HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- 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 in Texas 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. Lopes, a 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."
He told relatives of his two victims, watching through a window a few feet from him, that he'd "put you through some things that I can't take back."
But he said his execution was "creating more victims."
"This is not going to change anything," he said.
Nine minutes later, at 6:27 p.m., 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 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.
Maxwell and McFarland were arrested less than a week after Lopes' body was found. They had a chase and running gun battle with police 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.
Bott's parents joined three relatives of Lopes as witnesses in the Texas death chamber. Maxwell's son, mother and half-sister watched through a window in an adjacent room.
After Maxwell was pronounced dead, Shirley Bott, whose son was the first murder victim, turned to a state official accompanying her and showed a heart-shaped locket she wore on a chain around her neck.
"I have my son's ashes in here," she said. "I wanted him to be here."
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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