The Bathtub Killer : Dale Devon Scheanette

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Christine Vu and Wendie Prescott with me today. In 1996, Dale Devon Scheanette committed two rapes and murders at the same apartment complex in Arlington, Texas, crimes that later led to his nickname, the “Bathtub Killer.” On September 17, 25-year-old elementary-school teacher Christine Vu was found sexually assaulted, bound with duct tape, strangled, and left face-down in a partially filled bathtub in her apartment. About three months later, on Christmas Eve, Scheanette attacked 22-year-old Wendie Prescott, a teacher’s aide. Family members went to check on her after she failed to arrive for a planned holiday gathering and found her body in her apartment bathtub. She had been sexually assaulted, bound, and strangled; the medical examiner found that immersion in the water may also have contributed to her death. The cases remained unsolved for several years. A fingerprint recovered from Prescott’s apartment did not initially match anyone in law-enforcement databases. In 1999, Scheanette was arrested for burglarizing a car-audio business in DeSoto, Texas, and his prints were entered into the system. They matched the evidence from the murders. DNA evidence subsequently linked him to both killings and to multiple sexual assaults committed between 1998 and 1999. In January 2003, a Texas jury convicted Scheanette of capital murder for Prescott’s death during a sexual assault and sentenced him to death. He was also charged with Vu’s murder but was not separately tried for it. Texas executed Scheanette by lethal injection on February 10, 2009, when he was 35.