Crossed over

the long version

The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son’s death in a hit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story about Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then on death row. The article captured Tucker’s innocent beauty, the stunning brutality of her crimes — committed with a pickaxe — and the stories of her spiritual awakening on death row. Struck by these apparent contradictions, Lowry found herself inexplicably drawn to Tucker, who some ten years later would become the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863. Lowry eventually began to visit Tucker in prison, and over the course of several years she listened to the tragic story of her life before the murders and, in turn, told Karla Faye about her own life and the life and death of her son Peter. Crossed Over is a memoir of this time, a moving account of an unlikely but profound and genuine friendship created in the confines of a visiting room on death row.