Mom's execution: One daughter dreads it; the other welcomes it
Posted by: "Texas Prisoners Network Support"
Sun Jun 10, 2007 2:10 pm (PST)
Mom's execution: One daughter dreads it; the other welcomes it

Cathy Lynn Henderson set to die by lethal injection on Wednesday.

By Steven Kreytak
Sunday, June 10, 2007

Jennifer Henderson's early memories of her mother are vague
recollections: going to the neighborhood pool together and watching
scary movies at their house near Pflugerville.

Melissa Bradshaw remembers her mother using drugs, calling her a
little bitch and beating her, once so badly that her eyes swelled up
and she couldn't see.

Their mother is Cathy Lynn Henderson, a Travis County woman scheduled
to die Wednesday for murdering Brandon Baugh, a 3-month-old boy she
was baby-sitting, in 1994.

Jennifer Henderson, 17, wants her motherto get a new trial and one
day be set free.

Bradshaw, 28, wants Cathy Lynn Henderson dead.

v

In many ways, Jennifer Henderson is a typical suburban teen. She
lives with her father, Cathy Henderson's ex-husband, and her
stepmother in a two-story house with a thick front lawn in a Round
Rock subdivision.

She is heading into her senior year at Round Rock High School, spends
hours at a time on myspace.com and works as a hostess at Joe's Crab
Shack.

Until recently, her classmates didn't know that every other week
since she was a child, she has visited her mother at the women's
death row in Gatesville. Jennifer Henderson, who was 4 when Cathy
Henderson was arrested, knows her mother through those visits.

"Many people find it weird, but I thought it was normal just because
I had always done it," she said. "I look forward to it."

Bradshaw was 15 when Cathy Henderson was arrested, but had not lived
with her mother since she was 7. She is an Austin Community College
student and a single mother of two young girls. She lives in North
Austin, where she waits tables part time in a coffee shop.

She occasionally corresponds with Jennifer Henderson on myspace.com,
but they aren't close. She talks more frequently to her sister Amber,
Cathy Henderson's middle daughter, who lives in Illinois and couldn't
be reached for this story.

Bradshaw visited her mother on death row once, years ago.

Like Jennifer Henderson and their mother, Bradshaw has blond hair and
is about 5 feet tall. But unlike her half-sister, who talks with
energy and optimism, Bradshaw's voice is calm and low. Her words seem
carefully pulled from a well of thoughts and emotions that she is
constantly trying to understand.

Her life has been a struggle, especially after she testified at her
mother's trial at age 16. She said she dropped out of high school,
partied too much and used drugs; she was convinced that failure was
in her genes.

Bradshaw now talks of raising her children in a loving home and
breaking what she sees as her family's cycle of abuse and drug use.
She wants to go to college in Oregon and travel the world to study
other cultures.

"We can say, 'Poor me; I had a horrible childhood, and that gives me
the right not to do anything with my life,' " she said."I want the
world to know that they can overcome these things."

Their mother is 50 and has been on death row since 1995, when a
Travis County jury rejected her defense that Brandon's death was an
accident and agreed with prosecutors' theory that she intentionally
slammed his head into a hard object.

Cathy Henderson declined an interview with the American-Statesman.
Her daughters and her ex-husband say she denies ever abusing her
children.

Last week, Henderson's lawyers filed a new appeal, saying that
scientific evidence that wasn't available during her trial shows that
a short accidental fall — Henderson claimed she dropped Brandon while
reaching for the phone — could have caused the head injuries that
killed the baby.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could decide any day whether to
allow the appeal and delay her execution for the second time.

Hiding in the doghouse

Bradshaw said her mother's mistreatment started as neglect.

"Cathy took me to day care when I was probably about 6 months old,"
Bradshaw said, "and she would repeatedly forget to pick me up."

Bradshaw was born in Austin but remembers moving around a lot, with
different men coming in and out of her mother's life during her
childhood. She didn't learn which one was her father until she was an
adult.

Linda Bradshaw, the woman who cared for Melissa as an infant — and
eventually adopted her — testified at Henderson's trial that she got
a call from Henderson one day when Melissa was about 18 months old.

"Cathy called me to come and get" Melissa, Linda Bradshaw told the
jury. "She said if I didn't come and get her, she would put her on
somebody else's doorstep."

Melissa Bradshaw said things got worse when her mother moved her and
Amber,who is about four years younger than Melissa, to Hearne, a town
northwest of Bryan.

"There were people in and out of the house, using drugs," she said.
To escape it, she would go outside and hide in the doghouse and wait
for everything to pass. Bradshaw said her mother often beat her.

"If I woke her up to go to school, she beat me," Bradshaw said.

One of the men who passed through Cathy Henderson's home was Robert
Moore.

He was in prison for murder when he took the witness stand at
Henderson's trial and told jurors that in 1986, he saw Henderson
shoot up methamphetamine in front of her eldest daughter and then
slap her.

That year, when Melissa was 7, the state put her in foster care. The
judge's order said she was in "immediate danger" because of her
mother's abuse, according to news accounts after Henderson's arrest.
Henderson also lost custody of Amber that year in a divorce.

Linda Bradshaw and her husband later adopted Melissa, and Melissa
says they gave her a good life. But she said Cathy Henderson wouldn't
leave her alone, regularly calling and stopping by the Bradshaws'
Round Rock home. When she was about 13, Melissa Bradshaw said, her
mother made a threat that still sticks with her.

"She told me that one day when I had a child of my own, she would do
everything in her power to take that child away from me so I could
know how she felt," Bradshaw said. "Part of me is still scared of
her."

