FORT WORTH -- She'd embarrassed him, and it made him mad.
So Ryland Shane Absalon said he sneaked into the young woman's apartment while she was gone, waited in the closet until she returned, showered and went to bed, and then stabbed her more than 50 times until he believed she was dead.When he heard her moan, he said, he stabbed some more.That was the chilling account of the death of 18-year-old Ginger Hayden that prosecution witness Sean Garrett told to jurors Wednesday in Absalon's capital murder trial.Garrett testified that Absalon confessed when the two men were participants in a drug and alcohol treatment program about two years after the killing, which was on Sept. 5, 1984.Hayden and Absalon were friends from Arlington Heights High School. She was just about to begin classes at the University of Texas at Arlington."He told me he was angry," Garrett testified. "He told me he wanted to have more of a relationship with her, that he wanted to be more than friends. Her response was no, but he was real embarrassed."He stabbed until he was tired and thought she was dead," Garrett said, choking up briefly. "His intentions were to kill her."Absalon, 17 at the time of the killing, cleaned up in the bathroom, threw his jacket and shoes in a nearby trash bin and went back to the apartment he shared with his father upstairs from Hayden and her mother, Garrett said.The confession started out calmly but became emotional as Absalon revealed the details, Garrett said."He was upset. He was sad," Garrett said. "There was remorse.""Did he cry?" asked prosecutor Jim Hudson."Oh, yes," Garrett said.Absalon, now 45, was charged nearly 30 years after Hayden's killing when the Fort Worth police department's cold case unit conducted new DNA tests that linked him to the crime scene.News coverage of Absalon's arrest in 2010 brought out Garrett, who lives in Kaufman County, and other witnesses who said they heard him confess but had never reported the confessions to authorities.The confession Garrett described closely mirrors the evidence in Hayden's killing. The young woman was stabbed 57 times in the head, breast and pubic area until she collapsed beside her blood-soaked bed. She died in a kneeling position, covered in blood. A sliding glass door in her bedroom appeared locked but was not fully closed, investigators testified.Absalon, however, seemed confident that he would never be charged, Garrett said. "He said, 'They'll never find out,'" Garrett said. "They'd never know, because he covered it up too well."Defense attorney Gary Udashen questioned Garrett about the harsh Straight program that he said was eventually closed by authorities in the 1990s.Udashen has suggested through questioning that Absalon falsely confessed to the crime because he believed that his only way to advance out of the program was to participate. Participants were told that their comments were strictly confidential and would never be revealed outside the program.Garrett acknowledged under questioning that the staff and other participants had been harsh with Absalon once they realized police were questioning him."Counselors, everybody and their dog, was working him to tell them," Garrett told cold case Detective Thomas O'Brien in a tape-recorded interview. "He was pinned down. Talking about tightening the screws. They wore him out."But Garrett told jurors Wednesday, "Everybody at Straight Inc. got worked. The same thing happened to me."Garrett, now a minister, said he credits the program with turning his life around.Dianna Hunt, 817-390-7084Twitter: @DiannaHunt
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