HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Steven Lawayne Nelson was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. on February 5, 2025, after lethal injection began flowing through his veins at the Huntsville Unit, ending a 12-year wait for justice that stretched across two brutal murders and a litany of violence that left even seasoned investigators shaken.
Nelson, 37, died just 13 days before his 38th birthday. His final moments were not spent addressing the family of the pastor he killed or the secretary he nearly beat to death. Instead, his last words were reserved for the woman he married just three months earlier — a pen pal he had never touched outside prison walls.
“I will always love you no matter. Our love is uncontrollable. There is no definition and no feeling.
I’m thankful and grateful. It is what it is. Always live for me and enjoy life.
Give monkey a hug for me. No, I am not scared. It’s cold in here.
I’m at peace. I’m ready to be at home. Let’s ride warden,” Nelson said, according to witnesses.
The execution was carried out after every appeal failed. State courts, federal judges, and the U. S.
Supreme Court all declined to intervene. Nelson’s final meal was not a choice — Texas protocol dictated he receive whatever other inmates were served that day.
The road to that gurney began on a quiet Thursday morning, March 3, 2011, inside North Point Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas. Pastor Clint Dobson, 28, sat behind his desk — soft-spoken, thoughtful, the kind of man who remembered your name and meant it when he asked how you were.
Across the room, Judy Elliot, 69, the church secretary, typed away at her station. Faithful, kind, and known for never missing a day. Neither of them knew what was coming when 24-year-old Steven Nelson walked through the church doors.
He was not there to pray. He was there to rob.
What followed was fast and violent. Dobson was attacked first, hit in the head with what investigators believe was a monitor stand. He fought back, tried to survive, but it wasn’t enough.
Nelson used a computer cord to strangle the pastor, then suffocated him with a plastic bag until he stopped breathing.
Elliot came next. She was beaten so badly she suffered brain bleeding and multiple broken bones. Her face, arms, legs, and back were so bruised it was hard to tell where one injury ended and the next began.
She lost consciousness before the assault ended.
Then Nelson stopped. He grabbed what he came for — Dobson’s laptop, their phones, Elliot’s credit cards. He took her car keys, stepped over their bodies, and drove off like it was just another Thursday.
It wasn’t. Dobson was gone. Elliot was barely alive.
By early afternoon, concerns began to mount. Dobson had planned to meet church member Dale Harwell for lunch, but he didn’t show, didn’t call, and didn’t answer when reached. At 12:40 p.
m. , another member, Deborah Jenkins, pulled into the church parking lot. Both cars were there, parked side by side like any other day.
But something felt off. The church was too quiet. She rang the doorbell, called the office, but no one came.
After five uneasy minutes, she got back in her car and drove away. Something kept tugging at her, and 15 minutes later, she returned. This time, Judy’s car was gone.
Dobson’s wife, Laura, had been calling repeatedly. Each call went straight to voicemail. Her worry turned to panic.
She called Jake Turner, the church’s part-time music minister, who in turn called Judy’s husband, John Elliot. John didn’t ask questions. He grabbed his keys and headed straight for the church.
Using his passcode to get inside, John called out Dobson’s name. No answer. Then he saw the office — torn apart, papers on the floor, furniture overturned, drawers pulled out.
On the ground lay a woman, bloody and beaten so badly he didn’t recognize her. He fumbled for his phone and called 911.
Arlington police officer Jesse Parish responded. The scene was devastating. Blood was smeared across the floor, a pistol grip plate was broken on the ground, and in the middle of it all lay a woman on her back, her hands tied behind her.
When Parish bent closer, John finally realized it was his wife — recognized only by her clothes.
Then Parish noticed someone else. Behind the desk lay Dobson, face up, hands tied, a plastic bag over his head that had collapsed into his mouth, sealing off his air. Parish pulled it away, but it was too late.
The pastor was already gone.
Judy Elliot, however, was somehow still alive, but barely. Paramedics rushed her to the hospital where doctors worked frantically to stabilize her. Her injuries were overwhelming — fractures to her face, skull, arms, legs, and spine.
Brain bleeding. Signs of brutal trauma. They didn’t think she’d make it.
But she survived. After two weeks in the hospital and five months of physical therapy, Elliot made it back home. Her body was held together by mesh, screws, and metal plates.
Her mind remained sharp. She remembered the attack. And she remembered who did it.
While the church struggled to process what happened, Nelson was already on the move. He stopped by his apartment, then took Elliot’s stolen car to a tire shop, where he popped the trunk and sold Dobson’s laptop to a stranger. By 2 p.
m. , he was using Elliot’s credit card at a gas station, buying fuel, a drink, and a cigar.
Then he went shopping. At the Parks Mall in Arlington, he grabbed an Oscar the Grouch t-shirt, a fresh pair of Air Max shoes, and costume jewelry from Jewelry Hut and Silver Gallery. All paid for with Elliot’s cards.
Later that night, he returned to the same store with friends, but the card was declined.
Back at a friend’s apartment, Nelson walked in wearing the shirt, the shoes, the jewelry. He bragged to everyone that he had stolen it all from a pastor. Then he took some pills, smoked, and told the group exactly what he had done — laid it all out like it meant nothing.
The next day, the weight seemed to sink in. He sent a series of text messages to his cousin. “It might be the last time,” one said.
