Killer FedEx driver Tanner Horner snorted a line of cocaine when his attempt to strangle 7-year-old Athena Strand failed, before he beat her to death, a psychiatrist testified at his murder trial Wednesday.
“He tried to kill her by breaking her neck. Then he choked her,” Dr. Eileen Ryan, a psychiatrist who heard Horner’s own description of his gruesome crimes, told the jury.
“She was still alive after he choked her. He could hear her breathing. He did another line of coke,” Ryan continued, reading from her notes.
“So he told you that he used physical blows, whatever his description was, with his fists and his feet?” the prosecution asked on cross examination, to which Ryan responded yes.
Ryan described how Horner told her he tried to put a pill in Strand’s mouth during her abduction.
“To explain the reason why she seems like she’s gagging, he tells you he’s trying to put a pill in her mouth. That’s what he tells you?” the prosecution asked.
Ryan admitted that she didn’t believe Horner’s account.
“I believe that he was attempting to have her perform oral sex,” Ryan said.
Horner, who already confessed to murdering Strand after kidnapping her from her Paradise, Texas, home on Nov. 30, 2022, will learn this week whether or not he will face the death penalty or life in prison.
His defense has tried to argue that he had an abusive childhood and was struggling with his mental health when he abducted and killed the little girl before dumping her body in a rural creek.
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