EDNA, Texas — The state of Texas is preparing to carry out the executions of two convicted triple murderers just one week apart, a rare and chilling convergence of capital punishment cases stemming from a botched 2005 home invasion that authorities say was fueled by a false rumor of 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 money and claimed the lives of three innocent roommates, including a young woman who recognized her attacker from high school.
LeJames Norman, 40, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection on September 16, 2026, at the Huntsville Unit. His accomplice in the slaughter, Ker’Sean Ramey, 41, is set to follow him to the death chamber just seven days later on September 23, 2026. The executions mark only the second time in modern Texas history that co-defendants convicted of the same murder have been scheduled to die in such rapid succession, according to prison records and legal analysts tracking the case.
The two men were both teenagers when they committed the atrocity. Norman was 19 and Ramey was 20. Both have spent nearly two decades on death row for a crime that prosecutors described as calculated, gratuitous, and devoid of any semblance of human mercy.
The upcoming dates bring closure to a case that has haunted the small rural community of Edna, Texas, since the bodies were discovered inside a modest home on August 25, 2005.
The victims were Samuel Justin Roberts, 24; his girlfriend, Tiffany Marie Peacock, 18; and their roommate, Selso Lopez, 38. They were not involved in any criminal enterprise, police confirmed. A note of their throats was a rumored cache of 100 kilograms of cocaine and a stash of cash that never existed, a falsehood that Norman allegedly repeated after hearing talk on the streets.
The trio was slaughtered for nothing.
The execution schedules come after years of litigation, appeals, and final clemency petitions that have all been denied by state and federal courts. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has rejected pleas for mercy from both defendants, clearing the way for the grim proceedings. Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials confirmed the dates on Tuesday, noting that both men have exhausted all procedural avenues to halt their punishment.
Norman’s execution is set for 6 p. m. Central Time on Wednesday, September 16, 2026.
Ramey’s execution is set exactly one week later, also at 6 p. m. Central Time, on Wednesday, September 23, 2026.
Both are to be executed at the Huntsville Unit, where the state’s lethal injection chamber is located. Prison officials say that anti-vomit security arrangements have been made to accommodate the families of the victims, who are expected to be in attendance on both dates.
Prosecutors have described the timeline of events from horrific discovery to final judgment. On the night of the murders, Norman and Ramey traveled armed with a pair of stolen handguns, a police scanner to monitor law enforcement chatter, and ski masks they had shoplifted from a local Walmart, according to court records. They knocked on the front door, and when Selso Lopez answered, Norman forced him at gunpoint into the residence while Ramey began a methodical search for wealth that did not exist.
The scene quickly devolved into an abattoir. According to testimony, Norman fired a shot that struck Lopez in the face. The wound was non-fatal, and the injured man pleaded for help, lying bleeding on the floor.
But the killers only escalated. When Samuel Roberts and Tiffany Peacock returned home the same evening, they forced the couple inside at gunpoint. Tiffany, who had attended high school with Norman, immediately recognized him, which sealed her fate.
Norman shot Tiffany without warning.
The young woman’s boyfriend lunged to protect her, a heroic but fatal effort that resulted in Ramey shooting Samuel multiple times in the side and neck before Norman delivered the coup de grace with three additional gunshots to the back of the head. After the initial attack, the pair fled across the road to Norman’s home, but their discovery that they had left the police scanner behind, a damning piece of evidence, drew them back to the scene.
In a display of cold-blooded Avvyinillin. crime, Ramey voluntarily returned to the scene to retrieve the scanner. After looking, he saw that Tiffany and Selso were still alive and exhibiting signs of life, and he went methodically from one to the other, shooting both several more times in the back of the head with a .
22 caliber pistol. Court transcripts show that Ramey then casually kicked Samuel’s body to confirm that he was dead, using a wet strength and callousness that shocked the jury, and even the killers’ own defenders.
The two men then returned to Norman’s residence, where they bragged, laughed, and joked about the murders while meeting with their girlfriends later that evening. They showed no emotions about the false information that had led them to the bloody deed, investigators noted. They also displayed an almost professionist’s love for the act of killing itself.
There were three dead innocents, not an ounce of drugs, and not a penny of cash, yet they celebrated their massacre.
