David Spates and Kayla Larry (Harris County District Attorney’s Office)
A 61-year-old Texas man will spend the remainder of his days behind bars for killing a 28-year-old mother, beating, stabbing, and suffocating the victim using a variety of deadly weapons after accusing her of speaking to the police about one of their friends.
A judge on Monday ordered David Spates to serve a mandatory sentence of life in a state correctional facility without the possibility for parole in the 2020 slaying of Kayla Lary, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
Following a seven-day trial, a jury in Harris County deliberated for only 19 minutes before finding Spates guilty of capital murder in Lary’s horrific death.
“This was not just a vicious and cruel murder, it was a premeditated and planned-out capital murder,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a statement. “The victim was tied up, with a garbage bag over her head, and then beaten with a hammer, stomped on and stabbed until she was dead.”
According to a news release from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, Spates and Lary knew each other before her murder because both were part of a group of adults who hung out and did drugs together. Authorities say that the motive for Lary’s murder stemmed from a member of the drug-using group being arrested in early 2020.
Inside of a rural home near Sheldon Lake, Spates on June 24, 2020, accused Lary of speaking to police about the recently arrested member of the group. He then bound her hands and feet, covered her head with a trash bag, and proceeded to beat her with a hammer and stab her with a knife multiple times.
A witness to the grisly killing said that Lary was begging for her life and screaming that she “just wanted to go home to be with her baby,” per the release.
After killing Lary, Spates drove her car out to a remote area in the woods where he abandoned the vehicle. He then brought Lary’s body to the San Jacinto River and tossed her remains into the water.
Authorities were able to recover Lary’s body about 10 days after she was killed, but the remains were too decomposed for the medical examiner to determine her exact cause of death.
“No one deserves to die like that, and he threw her away like she was a piece of trash,” Assistant District Attorney Kathryn Rogers, who prosecuted the case against Spates with ADA Megan Long, said in a statement. “We are thankful to the jurors who listened to the facts of this horrible case and did the right thing.”
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