A Texas man is still on death row for a 24-year-old double murder despite new evidence in the case that may prove his innocence.
50-year-old Ivan Cantu was sentenced to death for the 2000 murder of his cousin, James Mosqueda, and his cousin’s fiancée, Amy Kitchen.
He is set to be executed in just 20 days.
This comes after his previous two execution dates were canceled.
The last time was in April of 2023, when claims of post-trail evidence which include a key witness who admitted he lied while testifying and the discovery of a watch Cantu was accused of stealing, were brought to light.
Cantu’s legal team and private investigators say this evidence is sufficient enough to warrant a new trial, but no state or federal court has reviewed the growing body of information questioning his guilt. And after last year’s scheduled execution was paused, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed Cantu’s request for an evidentiary hearing without offering an explanation for the rejection.
According to The Texas Tribune, the Collin County district attorney’s office relied heavily on the testimony of Amy Boettcher, Cantu’s then fiancée, who testified that Cantu committed the murders, and took her to the crime scene before a trip to Arkansas to visit her mother and stepfather.
According to court filings, police initially found Mosqueda’s car outside Cantu’s apartment the day after the bodies were discovered. They also found bloody pants, matching the victims’ DNA, in Cantu’s trash can.
Boettcher claims she disposed of Cantu’s bloody jeans in a trash can inside his kitchen shortly after the murders, and that Cantu threw Mosqueda’s Rolex watch out of a car window as the couple was driving to a club in downtown Dallas shortly after the murders.
However, Cantu has maintained his innocence since he was arrested over 20 years ago. He says his cousin was a local drug dealer, and that a rival dealer who he owed a lot of money to killed him.
Boettcher’s brother, Jeff Boettcher, also testified against Cantu. He told the jury that Cantu told him about the murders in advance and even recruited him to clean up afterward.
But after his sister died in 2021, a 2022 video of Jeff Boettcher’s conversation an investigator and an attorney, show him stating that he lied during his testimony, and that at the time of the trial, he was in a difficult point in his life and his testimony wasn’t reliable because he was out of the state at the time of the murders and was a frequent drug user.
A signed affidavit from the officer who performed a wellness check on Cantu after the murders also suggests his innocence.
Cantu’s mother reportedly requested this after learning about the murders. The officer who went stated that she did not see bloody clothes in the trash can. Cantu and Boettcher were not home, as they were in Arkansas at the time of the wellness check.
Cantu says this affidavit that the officer provided in 2020 is proof that someone placed the clothes in his home to frame him for the murders.
Additionally, Cantu’s legal team discovered that in 2019, officers recovered Mosqueda’s Rolex after finding it in his home and returned it to his family shortly after the murder.
Cantu is scheduled to be put to death on February 28th.
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