Wendie Rochelle Prescott, 22, was found dead on December 24, 1996, in her apartment at the Peartree Apartments in Arlington, Texas. A teacher’s aide for second-grade students at Erma Nash Elementary, she had planned Christmas Eve errands with her sister and a visit to her grandmother but did not show up. Her aunt and uncle discovered her face down in a half-filled bathtub shortly after midnight.

The scene was described as deeply disturbing: Prescott had been bound with duct tape, sexually assaulted, and strangled. Investigators noted striking similarities to the killing of Christine Vu three months earlier in the same complex; Vu, a 26-year-old elementary school teacher, had also been found bound and strangled in her bathtub. Fingerprints from both scenes later matched those of Dale Devon Scheanette, who had lived in the same apartment complex and was linked to multiple sexual assaults. Scheanette was convicted of capital murder in Prescott’s death in 2003 and was executed in 2009.