The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son’s death in a
hit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story about
Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then on
death row. The article captured Tucker’s innocent beauty, the
stunning brutality of her crimes — committed with a pickaxe — and
the stories of her spiritual awakening on death row. Struck by
these apparent contradictions, Lowry found herself inexplicably
drawn to Tucker, who some ten years later would become the first
woman to be executed in Texas since 1863.
Lowry eventually began to visit Tucker in prison, and over the
course of several years she listened to the tragic story of her
life before the murders and, in turn, told Karla Faye about her own
life and the life and death of her son Peter. Crossed Over is a
memoir of this time, a moving account of an unlikely but profound
and genuine friendship created in the confines of a visiting room
on death row. Now with a new foreword that recounts Tucker’s last
days and Lowry’s experiences at her execution, Crossed Over is also
an intimate portrait of a life gone tragically awry and then
redeemed behind bars.