Her mom’s murderer faces execution tonight. Will she read the letter he wrote to her?
Sarah Adleman thinks she may finally be ready to hear what condemned killer Arthur Lee Burton has to say as he faces execution in Texas.
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When Sarah Adleman woke up on Wednesday, her first order of business, she said, was to go for “a long run.”
It was a fitting tribute to her mom, Nancy, who was strangled to death nearly three decades ago while jogging by the Brays Bayou river near her Houston home. She was 48 years old.
“I have continued to run since she was killed,” Sarah told The Independent. “That’s one of the things that has enabled me to feel close to her, still… So, I wanted to go on a run this morning, to honor her in that way.”
On Wednesday evening, the man who murdered Nancy Adleman on July 29, 1997, is set to die by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. Her father and one of her two brothers will be at the execution chamber to watch Arthur Lee Burton die.
But Sarah, a 43-year-old Denver-area yoga therapist who works with traumatic brain injury survivors, will not be celebrating Burton’s execution. Instead, Sarah will remember her mother by holding what she described as a “gratitude and forgiveness ceremony” at a local river, with her son, two of her closest friends, and their two sons, who are her own boy’s best friends.
“We’re going to just play in the river this afternoon — the sound of their laughter is one of the greatest joys in my life, and that’s what I wanted to do today,” Sarah said. “In thinking about what my mom would want, she always said to choose joy.”
Later in the evening, Sarah said she is hoping to conduct a fire ceremony, during which she will symbolically incinerate “those things we no longer want to carry with us, those habits, thoughts, or what have you.”
Some time after Burton, now 54, was sent to death row, Sarah sent him a letter she mentioned the existence of, but did not include, in her 2019 memoir, The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother’s Echoes. Burton sent her a letter back, Sarah told the Houston Chronicle, but said she never opened it for reasons left unexplained.
On Wednesday, Sarah told The Independent that she wrote to Burton hoping for answers and information he would only be able to share while he remained alive. She said she told Burton in her note that she “hoped he was at peace, and that it’s available for everybody.”
“I mostly wanted to know that he received my words that I had said, and so I requested a response back,” Sarah said. “And he wrote back, and I still haven’t opened the letter. It’s something that I wrestle with; it’s literally filed in my file cabinets under the file, ‘Life.’”
Sarah said she wonders if her refusal to read Burton’s reply is a way of holding onto some power, that he’s talking but she’s refusing to listen. Now, Sarah thinks he may be ready to finally hear what Burton has to say.
“I’ve kind of thought [that] perhaps tonight, during the ceremony, that might happen,” she said.
Burton confessed in 1998 to having attempted to rape Nancy Adleman, then strangling her to death with her own shoelaces, and was convicted of capital murder.
“For any woman who has ever exercised alone, or walked to their car alone at night, this case is their worst nightmare,” assistant district attorney Josh Reiss, chief of the Harris County District Attorney’s Post-Conviction Writ Division, told USA Today, which has closely covered the case as Burton’s attorneys continue to appeal his execution all the way up to the US Supreme Court.
During Burton’s admission to police more than a quarter-century ago, he recounted the unimaginable grace Nancy expressed during her final moments.
As Sarah told The Colorado Sun in 2020, “It is impossible for me to try and understand forgiveness without looking to the last words my mother spoke: ‘I forgive you and God does too.’”
At the same time, Sarah said her dad continues to struggle with moving past Nancy’s horrific death.
“I feel like I lost my father the same night I lost my mother,” she told The Independent. “He’s still here, but he’s not the same person.”
Burton however is hoping for a last-minute repreieve to spare him death.
Burton’s lawyers say he is intellectually disabled and thus constitutionally barred from being put to death, according to a 2002 Supreme Court ruling. Prosecutors say the defense never mentioned anything about their client’s disability until a week ago.
The disability only then came to light thanks to “recently-developed evidence,” defense attorney Steven Wells said in an Aug. 3 court filing.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Burton’s final appeal remained pending, Wells’s co-counsel Kate Johnson told The Independent.
“Mr. Burton is a person with an intellectual disability, and his execution today would violate the United States Constitution,” Johnson said in an email. “We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will issue a stay of execution and intervene to ensure that the Texas courts follow the Supreme Court’s precedent and do not conduct an unconstitutional execution.”
Johnson said she expected “some action” from the high court by 6pm CDT, which is the earliest Burton could be executed. He will be the third person put to death in Texas so far this year, and the 11th in the nation.
Texas has three more executions scheduled for 2024, one in September and two in October, and a fourth set for Feb. 5, 2025.