Another read like a confession: “I did some s— the other day cuz the final one hit like a confession. I up bad cuz real bad.” It was the first glimpse that he might have realized what he had done.
But how did it get this far? Nelson’s life showed signs of breaking from the very beginning. He was born in Ada, Oklahoma on February 18, 1987, into a family home that felt more like survival than shelter.
His mother vanished for days at a time, leaving the children to care for themselves. His father was barely there — and when he was around, he was angry, violent, and hit both the kids and their mother.
By age three, Nelson had already started breaking. One afternoon, he dragged his mother’s mattress into the living room and tried to light it on fire. At age six, he started stealing.
He was breaking into places and lashing out. Oklahoma’s juvenile system took notice, but help didn’t reach him. He was locked up early, sent to a high-risk youth facility while most kids his age were still learning to read.
His family eventually moved to Texas, settling in Tarrant County. The trouble followed. At 14, police arrested him again — this time for stealing a car, burglary, and trespassing.
He was sentenced to an indeterminate stay in juvenile lockup, a rarity for a property crime at his age. It was supposed to be nine months. He stayed more than three and a half years.
Every time they let him go, he broke the rules again. Every time they sent him back, the cycle repeated. In 2011, Nelson was already on thin ice, on probation for assaulting his girlfriend the year before.
On the day of the church attacks, he failed to check in with his probation officer. That was the first red flag.
What police found afterward said more than any missed appointment. His fingerprints covered the crime scene. His belt, torn in two, had been left behind.
Surveillance cameras caught him using Elliot’s credit cards and shopping without a care. And when officers pulled him over behind the wheel of Elliot’s car, he still had items belonging to both victims — and drops of blood on his shoes.
Lab results confirmed the blood belonged to both victims. Nelson was charged with capital murder. But even behind bars, the violence didn’t stop.
While awaiting trial in Tarrant County Jail, he got into fights, damaged property, and assaulted guards. Then, just over a year in, things escalated enormously.
On March 19, 2012, Nelson murdered 31-year-old inmate Jonathan Holden. Holden had a long history of mental illness. Another inmate said Holden made a comment — nobody remembered what — but it set Nelson off.
He tore a blanket and twisted it into a noose. He told Holden to fake a hanging so he could get a transfer.
The game turned real fast. Once the loop tightened around Holden’s neck, Nelson didn’t stop. He braced his feet against the cell bars, leaned back, and pulled until Holden’s body lifted off the ground.
An inmate witness later said Nelson kept asking if four minutes were up — because, in his words, that’s how long it took to kill somebody.
Then came the part no one forgot. Nelson laughed, grabbed a broom, and pretended to play air guitar as Holden’s body lay motionless. That act — the cold, performative cruelty — became a defining moment in how prosecutors and the public would come to understand the man facing trial.
By October 2012, Nelson stood trial for the murder of Clint Dobson. The jury saw the evidence: surveillance footage, stolen credit card charges, Dobson’s bloodstained clothes. But what sealed their decision came later — when they heard what Nelson had done to Jonathan Holden.
Nelson took the stand and pointed fingers at two other men, claiming he was just the lookout, that they were the ones who killed the pastor. Their alibis were tight. His story wasn’t.
He told the jury he waited outside the church for about 25 minutes, finally went in, and saw both victims on the ground — beaten but alive.
He insisted he didn’t kill anyone, that he just took the laptop and that one of the others handed him the car keys and credit cards. His version didn’t hold up, not in court and not against the evidence. The jury didn’t take long.
On October 8, 2012, they found Nelson guilty of capital murder and attempted capital murder.
Eight days later, they returned with a unanimous decision: the death penalty. Right after sentencing, Nelson yanked apart a fire sprinkler in the courtroom, flooding the place with black liquid. It was the last act he could own.
Everything after that belonged to the state.
Nelson spent the next 12 years on death row inside Texas’s Polunsky Unit, filing appeals at every level — state courts, federal judges, even the U. S. Supreme Court.
All failed. His case moved steadily toward the execution chamber, and with each denied appeal, the date drew closer.
On February 5, 2025, Nelson lay strapped to the gurney, eyes fixed on a woman he had never touched outside prison walls — his wife, a pen pal he met five years earlier and married just three months before. His final words were not for the victims or their families. They were for her.
Judy Elliot had passed away the year before, but her son was there in the witness room, watching the man who had nearly killed his mother take his final breath. Nelson had no words for him. No apology.
No acknowledgment of the lives he destroyed.
The warden gave the signal, and the injection began to flow. Nelson turned toward the glass, looking at his wife and dog one more time. “Let me go to sleep,” he told her.
The word “love” slipped out as his voice faded. His body tensed. He gasped twice and appeared to try to hold his breath.
His head, shoulders, and arms trembled for a few seconds before all movement stopped.
He was pronounced dead 24 minutes later.
For the family of Clint Dobson, for the son of Judy Elliot, and for the family of Jonathan Holden, the execution closes a chapter more than a decade in the making. But the scars remain. A church office that once welcomed worshippers became a crime scene.
A quiet Thursday morning turned into a nightmare that rippled through Arlington and far beyond.
Nelson’s final act on earth was one of selfishness — his last words directed solely at the woman he loved, with nothing for those who loved the people he took. The state of Texas carried out its sentence, and Steven Lawayne Nelson was gone, 13 days short of his 38th birthday, leaving behind nothing but the memory of what he did and the families he shattered along the way.
