HOUSTON – 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.
Prosecutors said Carty was desperate to stop a break-up with her common-law husband and concocted a diabolical plot to keep the relationship together by claiming she was pregnant.
Trouble was - Carty wasn’t pregnant, which is why investigators believe she set her sights on her neighbor’s baby.
“She is prepared to take this baby,” said Josh Reiss, head of the post-conviction writs division of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. “Whether she cuts the baby out or whether she steals the baby, she doesn’t care. She’s getting that baby.”
‘Linda’s life was kind of falling apart’
Reiss said by May 2001 Carty’s common-law husband, Jose Corona, had moved out of their apartment.
“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.”
Reiss said Carty lived in apartment 38 at the Sandy Glen complex on Westview near Beltway 8. Rodriguez lived in apartment 36.
“They are Latino and Linda knows that they are expecting a baby,” Reiss said. “Linda comes up with this plan that the way she is going to save her relationship is she is going to take Joana Rodriguez’s baby, and the reason she needed Joana Rodriguez’s baby is because that baby was Latino and her common-law husband was Latino. Linda needed a Latino baby.”
On May 16, 2001, at approximately 1:00 a.m., Rodriguez and her newborn son, Ray, were kidnapped. Rodriguez’s husband and his cousin were pistol-whipped and bound with duct tape.
‘She planned it’
As police were scouring the city for Rodriguez and her son, Carty’s name quickly emerged as a potential suspect. Detectives spoke with Florence Meyers, who lived in apartment 40.
“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.
During a recent interview with KPRC 2 Investigates, Meyers said she clearly remembers the day officers knocked on her door.
Meyers said she told the investigator about an encounter she had with Carty the evening before the kidnapping. Meyers said as she was taking out her trash and checking her mail, she saw Carty sitting in her car.
“She was looking at me, and I was about to walk past her, and she asked for me to come here. I said, ‘What was going on.’ She goes, ‘You know, I’m going to be having a baby tomorrow, and when I have the baby tomorrow, I will bring the baby tomorrow and I will show you the baby.’” Meyers recalled. “I’m like, ‘okay.’ Then I looked, you know, I looked at her and she put her hand on her belly. I just knew something wasn’t quite right, really, but I didn’t know, you know. It was odd.”
Reiss said investigators also looked at past calls for service at the complex and discovered Carty called for police in the weeks prior to the kidnapping.
“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.”
The kidnapping
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. Evidence shown at trial revealed several baby items were found in a room rented under Carty’s name.
Court documents read Carty recruited Chris Robinson, Carliss Williams and Gerald Anderson to help her break into Rodriguez’s apartment, promising they could keep whatever drugs and cash were found in the apartment.
“She convinces Robinson, Williams and Anderson, that in this apartment unit in her apartment complex, there are pounds and pounds of marijuana and cocaine,” Reiss said. “Linda is creating this illusion of drug activity in Joanna Rodriguez’s apartment that doesn’t exist in order to cover her tracks later on, but also to convince, Robinson and the others to help her steal this baby.”
Reiss said Linda told also Robinson and the others Rodriguez had an affair with her husband and she was pregnant with her husband’s baby. Reiss said the story of the affair was an “absolute lie.”
“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. She wanted Anderson, Williams and Robinson to do the dirty work. She either just entered the unit or she was waiting outside. What is very clear is that she was the mastermind of this plot.”
Reiss said Robinson later told investigators he saw Carty put the baby in a car seat in the car she was driving, while Rodriguez was put in the trunk of another car.
“They now have a real problem, right? They are livid at Linda. In fact, they’re talking about killing Linda,” Reiss said. “What are they going to do with this woman that they now have in the trunk of the car?”
Linda was a confidential informant for the DEA
Several hours after the kidnapping, and after talking with Meyers and finding the prior police report, detectives called Carty under the pretense of talking with her about the report she made regarding suspicious men in the complex.
They ended up meeting at a McDonalds,” Reiss explained. “They bring her back to the apartment complex and they say, ‘Look, we want to bring you down to the station for a statement about what’s going on here with this baby, will you come with us?’ Linda says, ‘Sure.’ She rides in the front seat of the car. They took her down to the station but she was not in custody. They put her in a room and they started videotaping and talking to her. Linda very quickly says, ‘I didn’t have anything to do with this. I want to talk to Charlie Mathis. Get Charlie Mathis here.’”
Investigators learned Carty had previously been a confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“In the years prior to the capital murder, Linda had been a very low-level confidential informant, a CI. She wasn’t really involved in any big deals,” Reiss said. “She also had been a failed CI for HPD. She tried to work with them on two or three transactions. The transactions were absolute disasters. She placed the officers at great risk.”
Reiss said Carty hadn’t been used a DEA informant since 1994 or 1995, but she maintained a friendly relationship with her former handler, Mathis.
