Jury sends killer to death row for Fort Worth strangulation of girlfriend and her child

A state district court jury in Tarrant County on Wednesday concluded that a man who strangled his girlfriend and her daughter after he raped the 10-year-old should be executed.

Paige Terrell Lawyer was sentenced to die by lethal injection in connection with his capital murder conviction in the 2018 killings in east Fort Worth. Lawyer, who is 44, locked his fingers in front of his body and angled his head slightly toward the floor of the courtroom well as Judge Elizabeth Beach read the verdict in Criminal District Court No. 1. Three sheriff’s office deputies stood behind him.

The jury deliberated for about seven hours over two days that were split by a night under sequestration at a hotel.

Lawyer killed O’Tishae Womack, whose body was found on her kitchen floor with a plastic grocery bag covering her head. Blood was smeared on the refrigerator. Lawyer also killed Ka’Myria Womack, whom he left on a second-floor bed, covered by a blanket.

Tarrant County Assistant District Attorneys Lloyd Whelchel and Dale Smith theorized to the jury that O’Tishae Womack was slain when she discovered Lawyer sexually assaulting Ka’Myria.

Whelchel and Smith also argued that Lawyer was motivated to kill Womack by his desire to silence her. Lawyer suggested to his nephew that he feared Womack would participate in the district attorney’s office prosecution of previous domestic violence assault cases in which O’Tishae Womack reported to police that Lawyer gripped her neck, the relative, Cortez Frazier, testified. The cases were underpinned by false accusations, Lawyer suggested.

Lawyer had a probation revocation hearing scheduled on April 13, 2018, seven days after the bodies were found, and could have been sentenced then to a prison term.

Defense attorney Steve Gordon argued that the jury should consider as mitigating evidence that Lawyer did not also kill O’Tishae Womack’s twin 4-year-old boys, who lived at the apartment in the 200 block of Shady Lane Drive. Gordon, Brian Poe and William Biggs were the defense attorneys appointed in the case.

Whelchel suggested the jury ought not to reward Lawyer because he spared the boys, Zayden and Kayden. They did not witness the defendant’s crimes and therefore, in Lawyer’s assessment, did not need to be killed, Whelchel suggested.

“They’re alive because they didn’t see anything,” Whelchel argued.

On the day the bodies were found, Lawyer dropped the boys off at their elementary school, retired Fort Worth Police Department Homicide Unit Detective Ernie Pate testified.

The jury did not hear from a witness who testified about at precisely what times the killings occurred. Defense attorney Poe argued there was no evidence that demonstrated that the deaths occurred after O’Tishae Womack’s boys arrived at school April 6, 2018, or occurred earlier, perhaps overnight, when the twins were inside the apartment.

The state called to testify a resident of a neighboring apartment who told the jury that as she waited for “The Price Is Right” to air at 10 a.m. she watched on a television a live feed from a surveillance camera that showed Lawyer outside his apartment with a black trash bag. It was at a time he typically was away at work.

James Van Gorkom, a Fort Worth Police Department crime scene officer, testified that he believed nothing of evidentiary value was found in the outdoor trash container.

Lawyer’s bloody fingerprint was found on a mop near O’Tishae Womack’s body and DNA connected to the defendant was found under O’Tishae’s fingernails and in the area of the knot on the plastic grocery bag that covered her head.

Lawyer, in a telephone call with his father after his arrest, denied that he killed the victims.

“He told me he didn’t do it,” Paige Lawyer Sr. testified.

The defendant’s father and two sisters took the witness stand during the defense punishment case and described their hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi. The defendant dropped out of high school in the economically depressed town and later held a commercial driver’s license. He began to drink heavily after his mother died when he was 30, the relatives testified.

“Do you still love him?” defense attorney Gordon asked April Lawyer, a sister of the defendant.

“I do,” she said.

Lawyer’s uncle, Mark McGee, testified during the guilt-innocence trial phase about a drunken kitchen confession that McGee testified the defendant gave.

In the hours after the homicides, Lawyer told his sister that he needed to get out of town but did not refer to the killings. She drove him to McGee’s house in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Over booze, Lawyer told McGee that he had killed his girlfriend and a child by choking them and had put a bag over the adult victim’s head to be certain that she was dead, McGee testified. Prosecutors noted neither detail was publicly released by Detective Pate, the case’s lead investigator.

Lawyer suggested that he considered dismembering the bodies, McGee testified.

“Did he say something about a chainsaw?” prosecutor Smith asked.

“He was gonna cut ‘em up but it would make too much noise,” McGee testified.

The next morning McGee called the U.S. Marshals Service, and law enforcement officers assigned to a fugitive task force arrested Lawyer after he climbed out of a back window at McGee’s house.

Lawyer elected not to testify at either trial phase.

It is not clear whether Lawyer answered questions in an interview with detectives after his arrest, but no account or description of such an interview was offered by a witness.

Following the conviction in a capital murder case in which a district attorney seeks the death penalty, the jury moves to a second phase to hear punishment evidence.

The jury deliberates to consider two options, life in prison without parole or death, and considers the probability that the defendant poses to society a continuing threat of criminal violence and whether there is mitigating evidence that a juror might regard as reducing the defendant’s moral blameworthiness that warrants a sentence of life without parole.

Lashundra Womack found the bodies of her sister and niece. After the death verdict, she read a statement to Lawyer in which she said he had devastated her family.

“You will forever be known as a murderer, rapist and a coward,” she said.

Lawyer was indicted in February 2020, and the decision to seek the death penalty was made when District Attorney Phil Sorrells’ predecessor, Sharen Wilson, held the office.

The last time a Tarrant County jury sent a defendant to death row was in November 2019 when it convicted Hector Acosta of capital murder. The Mexican drug cartel hit man was found guilty of killing two people in Arlington in 2017, beheading one of the victims, and mutilating their bodies with a machete and a 2-by-4.

The next death penalty trial in Tarrant County is scheduled for a man accused of killing and dismembering three people at a Euless motel in September 2021.

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