Audio only
Length7h 23m
About this audiobook
On a June night in 1983, twenty-three-year-old Karla Faye Tucker and her boyfriend, fueled by a sinister cocktail of illicit drugs, broke into a Houston apartment. "We were very wired," Tucker later testified, "and we was looking for something to do." Though they later claimed they entered the premises with no murderous intent, they ended up slaughtering two people—one a sworn enemy, the other an utter stranger. The weapon: a pickax they found in the apartment.
Fourteen years later, in early 1998, Tucker was facing lethal injection. But after her religious conversion in prison, Texas would be executing a different woman than the one who'd committed the murders. Her change was so dramatic that the most powerful and influential voices in American televangelism—Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell among them—were urging viewers to contact Texas's governor, George W. Bush, and plead for clemency. One follower was author Mark Beaver's father, a devout Southern Baptist deacon who asked Beaver to put his fledgling literary ambitions to work by composing a letter on his behalf to Governor Bush.
Through a merger of true crime, social history, and memoir,
The Ballad of Karla Faye Tucker illustrates how a seemingly distant news story triggers a national reckoning and exposes a growing divide in America's evangelical community. It's a tale of how one woman defies all conventions of death row inmates, and her saga serves as an unlikely but fascinating prism for exploring American culture and the limits of forgiveness and transformation. It's also a deeply personal reflection on how a father's request leads his son to struggle with who he was raised to be and who he imagines becoming.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 4.5 (21)
Includes Goodreads
GenreTrue Crime, Biography and Memoir
Length7 hrs 23 mins
Narrated byMark Beaver
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateSep 12, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Opening Credits
2Dedication
3Epigraph
4Prologue: All Five
5Chapter 1: Sweet Woman of God
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 2: Your Very Own Gethsemane
7Chapter 3: Looking for Something to Do
8Chapter 4: Evangel
9Chapter 5: Fish and Ketchup
10Chapter 6: Puppet Show
11Chapter 7: And That's the Way with Jesus
12Chapter 8: Well, Hell Yes
13Chapter 9: The Thing Is Quickly Enough Done
14Chapter 10: Here and Happy
15Chapter 11: Until She Be Dead
16Chapter 12: The Ballad of Karla Faye Tucker
17Chapter 13: The Real Debbie Thornton
18Chapter 14: Southern Gothic
19Chapter 15: This Mess That Some People Call Life
20Chapter 16: I Will Wait for You
21Chapter 17: The State of Texas, Office of the Governor, Austin
22Chapter 18: The Son's Execution Date
23Acknowledgments
24Closing Credits
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