This episode of The Evidence Room exposes the shocking story of Linda Carty, a woman sentenced to death for a desperate and diabolical plan to kidnap her neighbor's newborn son.
– Linda Carty is one of seven women on Texas Death Row, convicted in Feb. 2002 of a crime that involved the kidnapping and murder of a neighbor who had just given birth to a baby boy.with her common-law husband and concocted a diabolical plot to keep the relationship together by claiming she was pregnant.
“Their relationship had problems, and in an ongoing effort to keep the relationship going, Linda would routinely say she was pregnant. Then, when her boyfriend would say, ‘Well, let me go to the doctor with you. What’s going on?’ She would always just say, ‘Oh, I lost the baby, or she would be evasive,” Reiss explained. “There were three or four times Linda had said she was pregnant in an apparent effort to keep this relationship together.
“In retrospect, you know, when I look back at it, and when I put all those things together leading up to the time the crime was committed, she planned it,” said Meyers., Meyers said she clearly remembers the day officers knocked on her door. “Linda had called in an offense where she said she had been accosted by two Latino males in the apartment complex. HPD responds, they get a statement, there’s nothing, it goes nowhere. Linda had been setting this up,” said Reiss. “Linda basically calls in a false report that there was Latinos in this area engaged in nefarious business.”Reiss said Carty rented a hotel room at the Hampton Inn in the Galleria area where she planned to take the baby after the kidnapping.
“Chris Robinson looks all around for drugs, looks all around for money. They very quickly realize there are no drugs here. All that Joana Rodriguez and her husband had was $1,000, that they gave them, that they had been saving to purchase a car. Joana Rodriguez’s relative and her husband get hogtied, pistol-whipped, and left upstairs. Joana Rodriguez and the baby, a three-day-old baby, are taken out of the unit,” Reiss said. “Linda Carty was waiting outside.
Investigators learned Carty had previously been a confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Look at me. You know I know you, I can read you. Can read all the way through you. I’ve been knowing you too long, what’s it been 15 years? Have you done anything I’d be ashamed of?” Mathis asks.During the exchange Carty tells Mathis she knows nothing about the kidnapping, but she is worried because she loaned her rental car and a car belonging to her adult daughter to men who may be involved in the crime.
“I’ve been doing this job for a long time, okay? I’ve worked many, many home invasions. Nobody goes in and does a home invasion for more than dope or money. They never take a child,” the HPD detective said.During the interview investigators brought in Linda’s common-law husband, Jose Corona.“The baby?” Corona asks.“Where’s my baby that was supposed to be born today? Was he born today?” Corona asks.
“The officers who arrived there will tell you that they could smell it pretty quick once they showed up at the scene,” Reiss said. “The baby was alive and was being taken care of by Chris Robinson.”Rodriguez’s body was found in the trunk of a car. An autopsy later determined she was suffocated. “I didn’t have a key,” Robinson said. “The woman, I know she didn’t deserve to die, and I know if maybe if I called the law, but if I had called the law at the time, I would have been, I was thinking I would be in more *expletive* than I’m in,” Robinson said.“I wanted to let the girl go, I wanted to let her go with her baby,” Robinson said.“Because, you know, I wasn’t, I wasn’t the shot caller. I couldn’t call the shots and say, ‘let her go,’ and, you know what I’m saying,” Robinson said.
Comb also told investigators he saw Rodriquez in the trunk of Carty’s car with a bag over her head and that Carty discussed disposing of the body by burning it. Reiss referred to Rodriguez’s murder as “unspeakable evil.” Anderson pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to life in prison; Robinson pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to 45 years in prison; and Carliss Williams was found guilty of kidnapping by a jury and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Reiss said Carty has seen her case examined through the appeals process multiple times over the past two decades. “The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations requires that if you are a citizen of country ‘A’ and you go to country ‘B,’ and you are arrested in country ‘B,’ country ‘B’ has to ask you, ‘Do you want us to notify the local consulate on your behalf to help you?’” Reiss explained.
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