Lucky Ward

Lucky Ward (born November 1, 1964) is an African-American man who was convicted of strangling two people in September 2010 in Houston, Texas, while he was homeless, out of his psychotropic medications, and addicted to crack cocaine.

Lucky Ward was born on November 1, 1964, in Brazoria County, Texas.

He grew up in an unstable home, where he was physically and mentally abused.

His mother gave him to her brother, who was known to sexually abuse children, when Lucky was a baby; his uncle raised him until he was about seven.

He later spent some time with his violent father who once dragged him behind a car to which he was chained.

These experiences affected his mental health and led him to be diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder.

At age 14, he sexually assaulted an 83-year-old woman in Brazoria County.

He was arrested and confessed the same day.

After spending two years in juvenile prison, he was released at age 16 and sent back to his abusive family despite a recommendation that he not be returned to his mother.

Soon thereafter, he was accused of assault, tried as an adult, and sent to adult prison at age 16.

He was accused of committing four other homicides, one dating back to 1985, none of which were ever prosecuted.

He was convicted and sentenced to death on one count of capital murder based on the theory that two different individuals, a Hispanic transgender woman named Carlos "Gypsy" Rodriguez and an African-American woman named Reita Long, were killed as part of the "same scheme or course of conduct."

This conviction was obtained after a 10-year delay in his trial.

He was released from prison briefly in 1985.

After being sent back to prison in 1985, he was in the custody of the Texas prison system until 2006.

Upon being released, Ward became homeless and addicted to drugs.

One of these was the 1985 murder of Birdell Louis.

From 2006 until his arrest for the capital crime in November 2010, he was repeatedly arrested and served time in the Harris County jail for a variety of crimes, including soliciting prostitutes; possession and distribution of controlled substances; resisting arrest; theft; failure to identify himself to law enforcement and criminal mischief.

He was housed in the section of the jail used for people with mental illness and given psychotropic medications.

He was written up for numerous infractions and accused of assaulting another inmate.

He showed jail staff how he had been able to unlock his cell; an educational video was made of him demonstrating the process.

But he never attempted an escape.

Ward is accused of targeting homeless women and trans women.

At trial, the state attempted to prove that the murders of Long and Rodriquez were part of the “same scheme or course of conduct.” Ward is challenging this finding on appeal.

Each victim was allegedly strangled, but none were sexually assaulted.

While Ward awaited trial for Long and Rodriguez’s murder, law enforcement endeavored to link him to several other unsolved murders.

Since his arrest in 2010, he has consistently denied any knowledge of Rodriguez’s death whereas he admitted responsibility for Long’s death once he learned of her death, although he denied an intent to kill her.

He has been on Texas’s death row and is currently appealing his conviction and sentence.

She was found dead in a grassy area near a highway on January 18, 2010.

Investigators spent ten years attempting to link Ward to Ical’s murder.

Right before his trial began, using a new probabilistic genotyping software known as “STRmix,” the State claimed that one swab from Ical’s body contained a mixture of DNA from at least four different contributors.

After assuming that the mixture contained only four contributors, an analyst claimed that Ward could not be excluded from one of the four.

Ward was not considered a suspect in Louis’s death until 2013 and only because of law enforcements express intent to try to link him to other crimes; during trial, it was revealed that the Long investigation’s lead detective directed a cold case detective to look for unsolved strangulation cases that police might be able to link to Ward.

The cold case of a woman named Birdell Louis was identified because it had occurred when Ward was not in prison; her body had been found behind a gas station near downtown Houston.

Initially, the primary suspect in Louis’s murder was her abusive ex-boyfriend who had reportedly choked and threatened her shortly before her death; but that investigation was, for unknown reasons, abandoned.

During Ward’s trial, a latent print examiner testified that Ward’s palm print could not be excluded as a match to a partial palm print lifted from a pair of glasses found near Louis’s body.

No other physical evidence linked Ward to the murder.

Louis’s ex-boyfriend’s fingerprints were never obtained or compared to the prints found at the crime scene; not was his DNA collected or his profile compared to the many items from which Ward was excluded.

Ward was not indicted for Louis’s murder, but details of the crime were presented to his jury in 2020 as if he had been the perpetrator.

The second suspected victim was 51-year-old Ruben "Myra Chanel" Ical, a transgender woman.