Elkie Lee Taylor had a reputation as a troublemaker in his near-downtown Fort Worth neighborhood when he and a partner were seen leaving the home of Otis Flake.
A woman who knew the 65-year-old mentally ill Flake showed up later and found the front door open and the house ransacked.
She entered and found Flake sitting against his bed, dead. His hands were tied behind his back with plastic tubing. His feet were bound with a coat hanger and a T-shirt, and two more coat hangers were wrapped around his throat.
Otis Flake's niece calls Elkie Lee Taylor "an animal who preyed on the weakest of people."
Elkie Taylor is to die in the state death chamber in Huntsville tomorrow night for the April 1993 slaying. He'd be the 15th Texas inmate executed this year and the first of six scheduled for lethal injection this month in the nation's most active capital punishment state.
Taylor admitted to his involvement in a similar slaying of an 87-year-old Fort Worth man seven blocks from Flake's home and 11 days before his murder. But Taylor, like in Flake's killing, blamed the murder on a partner.
Accomplice Darryl Birdow was sentenced in 1994 to life in prison for Flake's death. Taylor told police he bound and gagged Flake but insisted Birdow strangled the man.
