Texas death row inmate Craig Ogan has been executed for the 1989 shooting death of Houston policeman James Boswell.

Ogan claimed the killing was self defense.

The former federal drug informant from St. Louis was the 30th convicted killer executed this year in Texas.

Several dozen police officers and supporters arrived on motorcycles shortly before Ogan's scheduled execution hour and stood down the street from the prison entrance.

Still unrepentant, cop killer executed

HUNTSVILLE — Defiant to the end, a former federal drug informant who aspired to be a CIA agent was executed Tuesday for killing a Houston police officer 13 years ago.

"In killing me, the people responsible have blood on their hands because I am not guilty," Craig Ogan said in a deliberate and firm voice.

He described the details that preceded the officer's death and, as he has in the past, essentially blamed slain Officer James Boswell for his own death, saying the officer was "out of control."

Without looking at relatives of the slain officer, who watched through a window a few feet away, he alleged that Boswell was angry and was still suffering from an on-the-job injury months before.

Ogan, 47, was pronounced dead at 7:13 p.m.

"I killed a cop and this is Texas," Ogan said recently from death row, insisting the shooting was in self-defense.

Nov. 19, 2002, 11:44PM

Houston cop-killer executed

AP Craig Ogan's execution took place after the Supreme Court rejected two appeals filed on his behalf.

HUNTSVILLE -- Cop-killer Craig Ogan went to his death in Texas' execution chamber Tuesday night proclaiming his innocence, labeling Houston patrolman James Boswell a "policeman out of control" and insisting that he fired a bullet into the officer's head in self-defense.

"In killing me the people responsible have blood on their hands, because I am not guilty," Ogan said in his last statement, which eventually was cut off by the flow of deadly drugs. "I acted in self-defense and by reflex to an unprovoked attempted murder by a policeman out of control."

Speaking rapidly as Boswell's mother and other family members watched from an adjacent witness room, Ogan accused prosecutors of fabricating evidence in his 1990 trial. He said Boswell, 29, was "mad at the world" as a result of a brutal beating he had suffered seven months earlier at the hands of a crack cocaine dealer.

After the attack, Boswell was angry with "the mayor, the police chief, the fire chief, angry at the world, perhaps with some justification," Ogan said.

His statement stopped in mid-sentence as the drugs took effect.

In a meeting earlier, Walls Unit warden Neill Hodges had told Ogan he would have two minutes for his final comments.

The drugs were given at 7:05 p.m.; he was pronounced dead eight minutes later.

Ogan was the first of two killers scheduled to be executed this week.

William Wesley Chappell, 66, is set to die today for the 1988 murder of a 50-year-old Tarrant County woman and her daughter -- relatives of a 3-year-old girl Chappell was convicted of molesting four years earlier.

Chappell was free on bond, pending appeal, when he shot both women in the face with a 9mm pistol, allegedly to eliminate them as trial witnesses.

The execution of a third killer, James Lee Clark, 34, set for Thursday, was postponed Monday by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals after his lawyers argued that he is mentally retarded.

The court cited the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in June that barred execution of the mentally retarded. Clark had been convicted of the 1993 rape, robbery and murder of a 17-year-old Denton High School student.

Ogan's execution took place after the Supreme Court rejected two appeals filed on his behalf. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles also declined to block the execution.

As Ogan went to his death, about 80 law enforcement officers and their sympathizers -- members of two Houston motorcycle clubs -- gathered at the Walls Unit to show support for Boswell's family.

"Justice was finally served tonight," said Martha Boswell, the slain officer's mother. "We have waited for this 12 years. . . . I had faith this would happen, and it did."

She said she felt no compassion in watching her son's killer die.

"Nothing has changed," she said of her feelings.

Nov. 17


TEXAS---impending execution

Ironic turn leads to death row; Would-be agent faces Tuesday execution date


The book was called I Led Three Lives: Citizen, `Communist', Counterspy,
and its breathless cloak-and-dagger accounts of exposing Marxist
infiltrators in media, government and academia scared its McCarthy-era
readers witless.

It was the book that changed Craig Ogan's life.

Ogan, a bright but socially awkward St. Louis teenager, read the book in
the early 1970s, and author Herbert Philbrick's dangerous but romantic
years as an FBI mole galvanized him. He craved such adventure.

In 1973, at age 18, Ogan launched a career as a drug snitch, buying
marijuana from -- and informing on -- some of his region's deadliest
crime families. He hoped eventually to join the CIA.

