Meanwhile, in Monterey, Bart lived under the name…
Meanwhile, in Monterey, Bart lived under the name Rudy Rios and waited.
Perhaps he thought Mexico was far enough.
Perhaps he thought no one would find him in a city of 4 million people.
Perhaps he thought time would make everyone forget.
But Detective Slaugh did not forget.
The FBI did not forget.
And the Texas justice system, with a capital murder warrant hanging over Bart Whitaker’s head, had no intention of letting him disappear into the Mexican crowd forever.
The question was no longer whether Bart would be caught.
The question was when.
The answer came in September 2005.
Through coordination between the FBI, the United States Federal Law Enforcement Agency, and Mexican authorities, Bart Whitaker was located in Monterey.
He had been living there under the name Rudy Rios, using an identity that a real friend named Rudy Rios had allowed him to borrow.
Bart was not living on the run in the way people usually imagine.
Not hiding in dark alleys or constantly changing his appearance, he blended into the everyday life of a city of 4 million people.
A foreigner in the crowd, unremarkable, attracting no attention.
But the capital murder warrant from Fort Bend County did not disappear simply because he had crossed the border.
Mexican authorities cooperating with the United States arrested Bart without any resistance on immigration violation charges.
There was no chase.
There was no shootout.
There was no action movie scene.
Bart Whitaker, the man who had planned to kill his family three times over three years, was arrested quietly and taken to the border.
He was handed over to Sugarland Police in Laredo, Texas, the border city on the banks of the Rio Grand.
Sugarland Police Captain Gary Cox confirmed that Mexican authorities and FBI agents had found Whitaker and turned him over to Sugarland Police in Laredo.
Bart, 25 years old, was the third suspect arrested in the attack of December 10th, 2003 that took the lives of Patricia Whitaker and her son Kevin.
When Bart was brought back to Texas, his two accompllices had already faced the justice system before him, and their outcomes would shape the way Bart’s case was tried.
Chris Brashier, the man who had dressed in black, worn a ski mask, broken into the Whitaker home, forced open Kevin’s safe, taken the Glock, and shot four family members, pleaded guilty to murder in 2007 in Fort Bend County Court.
Brashier, the one who directly pulled the trigger and killed Trisha and Kevin Whitaker, was sentenced to life in prison.
He would be eligible for parole after serving 30 years.
Steven Champagne, the getaway driver who had sat in the car with the engine running a few blocks from the Whitaker house while Brashier opened fire inside, reached a plea agreement.
Champagne received a 15-year prison sentence in exchange for his testimony against Bart Whitaker at the upcoming trial.
Champagne’s videotaped confession along with his leading police to Lake Conroe to recover evidence was the decisive factor that broke the case.
Without champagne, there might not have been enough direct evidence to charge Bart.
Two details from the accompllic’s sentences would become extremely important years later.
First, Brashier, the man who actually held the gun and killed two people, received life in prison rather than the death penalty.
Second, Champagne, the getaway driver, received only 15 years.
Remember these two numbers.
Bart Whitaker’s trial began on March 3rd, 2007 in Fort Ben County Court, more than 3 years after the shooting.
Prosecutor Fred Felman stood before the jury and built a picture of a defendant whom he described not as a lost young man or a desperate son, but as a cold, systematic individual who had spent years planning to kill his family for money.
Felman called it a strong case, an overwhelming case, and the evidence he presented showed he was not exaggerating.
The prosecution rested on the foundation of financial motive.
Police testified that Bart believed he would inherit the family estate, estimated at between $1 million and $1.
5 million, including the house in Sugarland, savings accounts, and life insurance payouts, if his parents and younger brother died.
Adam Hip testified that Bart had offered to share a portion of the inheritance with him to pull the trigger in the 2001 plot.
Bart did not kill out of hatred.
He did not kill because he had been abused or mistreated.
The Whitaker family had bought him luxury cars, paid the rent on a lakeside house, and covered all his college tuition.
They loved him, and he wanted them dead for the money.
The prosecution described Bart as an unrepentant sociopath who manipulated his accompllices and staged the murder in the belief that he would receive a 1 million inheritance.
Evidence was presented chronologically, building from the failed plots of 2000 and 2001 through the recruitment of Brashier and Champagne to the detailed plan for the night of December 10th, 2003.
The lies about graduation, the dinner at Papado, the Rolex, and the four shots.