“Lt. Murray Smith, who was head of the Chicano unit at that time, decides, ‘All right, get Charlie Mathis here because we have a lost baby. We got to find this baby. We’re kind of desperate. Whatever we got to do, let’s do it,” Reiss said.
Mathis agreed to come and speak with Carty.
“I’m just here because you told them who I was, which is very unusual for you to tell anybody what you do. I was surprised, even though you gave them my wrong name, you didn’t give them my real name,” Mathis said Carty during a recorded interview at HPD in 2001.
“I told them Mathis,” Carty said.
“So what’s wrong?” said Mathis.
”I don’t know what’s wrong,” said Carty.
“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.
“Like?” Carty responded.
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.
Mathis tells Carty he believes she was not involved in the kidnapping but pleads with her to give police any information she may have regarding who was behind the crime and where the baby and his mother were taken.
Just tell the truth, Linda. Tell the truth now,” said Mathis.
“No, they threatened to kill me if I...” Carty said.
“Tell the truth now, don’t worry about them. Do you know anything about the baby? Do you know where the baby’s at?” asked Mathis.
“If anything, if they have the girl, they’re going to have the baby,” Carty said.
During her exchange with Mathis, an HPD detective comes back into the interview room.
“I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, all right? We just met today, Okay. One thing that I noticed before I left out of this room is that you said if they have her, they must have the child, Okay. That was before I walked out. What would make you think that they have her?” the HPD detective asked.
“Because they were scoping, they were out there scoping the area, but I didn’t know,” Carty said.
The HPD detective continues to press Carty for information. Carty is evasive but tells the detective whoever took Rodriguez and the baby were probably looking for drugs.
“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.
“Well, they wasn’t taking it for me because I didn’t ask anybody to take anything,” said Carty.
During the interview investigators brought in Linda’s common-law husband, Jose Corona.
“I didn’t do anything. I loaned my car out, these people used my car,” Carty said.
“The baby?” Corona asks.
“I don’t have the baby,” Corona said.
“Where’s my baby that was supposed to be born today? Was he born today?” Corona asks.
“Are you accusing me, too?” Carty responded. “They got my car. So what am I going to do? If they did anything, they’re probably going to incriminate me because they got my car.”
Carty said the person she loaned the cars to said they were just “going down the street” and would be right back.
“Why didn’t you tell me that this morning?” Corona asked.
“Not to upset you, and then you get mad at me and tell me why I’m so stupid again to go lend somebody a car. You are already mad at me because the reason why you left me is because you think that I couldn’t have the baby, it’s not that I couldn’t have the baby, it’s because I kept having the miscarriages. What am I supposed to do? I’m naive into thinking that people, you know, are going to keep their word,” Carty said.
“No, you don’t trust people, Linda,” Corona said. “You always tell me you don’t trust people.”
“Oh, God! I’m just hoping that these people didn’t kidnap nobody in my car. That’s all I’m worried about, nobody kidnaped nobody in my car,” Carty said.
Eventually, Carty led detectives to a home on Van Zandt Street, telling them she thought that was where the people who had her cars were hanging out.
“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.”
‘Unspeakable Evil’
Rodriguez’s body was found in the trunk of a car. An autopsy later determined she was suffocated.
“Chris Robinson’s testimony both at trial and then later on when dealing with her appeal, is that he sees Linda Carty pull a bag over Joana Rodriguez’s head and suffocate her. She had been bound up in duct tape and killed and suffocated in the trunk of the car,” said Reiss.
After finding the baby and Rodriguez, Robinson is questioned by police.
“What was Linda’s scheme or plan? What was the deal?” a detective asked Robinson.
“She was trying to manipulate us, she was trying to con us. She conned us, you know what I’m saying,” Robinson said.
“Conned you into what?” asked the detective.
“Conned us into going into them people’s house and had us thinking it was a dope house. So she said one of the ladies told her they brung (sic) the thousand pounds of weed in, I think that Friday, right. I was manipulated into thinking they was really drug dealers. We all, you know what I’m saying. She lied to us because she wanted that *expletive* baby,” Robinson said.
Robinson then explains during the home invasion there was a phone call between Carty and one of his “partners” and during that call Carty said she wanted “the package.”
“What does the package mean?” the detective asked.
“I thought it was the weed, but it wasn’t. I go to tell him, I said there ain’t(sic) no weed in there. I guess the package was the baby,” Robinson said.
Robinson explained everyone drove to the house on Van Zandt after the home invasion and kidnapping.
“At any time during the day, did you or anybody go check on (Rodriguez) well-being? Did anybody go open that trunk and look in and say, ‘Hey, she’s still alive?’ Did you go check on her or anything?” the detective asked.
“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.
