, but pleaded guilty to confinement and arson as part of a plea deal.

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