The Death of Nikki Curtis

A sick week

In the winter of 2002, Robert Leslie Roberson III was living in Palestine, an East Texas county seat, with his daughter, Nikki Michelle Curtis. He was thirty-five. She had turned two that October.

The house also held his girlfriend, Teddie Cox, and her ten-year-old daughter, and an eleven-year-old niece was often there. Nikki's grandparents on her mother's side, Larry and Verna Bowman, lived nearby. According to the Tyler paper, they had at one point fought for custody of her.

Nikki had a history the jury would never hear about. When she was ten months old, her pediatrician wrote that she was under her care for "several apneic episodes," spells where she stopped breathing, and that the cause was "undetermined." She slept on an apnea monitor at home.

In the last week of January 2002, Nikki got sick: vomiting, diarrhea, a cough. On Monday the 28th she was seen in the emergency room at Palestine Regional Medical Center with a fever of 103.1 and sent home with medicine for the nausea and diarrhea. That same day Teddie Cox went into the hospital for surgery, and Roberson took Nikki to stay with the Bowmans.

On Tuesday she was at the pediatrician's office with a fever of 104.5. She went home with an antibiotic and a cough syrup, Phenergan with codeine.

On Wednesday, Verna Bowman fell ill herself and could not keep a sick two-year-old. At about half past nine that night Roberson came to collect his daughter. Teddie Cox would later testify that he had never before been asked to be Nikki's sole caretaker. This was the first time.

His account of the night

What happened over the next ten hours has one witness, the man who was convicted. This is his account, as police recorded it in the sworn complaint.

Nikki fell asleep in his arms some time after eleven, and he put her in his bed: a full-size mattress and box springs set up on gray masonry blocks. Police measured the top of it at twenty-one and a half inches above a carpeted wooden floor.

At about five in the morning, he said, he heard her crying and found her on the floor at the foot of the bed, with "blood around her lips" and "a bruise or something under her chin." He cleaned her up and kept her awake for about two hours. Then they went back to sleep. When the alarm went off, she was "not moving" and "a little blue."

He told it more than once, and not the same way each time. To a nurse at the hospital he said she fell at half past five and that he had tried to wake her every hour. To Teddie Cox, she testified, he said he had not heard her cry at all, and that she had hit her head on "the table." His lawyers would argue years later that he meant the cinder blocks.

"His story just doesn't match"

On the morning of Thursday, January 31, Roberson brought Nikki into the emergency room at Palestine Regional, where Teddie Cox was still a patient. Nikki was in her lap, in a wheelchair, limp and blue. He told a nurse, Kelly Gurganus, "If I'd known that she'd fallen off the bed this far I would have never let her sleep with me."

The nurses watched him, and they did not like what they saw. Gurganus had the director of nurses call the police. She later testified, "I felt like basically spitting in his face." The chief nursing officer said he was "somewhat more calm than I would be." Another nurse said he "didn't appear as upset as other parents that I've seen with injured children."

The ER doctor, Thomas Konjoyan, testified that swelling on her brain "necessitated her transfer to the Children's Medical Center in Dallas for pediatric neurosurgical services." She was transferred that afternoon.

The case went to Sergeant Brian Wharton. Police searched the house and, the Tyler paper reported, found nothing to support Roberson's story. Years later Wharton testified that everyone on the law enforcement team thought there was something wrong with him, that he made a sandwich while detectives searched the house, and that he "was there, but he wasn't there."

On Friday, February 1, Dr. Janet Squires, who ran the child-abuse program at Children's, called the Palestine police. On her affidavit and an investigator's, Roberson was arrested for capital murder that day. At 7.04 that evening, after the decision to end life support was made with her grandparents, Nikki was pronounced dead.

The autopsy was not until the next morning. Three days later the Tyler paper had the story.

"I've been in the department 10 years," Wharton told the paper, "and I don't remember ever having anything like this — ever."

A shaken baby case

Dr. Jill Urban of the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences performed the autopsy at 7.30 on the morning of February 2. She gave the cause of death as "blunt force head injuries" and the manner as "Homicide." She recorded bleeding around the brain and in the eyes, bruises on the face and chin, and no skull fracture.

That June, District Attorney Doug Lowe announced he would seek the death penalty.

The paper put it over the story plainly: "Death Penalty Sought In Shaken Baby Case."

The trial opened in Palestine before Judge Bascom W. Bentley III, with seven women and five men on the jury and eight days of testimony. Dr. Squires told the jury Nikki was a victim of shaken baby syndrome. "It's a very violent forceful act," she said. "It is not something that ever happens accidentally." Dr. Urban testified that "shaking also falls into this definition of blunt force," and that there was no way to separate how much of Nikki's death came from shaking and how much from impact.

Teddie Cox testified that, within about a month of Nikki's death, she once saw Roberson shake Nikki for a few seconds and throw her back on the bed. The two girls testified that they had seen him shake her too.

The defence did not fight the medicine. Roberson's lead lawyer, Steve Evans, told the jury in closing: "Yes, this is a shaken baby case, but no, this is not a murder case."

On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, at 3.45 p.m., the jury found Roberson guilty of capital murder. His mother, Carolyn, had been in court every day.

At the punishment phase a State psychologist spoke about the callousness he said Roberson showed. On Friday, February 14, after less than four hours, the jury returned a sentence of death.

"I'm still sad about the death of Nikki," Lowe told the paper. "It was a needless death." That August, Evans said it again in the Telegraph's series on shaken baby cases: "We agreed that it was a shaken baby case. This was a situation where this individual lost control."