'I think she was scared'

A year after Henderson lost custody of her children, she got a job at
an aircraft component overhaul shop in Pflugerville. There she met
Warren Henderson.

They married a year later. Jennifer was born in 1990. People told
Warren Henderson that his wife used drugs sometimes when she went
out, but he said he never saw it. He also said he never saw her abuse
her children.

"She was a good mother," he said.

In 1992, Warren Henderson said, his wife started baby-sitting
children in their home near Pflugerville to make extra money and have
companions for Jennifer.

On Jan. 21, 1994, she was watching Jennifer, Brandon and Brandon's 2-
year-old sister, Megan. Henderson would later tell investigators that
she panicked after she dropped the infant and then drove north with
Jennifer, Megan and Brandon's body.

She left Jennifer and Megan at a relative's house in Bell County and
kept going, according to testimony at her trial. In an oat field near
Temple, she buried Brandon in a wine cooler box. She then fled to her
childhood hometown of Independence, Mo., where she was arrested 11
days later after dyeing her hair and assuming a new identity.

Jennifer Henderson says she remembers nothing about that day. But she
said she believes it was an accident and she's not angry that her
mother left her.

"I think she was just scared," Jennifer Henderson said.

Mom won't apologize

When Melissa Bradshaw heard about Brandon's death, she felt partly
responsible, she said. She had heard about her mother taking care of
other people's children and thought about saying something about her
own abuse, she said, but didn't.

At 16, she agreed to testify against her mother, she said, because "I
felt I had to."

During the punishment phase of the trial, as jurors prepared to
decide whether Henderson would be sentenced to life in prison or
lethal injection, Bradshaw took the stand.

She told the jury about her mother's abuse. She told them about
hiding in the doghouse when the men and the drugs filled their home.

Back at school, she said, students saw the media coverage and
realized who Melissa's real mother was. Some students called her the
daughter of a baby killer. Others were sympathetic, which she read as
pity.

Before the trial, Melissa had been an honors student and an athlete
on schedule to graduate early. After the trial, she said, she dropped
out just before graduation and "wandered through life" for several
years.

"I had a chip on my shoulder and felt sorry for myself," she said. "I
used to wish that maybe she had killed me."

She said she went into drug rehab when she was 19 and cleaned herself
up with help from her adoptive parents and her friends. Then she went
to see her mother on death row. "I wanted her to know that I forgive
her. That I am OK," she said. "I wanted some kind of closure."

Bradshaw said she was also seeking something in return: an apology.
"I wanted her to finally admit that the life I had as a child wasn't
normal."

Her mother considered the request, Bradshaw said, and then said she
couldn't apologize because none of the things her daughter remembered
had happened.Bradshaw said Cathy Henderson then talked about how hard
life was on death row.

"Everything was about her," Bradshaw said.

'She's like a teenager'

Every other week for 12 years, Warren and Jennifer Henderson have
made the pilgrimage to the prison in Gatesville where Cathy Henderson
and nine other women await execution.

In the beginning, Jennifer's father told her that they were going to
see her mother at the hospital and that the Plexiglas between them
was to keep germs contained. Later, Jennifer Henderson said, she
began to understand that her mother was on death row and why.

She said she and her mother have never talked about the day that put
Cathy Henderson there. She goes to her father for that information.

"I felt uncomfortable, and I didn't want her to be uncomfortable, "
she said.

So, during their visits, they kept it light, with Jennifer giving her
mother updates on her life: school, friends, boyfriends.

"We just have fun," she said. "We are goofy."

When Jennifer got into cheerleading, she said, her mother looked up
information on competitions in magazines to share with her. When
Jennifer got into music, Cathy Henderson told her daughter about
bands she used to like — Lynyrd Skynyrd was one — and Jennifer went
home and downloaded the music from the Internet.

"People always say we look the same, act the same," Jennifer
Henderson said. "She's like a teenager. She's so full of energy."

She said she never became too emotional about her mother's situation.
Then late last year, a judge set Cathy Henderson's execution for
April 18.

"It really hit me hard," Jennifer Henderson said. "I didn't want to
go to school. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I was moping around.
It sucked."

She said she became overwhelmed with anxiety, began taking Valium and
ended up in the hospital. She said therapy and the support of her
friends and family helped her pull out of the tailspin. Then she
decided she needed to help her mother.

Against the advice of her stepmother and father, she went to school
with fliers detailing her mother's case. Her teachers agreed to give
her a couple of minutes to address her classmates, and Jennifer
Henderson revealed that her real mother was on death row for
murdering a child. She told them her mom didn't do it and asked them
to write to the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. "It was like
going on a stage by yourself in front of the entire school pretty
much," she said. "It was very nerve-racking."

She said her classmates were supportive, and a handful joined her at
an April court date during which her mother's lawyers asked for more
time to file an appeal. They were successful, and the execution date
was moved to this month.

Different dreams

As her mother's appointment with death creeps closer, Jennifer
Henderson is hoping the courts will step in again. She dreams of one
day walking through a mall with her mother or having lunch with her
at a restaurant.

If no reprieve comes, she plans to be with her father outside the
gates of the prison in Huntsville that contains the death chamber.
Her father won't allow her to be in the witness room to watch the
execution.

Bradshaw said she won't be in Huntsville on Wednesday. She is busy
studying, moving toward her goal of attending Oregon State University
in a couple of years.

Her mother's execution, she said, will be "relieving."

"Finally that chapter in my life could actually be done with now,"
she said. "And I can stop looking over my shoulder."

skreytak@...; 912-2946

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/06/10/10hende
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