By Lawrence Wright — The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row

Sis­ters from a con­vent out­side Waco have repeat­ed­ly vis­it­ed the prisoners—and even made them affil­i­ates of their order. The sto­ry of a pow­er­ful spir­i­tu­al alliance.

Over the next few years, the deacon’s min­istry on death row expand­ed. “One became two, and two became three,” Ron­nie recalled. The next woman to be includ­ed was Brit­tany Hol­berg. A for­mer sex work­er, she’d mur­dered an eighty-year-old man in Amar­il­lo. She was fol­lowed by Dar­lie Routi­er, who was con­vict­ed of killing two of her chil­dren and then stag­ing an attack on her­self. Then came Kim­ber­ly Cargill; she had set a babysit­ter on fire. Final­ly, there was Eri­ca Shep­pard, who had assist­ed in the mur­der of a Hous­ton woman while steal­ing her car. This was three decades ago, when Eri­ca was nine­teen. Each of the women had been sen­tenced to death, but until that day came they were con­demned to live with one anoth­er. They didn’t know how to get along. “They were like fer­al cats,” Ron­nie told me.