The junk-science writ

The appeals ran quietly. The Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction in 2007, and a federal appeal failed in 2015. Even then, the wire story said, his lawyers were saying the child "likely was fatally shaken or dropped."

But in 2013 Texas had passed a law, Article 11.073, that lets a prisoner go back to court when the science used to convict has changed. In 2015 it was widened to cover a change in a whole field of knowledge.

Roberson was given an execution date of June 21, 2016, and his new lawyers, led by Gretchen Sween, filed under that law. On June 16 the Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution and sent the case back to Anderson County.

The hearing opened on August 14, 2018. On that same day, Nikki's medical records were found in the basement of the Anderson County courthouse.

Two readings of one autopsy

Roberson's experts say the week of illness explains what happened. The lung pathologist Dr. Francis Green concluded:

A toxicologist, Dr. Kennan Bora, said the promethazine level in her blood was "clear evidence that [Nikki] was given too much promethazine," and pointed to an anti-seizure drug in her blood with no record of anyone giving it. Codeine had been prescribed, but it was not on the autopsy drug screen. A forensic pathologist, Dr. Harry Bonnell, said a mis-placed breathing tube that morning had kept half of her lung from getting air. A radiologist, Dr. Julie Mack, read the scans as one impact to the right side of the head: "There is no skull fracture." In February 2025 ten pathologists signed a statement that the autopsy "is not reliable."

The State has never accepted any of it. The autopsy's blood culture grew nothing, and it found "no evidence of meningitis." Tests for older bleeding were negative. The State's pathologist at the hearing, Dr. James Downs, agreed with Dr. Urban: multiple blunt-force injuries, a homicide. The ER doctor called the fall Roberson described "extremely implausible or unlikely." And in 2022 the First Assistant DA, Scott Holden, put the State's view in one line: "Most of their scientific evidence is not new. Nothing. Not the pneumonia, not the injuries."

Neither side has a clean answer. The defence must account for bruises on her face and chin. The State must account for a fatal head injury with no skull fracture and no neck injury.

"I did not see Robert"

In 2018 a neuropsychologist, Dr. Diane Mosnik, diagnosed Roberson with autism spectrum disorder, which can show as a flat affect: a frightened or grieving person can look calm. Nobody at the 2003 trial knew. The calm the nurses described, the sandwich, the man who "was there, but he wasn't there," had all gone before the jury without it.

In 2022 Brian Wharton signed a sworn declaration breaking with the case. On October 16, 2024, the day before Roberson was due to be executed, he testified to a committee of the Texas House.

"We constructed an appeals system because we understood that we get things wrong," he said. "Don't make my mistake." A week later, in a written statement: "I had doubts then, but today I am certain that nothing here supports a continued effort by the State to execute Mr. Roberson."

He is the only person from law enforcement in the case known to have changed his mind. He is not a doctor.

October 2024

By then the hearing was over. In February 2022 the habeas court recommended denying relief on every claim, and in January 2023 the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed without writing an opinion of its own.

Then, on October 9, 2024, the same court threw out the conviction of Andrew Roark, a Dallas County shaken baby case in which Dr. Squires had also testified. In Roark's case she had stepped back from part of her testimony. In Roberson's, the Anderson County DA, Allyson Mitchell, told lawmakers that Dr. Squires "stood by her original diagnosis," and said that shaken baby, "now called abusive head trauma, is widely recognized nationally and internationally as a viable medical diagnosis."

With the execution set for October 17, the parole board voted against clemency and the House committee subpoenaed Roberson to testify. On the day itself, the Supreme Court of Texas stayed the execution. In November it ruled that a subpoena cannot stop a scheduled execution, a dispute it said had "nothing to do with Roberson's guilt or innocence." Roberson never testified.

A juror did. On October 21, 2024, Terre Compton told the committee:

The foreman, Steven Cubstead, answered two weeks later. "I didn't vote to convict Roberson due to shaken baby syndrome," he said in a statement. "I voted to convict him for the bruises on Nikki's face," and for what he called "her crushed skull." The autopsy records no skull fracture. "I have no trouble sleeping at night," he said.

The Attorney General's office released the autopsy and said the lawmakers had "created a Constitutional crisis on behalf of a man who beat his two-year-old daughter to death."

Still waiting

A third execution date was set for October 16, 2025. A week before it, on October 9, the Court of Criminal Appeals stayed it and sent the case back for one question only: whether Roberson's junk-science claim succeeds in light of Roark. The trial court "shall not entertain nor address any other claims."

The judges split the way the jury box had. One counted shaken baby syndrome referenced "over 130 times" in the State's case at trial. Another was reported to have called it "a 'blunt-force trauma' case." The record also shows Dr. Urban's later testimony: "Well, again, I don't know that there is a shaking component here." Roberson's side calls that a recantation; the State says her opinion never changed, and she has kept her finding of blunt force.

The remand went to Judge Austin Reeve Jackson. At a hearing in Palestine in April 2026 he said, "let's hash out how Roark does or doesn't change things." The defence asked for an in-person hearing with live witnesses; the State opposed what it called "premature attempts at evidentiary development."

As of October 2026, Judge Jackson has not ruled. When the docket was last checked, on October 4, there was no hearing order and no execution date. The House committee wrote in 2024 that if Roberson is executed, he would be the first person in the country executed on a shaken baby case. That is the committee's claim.

Robert Roberson has been on death row for more than twenty-three years. Nikki Curtis would have turned twenty-seven this month.