I’ve known Ivan Cantu for 20 years. I also know the day he is due to die. Cantu, 50, has been on death row since 2001. I first met him a few years later when I moved to Texas from England. In the two decades I’ve covered the death penalty in the US, Cantu has helped me understand what inmates go through in one of the America’s most notorious prisons, and his own story of how he got there – a story that, if his execution goes ahead, will end on Wednesday at 6pm.
That story is complicated. Cantu was convicted of killing his cousin and his cousin’s fiancée in November 2000 as a result of a drug dispute. But he’s always denied it. There was no physical evidence proving he was at the crime scene – no fingerprints, shoe prints, DNA. And he was hundreds of miles away at his fiancée’s parents’ house in Arkansas when the bodies of James Mosqueda, 27, and Amy Kitchen, 22, were discovered in their Dallas home, riddled with bullets. Yet Cantu’s jeans and socks, which police found in his rubbish bin, had the victims’ blood on them, and Cantu’s fiancée, Amy Boettcher, told police he had shown her the bodies.