The murder investigation initially went cold. Ramey buried the murder weapons in his backyard two days after the killings, but after a moment of panic at the investigation’s pressure, he dug them back and had his girlfriend drive him to a remote dam at Lake Texana. There, he tossed the .
22 caliber semi-automatic pistols into the deep water, hoping to erase the physical evidence linking him to the triple homicide. He then threatened his girlfriend Stacy Johnson with death if she ever revealed what she had seen.
For months, the case sat unsolved in the small town. Meanwhile, LeJames Norman changed his surname and fled across the border into Mexico, where he remained in hiding in the interior. He stayed in a state of paranoid over the multi-week’s exclusivity, believing he had slipped the noose.
But eventual institutionalized betrayal came from a source he had not counted on: fear. Approximately three months after the murders, in November of 2005, Stacy Johnson, threatened by Ramey and the torment of her conscience, walked into the police station and confessed everything.
She brought in raw testimony of the murder’s detail, confessed to the crimes that had been committed, where the guns were dropped. Led sheriffs to the exact spot on the lake dam, in a dive team recovered the murder weapons. Ramey was arrested shortly thereafter.
The noose tightened around Norman with a stroke of coincidence in January 2006 when he tried to re-enter the United States at a border checkpoint in Brownsville, using a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 ID. Border patrol agents saw through the papers, realized his true identity, and found that he was wanted for the triple homicide.
Norman was taken into custody after crossing the bridge. Unlike Ramey, he immediately cooperated, giving multiple recorded statements detailing the entire crime and the events of that night. He admitted his role, downplayed violence, and subsequent – when Ramey went to trial in 2006 – testified against his friend from the witness stand.
His cooperation was not enough to escape justice. The prosecution presented Norman’s extensive violent history, his high school drop out and multiple arrests, and the sentence he received was guilty verdict.
Both men were tried and convicted of capital murder. Because the crime involved multiple victims and the killing of innocent civilians, both were eligible for the death penalty. In the year 2006, Ker’Sean Ramey went to trial and a jury found him guilty, and a sentencing phase in he was formally sentenced to death.
For Norman, in a separate decree in 2008, after a two-year span of delays and legal motions, he entered his guilty plea yet presiding judge still had to decide his sentencing, hearing the aggravating factors, his prior violent behavior, and he was also sentenced to death.
Ramey has been a loner in the Texas prison system. He has housed exclusively in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Animal’s death row unit in Livingston, Texas, where he awaits his execution. Norman had also been housed in the same unit vicinity, but since the high-profile nature of the case, the two were barred from the common area before their capture and between them a rivalry had grown.
Prison officials confirmed that the two did not share the same cell nor have any contact.
Legal experts had noted that it is rare, actually an anomaly, to have accomplices committing the same crime receive the death penalty at the same time. But in this state of Texas, s, juries handed down the ultimate punishment, and the state’s custom and softened on the pair of executions due to the horror of the murders.
Actions of new sympathy are mounting among rights groups. The non-profit Death Penalty Information Group pointed to the young age of the crimes and the fact that both men have been model prisoners in their years. They have filed emergency petitions for clemency with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, but the governor’s office has yet to indicate an intention to commute the sentences or issuing a temporary stop, h, for the families.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott press team did not return calls for comment.
The victims’ families have stated that they intend to witness both executions of the name of their son. Linda Coker, the mother of Samuel Roberts, was one of the first people to discover the massacre. She went to the house when she didn’t hear from her son, and with her husband, found a horror scene: Selso lying on the floor, Samuel dead in the living room floor, and Tiffany dead beside the bed.
She gave a statement earlier this year that she has waited 21 years for this day to come and that she would be there to see them die.
“He took my boy, my son’s future, and his future mother’s difference,” Coker said in a recorded victim impact testimony. “He was a kid with a bright future. The woman he loved to bring.
And these monsters took it all because of a rumor they heard. There is no time when I can forgive that in this life. I must see justice.”
The prison authorities have set security plans for the executions. The Huntsville prison has a visitation room and a witness room where witnesses are separated by a glass wall from the dying offender. The protocols are the standard route: lethal injection to a semiconductor cocktail of drugs that Texfully uses a single dose of pentobarbital.
There will be news articles and podcasts beyond. But for the state of Texas, the double death, they will be a grim first in many decades for two condemned to die in a stone’s throw of each other, both for the same deadly act.