Instead, he found himself enmeshed in a goofy career as an undercover
operative, mocked by the very agents he tried to help. Finally, through a
turn of events few could have foreseen, Ogan found himself on Texas'
death row for the 1989 murder of Houston police officer James Boswell.

Boswell, 29, was the 87th of 101 police officers killed in the line of
duty since the city started keeping records in 1860.

Barring the intervention of the courts or Gov. Rick Perry, Ogan will be
executed Tuesday. He would be the 30th person to die in the Huntsville
death house this year.

His death would come just weeks after the life of another cop killer,
Alex Adams, was spared when a Harris County jury could not agree on the
death sentence. Adams, 20, was only the 4th such killer to escape the
sentence in 12 years.

Ogan's attorney, Mike Charlton, last week was pursuing an appeal before
the U.S. Supreme Court based on ineffectiveness of earlier counsel. He
also was seeking clemency with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Additional appeals may be based on Ogan's mental state, Charlton said.

Ogan, whose IQ approaches 140, has mounted a flamboyant media campaign in
his defense. If he is executed, he charges, the state will be guilty of
"premeditated mass murder" by precluding his possibility of having
children. Some of them, he says, might have had "the intellect of Albert
Einstein."

Ogan's case has drawn international support from death penalty opponents
who believe the killer's assertion that he acted in self-defense. Ogan,
who had come to Houston after his cover was blown in St. Louis, contends
that he had high regard for police officers and shot Boswell only to save
his own life.

In testimony in Ogan's 1990 trial, federal drug agents said Ogan's
undercover career never was more than marginally successful. They laughed
at his penchant for hiding his face beneath a bulky sweatsuit and ducking
behind newspapers when a stranger entered their office. Behind his back,
they called him "Special Agent 005," an allusion to his ID number.

Ogan's life as an undercover informant didn't begin to truly spin out of
control, though, until Dec. 8, 1989, when a Houston drug dealer pointed a
gun at his head and accused him of being a "narc."

The unnerved Ogan turned to local Drug Enforcement Administration
officials for assistance, but he was chewed out for his overzealousness
in setting up drug deals without proper supervision.

Police then took him to a motel near the Astrodome. Ogan fretted that
drug dealers might have followed him, and he grew angry because his new
room was shabby and without heat.

Testifying for the defense, forensic psychologist Sallye Webster told
jurors that Ogan had a temper and probably suffered from functional
paranoia, a condition in which fears may be based on reality, not
psychotic delusions.

Ogan's circumstances that day left him "becoming more and more anxious,
agitated, almost hyperactive, very touchy, very worried," but not
psychotic or insane, she testified.

Ogan quarrelled with a motel clerk and kicked a door. Then, shortly after
midnight, he spied a police cruiser -- occupied by Boswell and his
partner, Clay Gainer -- making a traffic stop across the street.

The South Main Street area around the Astrodome was notorious for its
drug dealing and prostitution. As the officers worked, a small group of
onlookers gathered on the corner.

Suddenly, Gainer testified, Ogan rapped on Boswell's window, claiming to
be an undercover agent and complaining about a cold motel room. Boswell
advised him to wait. Again Ogan knocked on the window. Boswell opened the
passenger side door and warned Ogan to step back.

Ogan continued to ramble about undercover narcotics work.

Boswell, Gainer testified, then stepped from the patrol car, his pistol
unobtrusively at his side. He advised Ogan to leave or face arrest. With
the arrest seemingly imminent, Boswell reached to unlock the back door.
Ogan fired a shot into Boswell's head, then fled. Gainer shot the fleeing
man in the back.

In his Web postings, Ogan -- he refused to be interviewed for this
article -- contends that Boswell cursed him repeatedly, then burst from
the car "in an insane rage, running/lunging furiously right at me, like a
football tackle gone berserk, and clawing frantically at his gun holster."

"I saw his gun clear the holster and/or come into view," Ogan writes.
"Reflex took over. I heard an explosion and saw his body slam back
against the side of the patrol car and crumple to the ground, lifeless.
Then I saw the gun in my hand as the horrible realization crept over me.
I had just shot a policeman in the head."

David Atwood of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said
that, after visiting Ogan on death row over a period of 3 years, he
thinks the killer sincerely believes he acted in self-defense.

"He's extremely tense," Atwood said. "He knows his date is getting
closer. He believes in his mind that it was self-defense and he's
frustrated because he believes with the right investigation, his claims
could be made credible."

Jurors rejected the self-defense argument.

