On the cool Halloween evening of October 31, 1987, Mary Carrell Risinger, a 36-year-old mother, was at an open-air car wash in Huntsville, Texas. She was carefully washing her car, making it pristine for a special occasion the following day: the baptism of her young daughter, Kristen. Her little girl, who was just about to turn four, was with her, playing in the water as her mother worked.
It was a simple, domestic scene that was about to be shattered by an act of unimaginable violence.
A man in a truck pulled into the car wash, but not to clean his vehicle. He approached Mary, brandishing a knife, and tried to force her into his truck. A mother’s instinct is a powerful force, and Mary fought back with everything she had. She wasn't just fighting for her own life; she was fighting to protect her child. In the ensuing struggle, the man stabbed Mary in the throat, severing major blood vessels. She died within minutes, her final moments spent in a desperate battle to save her daughter.
The first witnesses to the horrific scene were three women who rushed to the nearby sheriff's office. When police arrived, the water hose was still running. They found Mary’s body and then saw her terrified daughter, who had locked herself inside the car. An officer, Dusty Dowgar, who had been trick-or-treating with his own family nearby, gently coaxed the little girl to open the door. When she finally did, she clung to him, pleading, "Protect me from the bad man. He's killed my mom." The white ballerina costume she wore was so soaked in her mother's blood that first responders initially thought it was red.
For a year, Mary’s murder remained unsolved, one of several brutal attacks on women that had spread fear across the region. The break in the case came in October 1988, after another woman, a college student named Wendy Gant, survived a nearly identical attack. Despite having her throat severely cut, Gant was able to work with a forensic artist to create a composite sketch of her attacker. A corrections officer recognized the man in the sketch as Daniel Lee Corwin, a 30-year-old ex-convict on parole.
Corwin had a disturbing history of violence. In 1975, he had been convicted of aggravated rape and attempted murder after abducting a high school classmate, assaulting her, and leaving her for dead. He was sentenced to 40 years but was paroled after serving only nine. After his arrest for the attack on Gant, Corwin confessed to the murders of Mary Risinger and two other women in 1987: 72-year-old Alice Martin, abducted and killed in February, and 26-year-old Debra Lynn Ewing, murdered in July.
In March 1990, Daniel Lee Corwin was tried for all three homicides under Texas's new "serial killer statute," which allowed for the prosecution of multiple murders committed in different jurisdictions in a single trial. He was the first person to be convicted under this law. A Montgomery County jury took less than 35 minutes to sentence him to death. After the verdict, Mary's brother, William Carrell, called Corwin "just an animal" and said of the execution, "I think it was too easy."
After spending eight years on death row, Daniel Lee Corwin was executed by lethal injection on December 7, 1998. In his final statement, he addressed the families of his victims, expressing sorrow and asking for forgiveness. For the families, including Mary Risinger's, the execution marked the end of a long and painful legal chapter, though the loss of a mother, sister, and daughter in such a brutal fashion remains a wound that time cannot fully heal.