Each piece was carefully placed next to the others, and the final picture was a portrait of a man who had spent 3 years of his life trying to kill the people who loved him most.
Family photographs from the dinner at Papado were introduced as evidence, showing the last moments of the Whitaker family when all four were still together.
In those photos, Kevin smiled beside his older brother.
Bart wore the new Rolex.
Trisha and Kent looked happy.
It was the dinner the parents had hosted to celebrate their son’s achievement, not knowing that the son had arranged for them never to see the next morning’s dawn.
Testimony from witnesses built the complete picture.
Hip recounted the earlier plots, including stick figure diagrams and detailed plans.
Peters corroborated Hip’s account and added the December 2000 plot.
Champagne described the night of December 10th from the getaway driver’s perspective.
From parking and waiting to Brashier jumping into the car smelling of gunpowder to both of them driving to Lake Conroe to throw the evidence into the water.
Each testimony was a link and each link tightened further around Bart’s neck.
But amid all the evidence and testimony, there was a moment in the trial that no one in the courtroom could have prepared for.
Bart Whitaker took the witness stand and he cried.
Before the jury, before his father sitting in the back row, before the prosecutors and defense attorneys, Bart said through tears, “I feel terrible about myself, about what I did”.
It was the first time he had publicly acknowledged his role.
It was also the first time he had cried in public since the night of December 10th, 2003, when he had cried in the role of victim.
The question the jury had to answer was whether the tears this time were real.
Whether this was genuine remorse or just another performance from a man who had spent his life performing.
Some people in the courtroom, including those who had known the Whitaker family, offered their own assessments.
Detective Slaugh, who had followed the case from the first night, said bluntly, “I honestly think Bart is evil”.
The jury would have to decide not only guilt or innocence, but life or death.
After 6 days of trial, the jury retired to the deliberation room to decide the first part, guilty or not guilty.
They took 1 hour and 30 minutes.
In the world of criminal trials, that is almost not deliberation.
It is a statement.
The jury returned to the courtroom and read the verdict.
Guilty of capital murder in the deaths of Patricia Whitaker and Kevin Whitaker.
Bart Whitaker, 27 years old, stood still as he heard the verdict.
But the trial was not over.
In Texas, a capital murder trial has two phases.
The first phase decides guilt or innocence.
The second phase, the punishment phase, decides life or death.
And this second phase is where the Whitaker family story shifted from a murder case into a story no one could have predicted.
In the punishment phase, the prosecutors argued that Bart Whitaker was a danger to society.
That the cold calculations spanning three years with three separate plots and at least five accompllices showed this was not an impulsive or momentary act, but the core nature of this person.
They asked the jury to impose the death penalty.
Bart’s defense attorneys begged the jury to consider life without parole instead of death.
And then the unexpected happened.
Kent Whitaker, the father, the surviving victim, the man Bart had tried to kill, the man who had lost his wife and youngest son to his own oldest son, took the witness stand and begged the jury not to kill his son.
Kent did not plead with suppressed anger or with legal arguments.
He pleaded with faith.
He told the jury that he had forgiven Bart, that he believed in redemption, that killing Bart would not bring Trisha or Kevin back, and that the death of yet another member of the Whitaker family would only multiply the pain rather than resolve anything.
He said, “He’s my son”.
Those three words rang through the courtroom like a bell in an empty church.
The jury listened.
Then they deliberated for 10 hours and they sentenced him to death.
Kent Whitaker sat in the courtroom as the sentence was read.
He had stood before 12 strangers and opened his heart, begging them to spare his son’s life, and they had said no.
Bart was taken to death row at the Palinsky unit in Livingston, Texas, where Texas’s death row inmates are held, each in a 60s square ft solitary cell 23 hours a day.
That is where Bart would wait for the day of execution.
But to understand what Kent Whitaker did next, you have to go back to the night of December 10th, 2003.
Not to the shooting itself, but to the hours afterward when Kent lay in the emergency room with a bullet in his chest.
He did not yet know who had shot his family.
He did not yet know Trisha was dead.
He did not yet know Kevin was dead.
The information came in pieces, each piece a knife thrust.
When the doctor told him his wife had not survived, Kent felt the world collapse for the first time.
When they said Kevin was also dead, it collapsed a second time.
And in that moment, lying on the hospital bed, blood still seeping through the bandages, Kent Whitaker made a decision that he later said was the most important of his life.