Then-prosecutor Rusty Hardin, now a prominent Houston defense attorney,
recalled that when Ogan testified, re-enacting the moments leading to the
shooting for jurors, the result was incriminating. "That was his own
version," Hardin said.

Charlton admitted that early defense efforts to use Ogan's agitated
mental state to save his life backfired under brutal prosecution
cross-examination.

"It's probably more complicated than this, but what they offered as
mitigation for punishment -- Ogan's long history of mental illness,
paranoid behavior -- was used by the prosecution to establish continuing
danger (a necessary element in obtaining a death sentence)," Charlton
said. "That was the problem. The mitigating factor was a double-edge sword."

Hardin, who noted the Ogan case was his last as a prosecutor, said he
never was happy in obtaining a death penalty. But Ogan, he said, showed
no remorse.

"In no way has he accepted moral culpability," Hardin said. "That's one
of the things a jury looks at before it returns a verdict of death. In
responding to the enormity of what he did, Craig Ogan's response was to
blame the victim.

"Ogan always was a wannabe. He wanted to be a CIA agent. He imagined he
was a CIA agent. He wanted to be a DEA agent. He was a guy totally
emotionally and psychologically ill-equipped to be a police officer, and
he ended up killing the type of person we want to have as police
officers. James Boswell was a poster boy for police.

"Ogan snuffed out a really good life."

(source: Houston Chronicle)

-impending execution

Texas set to execute convicted cop killer Tuesday night


In Huntsville, a former federal drug informant who aspired to be aCIA
agent headed to the Texas death chamber Tuesday for killing a Houston
police officer 13 years ago.

Craig Ogan, 47, from St. Louis, had been in Houston only a few weeks when
he fatally shot officer James Boswell the night of Dec. 9, 1989.

"I killed a cop and this is Texas," Ogan said recently from death row,
insisting the shooting was in self-defense but acknowledging he had
little hope of avoiding lethal injection in the nation's most active
death penalty state.

Ogan would be the 30th convicted killer executed this year in Texas and
the 1st of 2 prisoners set to die on consecutive nights this week.

"A lot of people say that in Texas they really use that death penalty a
lot," said Larry Standley, one of the prosecutors at Ogan's trial. "But I
truly believe if somebody will do that to a cop that quick, just think of
what they would do to just anybody else."

Ogan's lawyers filed late appeals in state and federal courts to try to
halt the punishment.

"They're trying to sell me as a nut case," Ogan said of his attorneys'
efforts. "I don't appreciate that."

Ogan was fascinated with espionage, spoke several foreign languages and
longed for a job with the CIA. He said he was building a track record by
working as a confidential informant in St. Louis for the federal Drug
Enforcement Administration.

He moved to Houston in late 1989 because he feared his cover had been
exposed. The night of Dec. 9, 1989, he got into an argument with a motel
clerk, walked outside and spotted a police car where Boswell and his
partner were writing a traffic ticket.

Ogan interrupted the officers repeatedly, citing his DEA connection, and
refused their instructions to wait a few minutes. When he persisted and
Boswell got out of the patrol car to unlock the back door of the car, the
officer was shot in the head. Ogan tried running away but surrendered
after he was shot and wounded in the back by Boswell's partner.

Ogan blamed Boswell for the shooting and contended his reaction was in
self-defense.

"He went crazy," Ogan said. "This doesn't make sense. I'm pro-police. If
I wanted to kill a cop, I could have blown them both off."

Ogan had an "explosive temper and a short fuse," said Standley, now a
Harris County judge. "He was just a time bomb, and that's what happened
that night."

Ogan contended he was calm, polite and feared for his safety.

"He was my son's judge, jury and executioner in a split second," Martha
Boswell, the officer's mother, told the Houston Chronicle.

She noted Ogan had appeals and had sought a reprieve and a commutation.

"As far as mercy - he showed Jim no mercy. None whatsoever," she said.

A defense psychologist testified at his trial that Ogan suffered from
functional paranoia, frequently was anxious, agitated and fearful, and
believed the officer was a deadly threat to him.

Jurors didn't buy the self-defense argument, convicting him of capital
murder and then deciding he should be put to death.

Ogan had no previous prison record but did acknowledge involvement in
drug dealing.

Wednesday, William Chappell, 66, condemned for a 1989 shooting spree that
left 3 people dead in a Fort Worth home, was scheduled to die. Chappell
would be the oldest person put to death in Texas since the state resumed
carrying out capital punishment in 1982.

(source: Associated Press)

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