The Viking Princess

Athena Presley Strand was seven years old and was spending that week with her father and stepmother on a rural road outside Paradise, Texas, in Wise County. She loved Viking stories and had told her family she wanted to be a Viking princess in pink armor. On the afternoon of November 30, 2022, a FedEx contract driver named Tanner Lynn Horner pulled up to the house with a package.

Athena was reported missing that evening, and volunteers spent the next day searching fields and roadsides. An AMBER Alert did not go out for almost twenty-four hours because investigators had no proof she had been taken. Delivery records pointed them to Horner, who was arrested near Lake Worth on December 2 and led deputies to her body in a creek off the Trinity River near Boyd, about nine miles from her home. He said he had backed his van into her, panicked, and strangled her.

Texas answered the alert delay in June 2023 with House Bill 3556, the Athena Alert, which lets police warn nearby residents before an abduction is confirmed. Horner pleaded guilty to capital murder on April 7, 2026. After a punishment hearing in Fort Worth, where his lawyers argued that autism reduced his culpability, a jury chose death, and Judge George Gallagher imposed the sentence on May 5, 2026. Horner filed an appeal within days.