He decided to forgive the killer.
He did not know who that person was.
He did not know what that person looked like.
He only knew that if he allowed hatred to take over his heart, the killer would have killed not only his wife and son, but also the remaining humanity inside him.
Kent later described that moment on ABC’s 2020.
At that moment, all I wanted was to inflict as much suffering as possible on this person who had taken my wife and son and tried to kill me and the other son.
But then something changed.
Kent said, “As soon as that happened, a warmth flooded through me.
It extinguished the fire inside me.
He forgave without knowing whom he was forgiving”.
A few weeks later, when police began directing suspicion toward Bart, when the lies about graduation were exposed, when the earlier plots were peeled back layer by layer, Kent faced a test that no psychology or theology book had prepared him for.
The person he had forgiven in the emergency room, the killer of his wife and youngest son, was his own oldest son.
The person he had hugged and cried with in the house where the blood had been cleaned up, the person he had leaned on in the most painful weeks was the one who had ordered it all.
Many people in that situation would have withdrawn the forgiveness.
Would have said that forgiving a stranger is one thing, but forgiving one’s own flesh and blood who had betrayed at the most extreme level imaginable is impossible.
But Kent did not withdraw it.
He kept his word.
He later said, “He’s my son.
I don’t want to see him executed by the state of Texas in the name of justice when there is a better justice”.
From then on, Kent Whitaker began a journey that most people would consider impossible or insane or both.
He devoted all his remaining energy to two things.
Healing the relationship with his son sitting on death row and fighting to save that son from the lethal injection.
He quit his job at a construction company in Houston.
He visited Bart at the Palinsky unit regularly, sitting across from his son through the glass, talking on the internal phone.
He wrote letters.
He prayed and he began to write.
In 2008, Kent published the book Murder by Family: The Incredible True Story of a Son’s Treachery and a Father’s Forgiveness through Howard Books.
The book recounts the entire story from the dinner at Papado to the trial, from the emergency room to death row.
But the focus is not the murder.
The focus is the journey of forgiveness.
Kent wrote about how his Christian faith gave him the strength to do what human instinct resists.
How he found peace not by forgetting but by letting go and how he believed that redemption is real even for a person who had killed his mother and brother.
He told of forgiving brashier and champagne as well not only Bart Kent donated all proceeds from the book to charity.
He kept not a single dollar.
The book received national media attention, including the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Kent remarried a woman named Tanya Youngling, and together they founded a Christian ministry dedicated to speaking to organizations, churches, and communities about forgiveness and healing.
He became a speaker not because he wanted fame, but because he believed his story could help others carrying the burden of hatred find a different path.
Meanwhile, on death row, Bart Whitaker waited year after year, appeal after appeal.
In 2009, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the sentence.
In 2017, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Bart’s appeal, in which he argued that his trial council had been ineffective and that the prosecutor had improperly used information about a failed plea agreement.
The court rejected both arguments.
Each time an appeal was denied, the execution date drew closer.
And each time that date drew closer, Kent Whitaker fought harder.
He wrote letters to the governor.
He lobbied the Texas Board of Pardons and parrolles.
He appeared on television.
He told his story over and over to anyone who would listen.
A father begging the state of Texas not to kill his son, the very son who had killed his wife.
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In early 2018, after more than 10 years on death row, Bart Whitaker received an official execution date.
The state of Texas set February 22nd, 2018 for the lethal injection of Thomas Bartlett Whitaker at the Huntsville unit about 70 mi north of Sugarland.
When the news spread, Kent Whitaker knew he was entering the final battle.
14 years of lobbying, writing letters, appearing on television, telling his story to thousands of people, all led to this moment.
If he failed, his son would die on the gurnie and he would lose the third and final member of his original family.
The only remaining path was clemency, executive clemency, specifically from Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
But for Governor Abbott to act, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles first had to issue a recommendation.
In modern Texas history, this board almost never recommends commuting a death sentence.
Texas carries out more executions than any other state in the United States, and the system is built for sentences to be carried out, not overturned.
But the Whitaker case was unlike any other the board had ever considered.
Kent Whitaker appeared before the board not as a lawyer or activist, but as a victim.
He was the sole survivor of the shooting.
His wife was dead.
His youngest son was dead.
And he was standing here begging the state of Texas not to kill yet another member of the Whitaker family.
He said on ABC’s 2020, “He’s my son.
