94-year-old woman under indictment in Tarrant County for murder dies in state hospital
A murder charge was dismissed Tuesday following the death of a 94-year-old suspect who had been the oldest person under indictment in Tarrant County in a pending murder case.
Kristal Florene Locke died in August at a state hospital in San Antonio, according to Tarrant County criminal court documents filed this month.
Locke was accused of shooting her neighbor to death in Hurst in 2003. She was found incompetent to stand trial more than a dozen times.
So for years, Locke was ordered to remain at state hospitals in Texas, according to court records.
Her cause of death was unavailable on Wednesday. Her funeral was on Sept. 1, 2019. She was survived by a son, three grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.
In 2016, at one of her most recent court hearings, Locke was found incompetent based on the recommendation of the medical staff at the San Antonio State Hospital, where she has been undergoing treatment the last few years.
Dr. Matthew Hopkins wrote that there had been no significant changes in Locke’s clinical presentation, saying she remains “paranoid, delusional and not competent to stand trial.” Hopkins also said she was likely to cause serious harm to others.
Killing of neighbor
Locke was accused of fatally shooting her neighbor Linda Porter on April 11, 2003, at a condominium complex in the 600 block of Bellaire Drive in Hurst. According to Hurst police, Locke, then 78, believed that Porter, 55, was trying to steal a man from her.
Porter didn’t know the man, but Locke was fixated on him and had been harassing him for more than 20 years, authorities said.
In the days before Porter was killed, Locke was banned from the Hurst Community Center after she had an argument with a female employee who Locke believed was trying to have a relationship with the same man.
Locke still believes that she shot Porter in self-defense, according to an April 2016 report by Dr. Vicky L. Litton at the San Antonio hospital.
Asked why she was in the hospital, Locke replied, “I don’t want to remember why I’m here,” according to the report.
After a court-ordered evaluation, a psychiatrist wrote that it “seems unlikely she will ever be able to have her competency restored.”
Psychiatrists said Locke had severe delusional disorder.
“She is unable to cooperate sufficiently with an attorney to prepare a defense because of her pervasive illogicality around her killing Linda Porter,” Dr. Raymond Faber wrote in his May 2014 evaluation.
On the other hand, Faber wrote, Locke was cooperative and readily explained that she was being kept in a hospital because she had shot and killed Porter.
His evaluation is almost a carbon copy of every one she had had since 2003. By law, Locke had to go before a jury each year to determine if she was competent, and since 2003, jurors found her incompetent.
Santiago Salinas of Fort Worth, who was appointed her attorney in April 2013, agreed with the assessment. He visited Locke in San Antonio in early September 2014.
“It’s sad,” Salinas said in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I don’t see her being competent, and she’ll remain a patient at state hospitals.”
In San Antonio, Locke took medications such as Prozac, Librium and Thorazine.
She preferred her surviving son not visit her, but she took telephone calls and visits from a niece from Houston, one of her few living relatives.
Years of harassment
In an April 2003 interview, John Cosgrove told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he met Locke in 1980 at the Texas Rehabilitation Commission in Fort Worth, where he worked and where Locke sought help for a neck ailment.
“I took her application for assistance, and I also could tell that she could use some mental-health help,” Cosgrove said. “I did all I could that day and closed the case.”
A week later, Cosgrove said, he received the first call from Locke in what would become 23 years of telephone harassment.
Faber’s May 2014 evaluation, other psychiatric reports obtained by the Star-Telegram and Tarrant County court records indicate that Locke had been mentally ill since her mid-30s. They give this account of the shooting and Locke’s mental history:
Locke and her husband had two sons during 34 years of marriage. They divorced in 1978. She told doctors that by that time, she had been mentally ill for 20 years. Her illness went largely untreated, she said. Before 1982, she was hospitalized only twice at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth for being overtly psychotic with paranoid delusions. Despite her illness, she was able to maintain work in accounting.
In July 1982, Locke was accused of shooting a woman in the driveway of the woman’s Bedford home. Locke believed that the woman, a former friend, was trying to steal Cosgrove.
A few months later, a Tarrant County jury determined that Locke was incompetent to stand trial and she was committed to Rusk State Hospital, where she spent a year before being released because doctors determined she was competent to stand trial. But prosecutors asked the judge to dismiss the attempted murder charge.
Then in December 2001, Locke became a suspect in a harassment case in Haltom City after a woman told police that Locke threatened to kill her because Locke believed the woman was trying to steal Cosgrove. Haltom City never filed a case against Locke because they had no recordings of the threats.
Through all the years, she continued to harass Cosgrove, even after he moved with his wife to Virginia, then to Oklahoma and back to Virginia.
In 2003, days before the fatal shooting of Porter, Locke was banned from the Hurst Recreation Center after she got into a verbal confrontation with a female employee who Locke believed was trying to have a relationship with Cosgrove.
Locke even began telephone harassment of Hurst police and intensified her phone campaign on Cosgrove. Locke made 106 calls to 911 from April 3 to April 11, the day that Porter was shot in 2003, according to Hurst police records. She was calling Cosgrove at least five times a day.
And despite her history of mental illness, on April 10, 2003, Locke walked into Affordable Firearms in Hurst, passed the mandated background check, and bought a .38-caliber handgun for $162.38.
This report includes material from Star-Telegram archives.
This story was originally published January 8, 2020 at 11:18 AM.
