Portrait of a repentant killer

Karla Faye Tucker says 15 years in prison have changed her

Karla Faye Tucker was a wild teenager whose life seemed destined to go off the rails.

She smoked marijuana at the age of eight or nine, experimented with heroin at 10 and had sex at 11 or 12.

An athletic, muscular and hot-headed teenager, she constantly got into fist fights and, more than once, was thrown out of school.

The details of Tucker's life are recounted in a book about the Texas pickaxe murders, "Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir" by American author Beverly Lowry.

The book describes how Tucker's mother taught her to roll a joint, and to earn money as a prostitute. She testified at her trial that she became a call girl at age 17.

"My mother and I were close," Tucker said. "We used to share drugs like lipstick.

"Our life may not seem normal to other people, but it didn't strange to us at the time," she added.

As a teenager, Tucker got tough. She joined the motorbike subculture, and hung out with older, streetwise men.

In 1983, Tucker, 23, was dating Daniel Ryan Garrett, a 38-year-old Vietnam veteran. To impress her, he began to act aggressively.

He boasted of his exploits in the army and said he would train her to be the first hit woman in the Mafia.

Both Tucker and Garrett were found guilty of first-degree murder. Garrett's conviction was later overturned; he died in prison awaiting a new trial in 1993.

A new life

That picture of Karla Faye Tucker could not be more different than the way she says she is now.

In an interview on the American news network CNN, Tucker said she was a different person then:

"I don't know how to make sense out of it except that the choices that I made to do drugs, to buckle to peer pressure and everything else - it was inevitable that something like that was going to happen in my life."

Tucker says she has undergone a religious conversion while awaiting the death penalty in a prison in Gatesville, about 40 miles west of Waco, Texas.

She now espouses Christianity and works in a prison-based ministry to keep young people from becoming criminals.

Two years ago, she wed (by proxy) a prison chaplain, Dana Brown.

He has been a regular visitor to her for more than four years. Like many others, he believes Tucker has put her past behind her.

"That is not the person she is today," he said.