I don’t want to see him executed by the state of Texas in the name of justice when there is a better justice”.
Kent’s argument was not based solely on emotion.
He also pointed out a clear legal disparity in the case.
Chris Brashier, the man who actually held the Glock, who pulled the trigger and killed Trisha and Kevin Whitaker, received life in prison.
Steven Champagne, the getaway driver, received 15 years.
But Bart, who did not personally shoot anyone, received the death penalty.
The shooter lived.
The one who ordered it died.
Although one could argue that the mastermind deserved the harshest punishment because he himself had created the entire tragedy, the disparity between life and death when placed side by side raised a question the justice system found difficult to answer comfortably.
3 days before the execution date, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles issued its decision.
They voted unanimously, every member, to recommend that Governor Abbott commute Bart Whitaker’s death sentence to life without parole.
Unanimous.
On a board that almost never recommends commutation, every member agreed.
The decision was sent to Governor Abbott’s desk.
And then came February 22nd, 2018.
Bart Whitaker, 38 years old, had been transferred from death row to the Huntsville unit.
The execution preparation process was underway.
The last meal had been served.
The clock was counting down.
Kent Whitaker was waiting, not knowing whether his son would live or die before the night ended.
40 minutes before the scheduled execution time, Governor Greg Abbott issued a statement.
He accepted the board of pardons recommendation and signed the order commuting Bart Whitaker’s death sentence to life without the possibility of parole.
Abbott explained his decision in careful but clear language.
The murder of Mr. Whitaker’s mother and brother is heinous.
The decision of the board of pardons and paroles and my action based on that decision ensures that Mr. Whitaker will never be released from prison.
Then Abbott added what Kent Whitaker had argued for years.
The person who fired the gun that killed the victims did not receive the death penalty.
But Mr. Whitaker who did not fire the gun did receive the death penalty.
That disparity, the shooter living and the one who ordered it dying was the factor Abbott cited in explaining why he signed the commutation order.
Bart Whitaker was not freed.
He would remain in prison until he died, but he would not die on the gurnie in Huntsville.
40 minutes.
That was the distance between life and death for Bart Whitaker.
Amnesty International later noted the case as a victory in the campaign against the death penalty, observing that the commutation occurred only hours before the execution.
Bart was transferred from death row into the regular prison system.
As of September 2021, he was incarcerated at the McConnell unit near Beville, Texas.
He will remain there for the rest of his life.
The Whitaker family story ends here legally, but the questions it leaves have no final verdict.
Kent Whitaker forgave his son, fought for 14 years to save his life, and won.
But what does that forgiveness mean? To some, Kent is a model of mercy, living proof that faith can overcome the instinct for revenge, that a parents love something that cannot be broken even by the ultimate betrayal.
His book sold well.
His ministry helped many people.
Those who read his story said it changed the way they viewed forgiveness.
that if Kent Whitaker could forgive this, then perhaps they too could forgive the smaller wounds in their own lives.
To others, the story is far more complicated.
Trisha Whitaker had no voice in the decision to forgive.
She was dead.
Kevin Whitaker also had no voice.
He was dead.
Who has the right to forgive on behalf of the dead? Kent forgave as a surviving victim, as a father, as a man of faith.
But did he have the right to forgive on behalf of his wife who would never be asked? Did he have the right to forgive on behalf of Kevin, the 19-year-old boy who smiled as he walked through the door of his home for the last time? These are questions with no correct answers.
They are questions each person must answer for themselves.
And the answers say more about the person answering than about the case.
One thing is certain, Bart Whitaker never paid the accompllices who killed his mother and brother.
He took his father’s money and fled.
He did not turn himself in.
He was caught.
And his tears in court, whether real or false, do not change the fact that he spent 3 years of his life planning to kill the people who loved him most in the world for money.
On the evening of December 10th, 2003, a family of four left the Papido restaurant in Stafford, Texas.
The father wore a tie.
The mother smiled.
The youngest son admired his older brother, and the oldest son wore the new $4,000 Rolex on his wrist, knowing exactly what awaited his family when they arrived home.
Two people in that photograph never saw the next morning’s dawn.
One spent the rest of his life in prison and one spent the rest of his life forgiving.
The case went cold for nearly 2 years.
A lie was exposed.
An accomplice confessed and in March 2007, the jury said what should have been said from the night of December 10th, 2003.
Guilty.
This is cold case reopened.
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