Report: Texas woman accused of mailing meth to double killer in prison
Keri Blakinger, Houston Chronicle
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A Katy woman was arrested in Wichita County on Thursday after she allegedly tried mailing meth to a high-profile Conroe double murderer in a North Texas prison, according to local reports.
Sara Elizabeth Russell was jailed Thursday and held on $10,000 bond after an Allred Unit mailroom worker spotted an unexpected bulge disguising a powdery packet stashed in an incoming card, according to KFDX.
The handmade note allegedly included written instructions - apparently tips for how to disguise the drugs inside.
The illicit supplies were allegedly headed to prisoner Jason Aaron Burkett, a Montgomery County man who later admitted he'd made the card and mailed it to Russell, according to investigators. But he said that, despite the packaging instructions, he wasn't asking her to send him drugs.
The Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab tied fingerprints on the package back to Russell, the TV station reported, and jail records show she was charged with one count of prohibited substance in a correctional facility.
Burkett is serving a life sentence for his role in a brutal 2001 triple murder that left dead two teens and a mother.
His co-defendant, Michael James "Romeo" Perry, was executed in 2010 for the drug-fueled slaying of 50-year-old Sandra Stotler, a nurse killed in her tony Bentwater home near Lake Conroe.
In 2001, two fisherman found her body wrapped in a blanket and tossed in Crater Lake.
The bodies of her 16-year-old son Adam Stotler and his 18-year-old friend Jeremy Richardson were later recovered in a wooded area west of Conroe.
Minutes before he was put to death, Perry called his execution an "atrocity" and blamed the woman's slaying on Burkett, saying his initial confessions were coerced through physical intimidation.
"Burkett should be up there, too, on the gurney with him," Charles Richardson, Jeremy's brother, said after witnessing the execution. "This was friends stabbing friends in the back."
Before trial, a jailhouse snitch apparently backed Perry's claim, writing in an affidavit that Burkett had admitted to all three killings
Still, Burkett netted a life sentence for the boys' deaths. It's not clear if he'll face additional charges stemming from the alleged smuggling attempt.
