Inmate in Texas executed for stabbing his wife to death, drowning her daughter in bathtub in 2009

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A man in Huntsville, Texas was executed 14 years after he stabbed his estranged wife to death and drowned her 6-year-old daughter in a bathtub.

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Gary Green, 51, was executed Tuesday evening by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, according to The Associated Press.

Green was given the death penalty in 2022 after being convicted of murdering his estranged wife, Lovetta Armstead, 32, and her daughter Jazzmen Montgomery, in 2009, KDFW reported. He stabbed Armstead more than two dozen times at their house in Dallas, Texas. He drowned Jazzmen in a bathtub in the house.

Green had also attempted to kill Armstead’s two other sons - 9-year-old Jerrett and 12-year-old Jermone, the AP reported.

Officials said that Green killed Armstead and her daughter because Armstead was trying to annul their marriage. When she was killed, she had written two letters to Green defending her decision. According to the AP, Green in his own angry letter had said he believed that Armstead and her children were plotting against him.

Ray Montgomery, 43, Jazzmen’s biological father, said he wasn’t “cheering for Green’s execution” but he got to witness “the justice system work,” the AP reported.

“It’s justice for the way my daughter was tortured. It’s justice for the way that Lovetta was murdered,” said Montgomery, according to the AP.

Green tried to make appeals that he was intellectually disabled and had mental health disorders but the United States Supreme Court and the lower appeals court rejected his claims, the AP said. The U.S. Supreme Court had prohibited the death penalty for those who are intellectually disabled but not for mental illness.