The Bathtub Killer

In 1996, Christine Vu, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher, and Wendie Prescott, a 22-year-old teacher’s aide, lived at the Peartree Apartments in Arlington, Texas. On September 17, 1996, Christine was attacked in her apartment. She was raped, bound with duct tape and strangled, and her boyfriend found her in the bathtub that afternoon.

On Christmas Eve, Wendie was killed in the same way, and matching injuries told detectives they were looking for one man. Fingerprints and DNA from both scenes matched nobody on file, and the investigation stalled for more than three years. In the summer of 2000, Arlington police resubmitted a fingerprint from Wendie’s apartment to the FBI. It matched Dale Devon Scheanette, who had lived in the same complex and whose prints entered the system after a 1999 burglary arrest. He was arrested on September 5, 2000. DNA tied him to both murders and to five rapes in the Dallas–Fort Worth area in 1998 and 1999.

Prosecutors tried Scheanette only for Wendie’s murder. In January 2003 a jury convicted him of capital murder, and he was sentenced to death. He was charged in Christine’s killing but never tried for it. Acting as his own lawyer, he lost his last appeals, and the state parole board voted against clemency. He was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville on February 10, 2009, at age 35.