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Larry Swearingen, 48, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday evening for the December 1998 killing of Melissa Trotter. The 19-year-old was last seen leaving her community college in Conroe, and her body was found nearly a month later in a forest near Huntsville, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of Houston.
Prosecutors said they stand behind the "mountain of evidence" used to convict Swearingen in 2000. They described him as a sociopath with a criminal history of violence against women and said he tried to get a fellow death row inmate to take credit for his crime.
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Swearingen, who is also represented by the Innocence Project, has previously received five stays of execution.
Appeals courts and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to stop the execution. If it happens, Swearingen would be the 12th inmate put to death this year in the U.S. and the fourth in Texas.
Kelly Blackburn, the trial bureau chief for the Montgomery County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted Swearingen, said Swearingen's efforts to discredit the evidence have been unsuccessful because "his experts' opinions don't hold water."
"I have absolutely zero doubt that anybody but Larry Swearingen killed ... Melissa Trotter," Blackburn said.
During a 2011 interview, Swearingen told The Associated Press that he was tired of being "demonized" for a crime he didn't commit.
"We'd all like to know who done it," he said.
Blackburn said Swearingen killed Trotter because he was angry that she had stood him up for a date. At the time of Trotter's killing, Swearingen was under indictment for kidnapping a former fiancée.
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The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week turned down Swearingen's challenge to the blood evidence and pantyhose match, citing the "mountain of evidence" that "seals Swearingen's guilt for Trotter's murder."
Blackburn said Swearingen has tried to get people to lie in order to give him an alibi. After his arrest, Swearingen got another inmate to write a letter Swearingen composed in Spanish that professed to be from the real killer and had it sent to his attorney. In 2017, Swearingen and another death row inmate, Anthony Shore, concocted a plan to get Shore to take responsibility for Trotter's killing. Shore was executed last year.
Rytting said Swearingen is guilty of doing "some very stupid things," but prosecutors don't have proof he killed Trotter.
"Hopefully we are one step closer to giving (Trotter's family) that justice that they've so long waited for," Blackburn said.
Texas executes man in 1998 slaying of college student
Texas has executed a man who maintained his innocence in the abduction, rape and murder of a suburban Houston community college student more than 20 years ago
abcnews.go.com