Lucky Ward (born November 1, 1964) is an African-American man who was convicted of strangling two people in September 2010 in Houston, Texas, while he was homeless.
After spending two years in juvenile prison, he was released at age 16 and sent back to his abusive family despite a recommendation that he not be returned to his mother.
At trial, the state attempted to prove that the murders of Long and Rodriquez were part of the “same scheme or course of conduct.”[1] Ward is challenging this finding on appeal.
Ward was not considered a suspect in Louis's death until 2013 and only because of law enforcements express intent to try to link him to other crimes; during trial, it was revealed that the Long investigation's lead detective directed a cold case detective to look for unsolved strangulation cases that police might be able to link to Ward.
[17] The cold case of a woman named Birdell Louis was identified because it had occurred when Ward was not in prison; her body had been found behind a gas station near downtown Houston.
[18] Initially, the primary suspect in Louis's murder was her abusive ex-boyfriend who had reportedly choked and threatened her shortly before her death; but that investigation was, for unknown reasons, abandoned.
Right before his trial began, using a new probabilistic genotyping software known as “STRmix,”[24] the State claimed that one swab from Ical's body contained a mixture of DNA from at least four different contributors.
[26] Ward was excluded as a contributor to the large quantity of more traditional DNA testing of materials gathered from that crime scene.
[27] The testimony regarding his possible inclusion in a mixture of four or more contributors to a single sample was the only evidence of any kind connecting Ward to Ical's murder.
On June 18, the partially decomposed body of 24-year-old Raquel Antoinette Mundy, a single mother with two children from Galveston, was found in a grassy field on 300 St. Charles, near some railroad tracks.
[29] Ward, who is not Hispanic and did not own a car, was considered a suspect after his arrest for Long's death,[30] but he was never charged with Mundy's murder.
Ward met with 52-year-old Reita Lafaye Long, a former teacher and friend of his who lived on the streets, who was sitting in front of the steps of the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.
[12] According to later interviews, the pair got into a heated argument that turned violent, and Ward, then high on crack cocaine, strangled her with her own bra.
[12] The night of his arrest on November 4, 2010, Ward confessed to police that he must have killed Ms. Long, claiming he had not intended to do so but had panicked when she “went off” on him.
[37] During his trial, YSTR testing results showed Ward was among a quantity of African-American males who could not be excluded from one sample from the unstained portion of Flood's scarf.
In the police interview, Ward explained that he had offered to watch Rodriguez's car, in exchange for a tip, while she went into a club.
District Attorney Kim Ogg eventually announced that she would seek the death penalty in his case, due to the severity of the crimes.
[55] The second note stated that the jury did not have the October 1, 2010, police interview related to the Rodriguez case and requested a copy.
After several more days of testimony, during which the State focused on other murders they sought to attribute to Ward, he was summarily sentenced to death.
[7] As of January 2024, Ward remains on death row at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in West Livingston and is currently appealing his conviction and sentence since he denies that he committed the murders he was accused of.