Texas Executes Man Convicted of 1998 Double Murder
Charles Thompson, who once briefly escaped custody after being sentenced to death, was executed Wednesday evening for the 1998 double murder of his former girlfriend and her friend.
Thompson had gotten into an altercation at his then-girlfriend Dennise Hayslip’s apartment in Houston with her and her friend, Darren Cain, before a police officer escorted Thompson off the property, according to court records. Early the next morning, Thompson returned to the apartment, killing Cain and shooting Hayslip in the mouth. Hayslip was life-flighted to a nearby hospital, where she died a week later. Thompson was charged with capital murder for killing the two and sentenced to death in 1999.
Thompson was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. Wednesday, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The 55-year-old apologized to Hayslip and Cain’s families in his final statement and encouraged them and his own family to “keep Jesus first.”
“There is no winners in this situation, it creates more victims and traumatizes more people 28 years later,” Thompson said.
In 2001, his death sentence was vacated by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals after judges ruled the Harris County District Attorney’s Office had unconstitutionally used an undercover investigator to obtain evidence for the trial. Thompson was given a new sentencing hearing, where a jury again sentenced him to death in 2005.
While Thompson did not dispute shooting Cain, he said the man attacked him first and he acted defensively. Thompson also asserted that Hayslip would have survived her wounds, which partially severed her tongue, had it not been for her receiving an improper intubation while at the hospital.
Days after his resentencing, Thompson escaped from the Harris County Jail by switching into the civilian clothes he had worn to resentencing hearings and posed as an employee with the state Attorney General’s Office. The escape led to a three-day manhunt that ended with Thompson being caught drunk in Louisiana.
Thompson filed a new appeal and a request for a stay of execution with the CCA on Jan. 21 that called into question the efficacy of his legal counsel during trial. It also asserted Thompson’s previous claim that the hospital’s alleged improper intubation of Hayslip ultimately killed her. Included in the new filing was an affidavit from a doctor who testified during Thompson’s trial about Hayslip’s cause of death, stating she would withdraw her trial testimony and instead assert medical complications were the cause of death.
The CCA dismissed the appeal and denied the request for a stay of execution late Tuesday night. Thompson then filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which it denied Wednesday in a brief order with no explanation. The Supreme Court declined to hear a previous federal habeas corpus appeal from Thompson in 2021.
Thompson is the first person put to death in the United States this year, and is the 136th person Harris County has executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The county has executed more people than any other state, and in 2025 sentenced its 300th person to death.
Texas’ use of the death penalty has dwindled for years as new death sentences and executions per year have remained in the single digits for more than a decade.
Three other men in Texas currently have scheduled executions. Cedric Ricks is scheduled to be executed by the state March 11. Ricks was convicted of capital murder in 2014 for stabbing his common-law wife and her 8-year-old son to death in their Fort Worth apartment.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
