A Texas death row inmate who gained notoriety after a brazen escape from jail has been executed for the double murder of his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend in 1998.
Charles Victor Thompson, 55, was executed by lethal injection on Wednesday, Jan. 28, for the murder of 39-year-old Dennise Hayslip and her boyfriend, 31-year-old Darren Cain. The couple was killed at Hayslip’s Houston-area apartment after she told Thompson that she wanted to be with Cain, court records say.
Thompson was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. CT.
“I hope the victim’s family, their extended family, and their loved ones can find forgiveness in their heart and that you can begin to heal and move past this,” Thompson said as part of his last words, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “There is no winners in this situation, it creates more victims and traumatizes more people 28 years later.”
He went on to say: “I’m sorry for what I did.”
Thompson’s execution is the first to be carried out in the U.S. this year. It follows a particularly busy 2025 for the death penalty, with 47 inmates executed. Another 17 inmates so far are scheduled to be put to death this year, including a woman in Tennessee, though that number will change significantly as governors approve more death warrants or inmates win reprieves.
Among the witnesses to Thompson’s execution was 41-year-old Wade Hayslip, who was just 13 years old when his mother Dennise was killed. He told USA TODAY this week that Thompson’s death will not bring him closure, but that his life “is the only thing he has left to offer in accountability for the lives he’s destroyed.”
“It’s more of the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the new one.”
Here’s what you need to know about the execution.
On April 30, 1998, Dennise Hayslip told her ex-boyfriend, Charles Victor Thompson, that she wanted to be with Darren Cain. Thompson had gone over to Hayslip’s apartment around 3 a.m. and had been drinking, according to archived news reports.
While there, the two men fought, and police arrived. They allowed Thompson to leave, but he returned three hours later with a gun, court records show.
Thompson broke down the apartment door and shot Cain four times, according to court records. He then shot Hayslip in the leg, presumably as she ran away, then shot her at close range in the cheek.
Thompson fled, dumped the gun in a creek, and then went to a friend’s house to take a nap, court records say. The next day, he turned himself into authorities.
While Cain died at the scene, Hayslip initially survived and told multiple people that “Chuck” was responsible for the shooting, court records say. She died several days later in a hospital.
Thirteen-year-old Wade Hayslip was at school during the attack.
At trial, Thompson’s attorneys argued that he didn’t deserve the death penalty because he had been obsessed with Dennise Hayslip and was drunk when he committed the crime. They also unsuccessfully tried to blame Hayslip’s death on the emergency room doctors who treated her.
Prosecutors at times referred to Thompson as a “pretty boy” who was a narcissistic sociopath and became violent when angry. They also repeatedly called him “Chuckster Killer,” a name they say he used in letters from prison.
Thirty-nine-year-old Dennise Hayslip owned her own nail salon and worked six days a week as a nail technician, her son told USA TODAY. Wade’s mother and father, a mechanic named Felix Hayslip, divorced in 1996 when he was 11.
Wade, a married father of three boys who now lives in Chicago and works in business development, said his family never had a lot of money growing up, but that his mom always prioritized paying for private school for him.
“There were times we knew when she wrote checks that they were probably going to bounce,” he said. But somehow, she managed. “She worked hard and made sure we never went hungry.”
He said his mother always taught him to look out for others. He recalled how he once told his mom that he was going to hang out with a new friend who was an outcast at school because of a severe medical condition.
“She started crying, she was so proud,” he said.
In the years since the murder, Wade said that every milestone in his life has had a void, an achingly empty space where his mother should be.
There was dating for the first time, graduating from high school, and becoming the first in his family to go to college. Then there was getting married and having children of his own.
With each new life event, Hayslip has the same thought: “I wish I had advice from Mom – that affirmation that she was proud of me and she loved me.”
As Wade Hayslip struggled with life without his mom, Thompson made national headlines after carrying out a brazen escape in 2005.
Left alone in an attorney visitation room at a Harris County jail during a resentencing hearing, Thompson somehow removed his handcuffs and then changed out of his prison jumpsuit and into khakis and a golf shirt that he smuggled in. Armed with an altered prison ID card that covered the word “offender” with tape, Thompson then posed as an investigator with the Texas Attorney General’s Office and walked out of the front door of the jail, according to archived news reports.
Thompson then hopped on a freight train and traveled 240 miles northeast to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he posed as a Hurricane Katrina evacuee. He was taken into custody after authorities, acting on a tip, found him drunk and penniless outside a liquor store.
Thompson also made the news when a Houston Chronicle story reported that he had sought companionship by starting his own website not long after he landed on death row.
“I am a very firm believer that everyone needs someone in their life and I need you,” Thompson wrote, according to the Chronicle. “I am a very interesting person with a lot of character and I just need someone to share that with.”
At the time of his death, Thompson had nearly 400 supporters on a Facebook page called Friends of Charles Victor Thompson. The page, run by a woman in Great Britain who has visited Thompson repeatedly over the years, has raised money for his legal defense by posting T-shirts for sale and directing people to Thompson’s Patreon account, which requires users to pay to read his content.
As for the killings, Thompson has called them a “crime of passion.” Thompson told the Houston Press in October that he shot Cain in self-defense and that Hayslip got shot in the cheek as she tried to intervene.
“There were no winners in this situation,” Thompson said. “It’s tragic what happened. I regret it. I have remorse. I want people to be able to heal and move past it. I pray for them and I’ve asked them to forgive me.”
Wade Hayslip refutes Thompson’s repeated claims that he has asked for forgiveness and said his pain has been compounded over the years by all the press attention on Thompson and by occasional hate mail he gets from people who apparently sympathize with the death row inmate.
“That’s part of the problem with this grieving process,” he said. “I’ve mourned and grieved her loss, but it’s still been an active thing because he’s been so visible in the public eye … That has overshadowed who she was and what she represented.”
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers cold case investigations and the death penalty for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.