At just 23 years old, Brittany Holberg was locked up in a north Texas county jail facing murder charges — when a chat with her cellmate, who was secretly an undercover police informant, changed her life forever.
The young sex worker from Amarillo, Texas, had crashed her car while high on crack cocaine in November 1996 and sought refuge from A.B. Towery, an 80-year-old man and existing client.
A heated argument over her drug use quickly devolved into violence, leaving Towery dead with a lamp jammed down his throat. Holberg, who was arrested for felony burglary in February 1997, claimed self-defense.
While detained, Holberg admitted to her Randall County Jail cellmate Vickie Kirkpatrick that she had killed Towery “in order to get money” and said she would “do it all over again for more drugs.”
Thanks to Kirkpatrick’s testimony, Holberg was convicted of capital murder in March 1998, and sentenced to death.
But years later, it emerged that the cellmate’s witness account was flawed — and thrown out.
After 27 years on death row at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Holberg, now aged 52, learned she was no longer condemned.
As their primary witness at the 1998 trial, prosecutors heavily relied on Kirkpatrick’s testimony. But what they didn’t reveal at the time was that Kirkpatrick was a confidential, paid informant for the Amarillo Police Department.
Instead, she’d been simply presented as a “disinterested individual who ‘wanted to do the right thing,’” Circuit Judge Patrick Higginbotham wrote.
Unaware that the state’s key witness likely had her testimony coached and that she had been compensated, the jury convicted Holberg and sentenced her to death.
Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Holberg’s death sentence in a 2-1 decision. Her murder conviction was passed back down to the district court for it to decide how to proceed.
The court argued that the prosecution’s nondisclosure until after the jury’s verdict was a “tactical decision” and “no oversight.”
In 2011, Kirkpatrick recanted her testimony but neither a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals nor a federal district court found that prosecutors had violated Holberg’s constitutional right to a fair trial.
The appeals court disagreed. It said the informant was critical to the jury’s decision and that prosecutors and disregarded the Brady Doctrine: a legal principle established by the Supreme Court in 1963 that mandates the disclosure of evidence favorable to the defense.
“This narrative, which the jury did not hear, razes Kirkpatrick’s credibility: either her testimony at trial was supplied by the State, or her recantation was a lie,” the court wrote.
What did Kirkpatrick testify?
At trial, Holberg testified that after the crash Towery invited her into his home when he spotted a crack pipe, before labeling her a “stupid b***h, w***e,” according to court documents.
She said that the man struck her on the head and pulled out clumps of her hair. Holberg said she then stabbed him and only took money that Towery had thrown at her.
After the prosecution called Kirkpatrick to the stand, Holberg’s claims of self-defense unraveled.
Kirkpatrick testified that Holberg told her she stuck a lamp down Towery’s throat as she was fed up with him “gurgling.” She also claimed Holberg initiated the altercation to get a money “fix.”
Holberg allegedly told Kirkpatrick that she stabbed Towery with a fork and thought the “fountain” of blood spurting from the old man was “pretty.”
But by hiding that Kirkpatrick was a paid police informant, Goldberg’s due process rights were perceived to have been denied.
“We pause only to acknowledge that 27 years on death row is a reality dimming the light that ought to attend proceedings where a life is at stake, a stark reminder that the jurisprudence of capital punishment remains a work in progress,” Higginbotham said.
Kirkpatrick was believed to have been a prolific informant who secured some 40 search warrants and multiple convictions for the City of Amarillo, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
She allegedly received thousands of dollars in exchange for her information and had been in daily communication with Amarillo police for months before they put her in a cell with Holberg.
Just two days after meeting her new cellmate in May 1997, Kirkpatrick provided crucial details that matched forensic reports that had already been in police possession for six months prior.
That same day, Kirkpatrick was released on bond and had her criminal trespass charge dismissed. However, her felony burglary charge remained until after she testified against Holberg at trial, according to the appeals court.
