‘This Killing Machine’
Sanitizing the death penalty has been key to this modern resurgence, masking the violence of state executions.
DALTON COBLE DIDN’T KNOW HIS grandfather particularly well, but stories of Billie Wayne Coble have cast a shadow over his family since before he was born. In August 1989, Billie murdered his estranged wife’s parents and brother. The slayings shocked Waco, and the Coble name continued to raise eyebrows as it surfaced in headlines about appeals in the case over the following three decades. Billie’s son from a previous marriage, Gordon Coble, was only a teenager when his father was sentenced to death. In an attempt to shake the stigma, Gordon moved his family to outside Austin when Dalton was a child. He grew up meeting his grandfather through birthday cards and the occasional trip to visit him across from a cage walled off with plexiglass.
Sometimes the phone rang with news about Billie that sent Gordon into an emotional tailspin. Dalton, now 23, remembers when he was young, standing in the kitchen with his father when Gordon hung up the handset. Gordon wrapped his arms around his son and began to weep. “He kept telling me, ‘It’s going to be OK, son, it’s going to be OK,’” Dalton says. “I later found out that’s when they set an execution date.”
Last year, as the appeals ran out and Billie’s execution date grew closer, Dalton says his father started to look ill. The day of the execution, February 28, 2019, as they visited