“Well, know you’re in pretty deep *expletive* don’t you?” the detective said.
“I wanted to let the girl go, I wanted to let her go with her baby,” Robinson said.
“Then why didn’t you?” the detective asked.
“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.
“Why couldn’t you call the shots, you’re a man?” the detective said.
“I know it, but I wasn’t the only man,” said Robinson.
Investigators also spoke with Robinson’s half-brother, Zebadiah Jerome Comb, who lived at the home on Van Zandt. Comb was under house arrest and awaiting trial on a federal bank robbery charge at the time of the kidnapping and murder. Investigators said he was not involved in the kidnapping or murder, but said Carty discussed the home invasion at his house and he helped recruit Williams for the job.
Comb testified Carty told the men in exchange for the drugs and money she wanted them to bring her “the lady.”
“She wanted the lady because her husband, or her husband and her, used to mess around and her husband got her pregnant, so I guess that baby supposed to have been the husband’s child,” Comb explained.
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.”
“It ultimately was Linda Carty’s decision to kill Joana. Linda Carty needed Joana Rodriguez dead,” Reiss said. “Linda Carty needed Joana Rodriguez dead because Joana Rodriguez knew what Linda looked like. Joana Rodriguez had never seen any of the other three before, but she knew Linda and Linda needed her gone. The evidence against Linda is overwhelming. She had motive, she had intent, she had her property there, she was planning this for days, and none of her stories ever made any sense at all.”
Carty maintains her innocence and claims she was set up to take the blame for kidnapping and murder because of her prior work as an informant.
Trials, sentences and appeals
Carty was convicted in Feb. 2002 of capital murder and sentenced to death.
“The trauma, the fear, what must have been going through Joana Rodriguez’s mind as this woman that she knows has taken her three-day-old baby, shoved her in the trunk of a car, taped her up, and then suffocates her,” said Reiss “That, to me, is what raises this case to the level of heinousness for which the death penalty is intended.”
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.
In 2014, Carty claimed new evidence proved prosecutors used false testimony to convict her. Four witnesses and co-defendants, including Charlie Mathis, signed affidavits claiming prosecutors either coerced or threatened them into testifying against Carty.
In 2016, a hearing was held to examine these claims. After the testimony was taken, the court found “Carty failed to demonstrate that the prosecution threatened or coerced witnesses.....into testifying falsely during Carty’s capital murder trial.”
“She’s not remorseful of what she did. She’s not because she kept denying it, and she knows very well she did it,” Meyers said. “She is evil. That is the face of evil. That is evil. You did something, you planned it, you carried it out, you killed people. Goodness gracious.”
Reiss said Carty has seen her case examined through the appeals process multiple times over the past two decades.
“She has had multiple reviews in state court and federal court. I mean, in terms of the number of appeals, we’re probably at like 10 or 12,” Reiss said. “Linda Carty has exhausted all of her appeals at this point.”
The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations
“The major procedural issue in Linda’s case right now is Linda’s citizenship as a member of the United Kingdom and something called the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations,” said Reiss.
Carty was born on the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies, which at the time, was a British Colony.
The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations is an international treaty that defines a framework for consular relations between sovereign states. It codifies many consular practices that originated from state customs and various bilateral agreements between states.
“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.
Reiss said Carty was among a handful of cases from the late 90s to early 2000s who were not notified of their right to contact their consulate.
“His Majesty’s government has made it clear to the district attorney’s office and the state of Texas that they take Lynda Carty’s case very seriously. They take the fact that she was not advised of her consular rights very seriously,” Reiss said.
The British government refers to Carty’s conviction and death sentence as “unsafe.”
“District Attorney (Kim) Ogg is, I believe, appropriately, very concerned about what might happen if an execution date were to be set for Linda Carty,” Reiss said. “Even though Linda Carty is not a United States citizen, Linda Carty has been afforded the same rights any American citizen would have if they were facing the same charge.”
Reiss said Ogg’s concern is setting an execution date could potentially impact how a citizen of Harris County is treated if arrested in a foreign country. Reiss also points out the US Supreme Court has ruled that while the federal government is bound to the terms of the treaty, Texas and the other states are not affected by the language of the treaty.
“Linda Carty does not have a right to a federal claim, or state claim her Vienna Convention rights were violated,” said Reiss.
“Save for the Vienna Convention violation, is anything else preventing an execution date being set for Linda Carty?” asked KPRC 2 Investigator Robert Arnold.
“Linda Carty has exhausted all of her appeals, and she is eligible for an execution date. However, this issue of the unresolved Vienna Convention claim remains,” said Reiss.
Carty originally agreed to an interview with KPRC 2, but she canceled the day before the interview was set to take place. Anderson and Robinson declined our requests for an interview.
Reiss said Rodriguez’s widower and son moved back to Mexico.
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