February 10, 2025
New Article: “The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row”
In his latest article for The New Yorker, Wright tells a powerful story of sisters from a convent outside Waco who develop deep ties with women on Texas’ death row.
The magazine’s executive editor, Daniel Zalewski, writes:
For the past year, Larry Wright has been regularly driving about two hours north from his home, in Austin, Texas, to the town of Gatesville, where there is a prison housing all seven of the women currently being condemned by the state to execution. Prison employees call them the ladies on death row. Wright started making these trips when he learned that something extraordinary was happening inside this locked world. The inmates, all of whom have been convicted of murderous crimes, have become close with a group of contemplative Catholic nuns who live half an hour away, in a convent in Waco. The inmates and the nuns formed an instant and intense bond the first time the nuns visited the row, in 2021. As one of the nuns, Sister Lydia Maria, told Wright, “Something from Heaven happened.”
Despite the obvious differences among the women, they understood one another—perhaps because they were both accustomed to spending days alone in tiny rooms, contemplating matters of life and death. The nuns continued visiting, and many of the inmates have now become devoted Catholics. Not long ago, the nuns named these prisoners formal affiliates of their order (a fact that the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, a Catholic, may find politically and morally inconvenient).
Prosecutors had depicted the ladies on death row—some of whom had been judged guilty of killing their own children—as embodiments of evil. The nuns, however, declined to view the inmates this way. “When you focus on evil, you become darker,” Sister Mary Thomas told Wright. “I don’t try to understand why they did it, or who did what. God sent us here to love them as they are—those who are repentant, those who are not.”
Wright’s kaleidoscopic article will introduce you to the nuns, to the condemned women—one of whom may be innocent—and to the charmingly insistent former cattleman, Deacon Ronnie, who brought them all together. I remember when Wright called me on one of his long drives home and reported that the prison would allow him to visit each prisoner only once every ninety days. “This is going to take a while,” he said. The most memorable New Yorker stories usually do.
Photograph by Katy Grannan for The New Yorker