Crossed over

The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son’s death in a hit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story about Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then on death row. The article captured Tucker’s innocent beauty, the stunning brutality of her crimes — committed with a pickaxe — and the stories of her spiritual awakening on death row. Struck by these apparent contradictions, Lowry found herself inexplicably drawn to Tucker, who some ten years later would become the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863. Lowry eventually began to visit Tucker in…