At just 24 years old, David Lee Daniels, a United States Air Force veteran who had served his country in Vietnam, was trying to build a life for himself back home. Originally from West Virginia, he was working the night shift at a gas station in Hurst, a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The year was 1969, and the crisp autumn air of early November held no warning of the brutal violence that was about to cut his promising life short.
On the night of November 6, 1969, David was alone at his post when three young men entered the station with robbery in mind. One of them was a 19-year-old named Charles Edward Wooten. What began as a robbery escalated into a horrific act of violence. While his accomplices, his 18-year-old brother-in-law and a 17-year-old friend, participated in the robbery, Wooten subjected David to a savage attack, stabbing him 36 times.
The young veteran, who had survived a war zone, died in a place of supposed safety, his life taken for a small amount of cash.
The investigation into David’s murder initially struggled to connect the dots. His death was one of two similar gas station attendant slayings that had terrorized the Fort Worth area that fall. Two months earlier, 58-year-old Loyd Dewey Choat had been kidnapped and shot. The cases remained separate until a crucial break on December 20, when Wooten was arrested during an attempted robbery of a grocery store where his own father worked as an assistant manager. In custody, Wooten's accomplices began to talk, implicating him first in the Choat murder and then, with their testimony, connecting him directly to the vicious killing of David Daniels.
The man responsible for David's death was revealed to be a serial killer. Charles Edward Wooten, who had been paroled just months before his murder spree began after serving a short stint for armed robbery, was a cold and manipulative criminal. To avoid the death penalty, Wooten pleaded guilty in May 1970 to two counts of murder with malice for the deaths of David Daniels and Loyd Choat, as well as the grocery store robbery. He was handed three consecutive life sentences, and it seemed as though he would never again be a threat to society.
Tragically, the story did not end there. Behind bars, Wooten presented himself as a reformed man. His father, Arlis Wooten, campaigned tirelessly for his son's release, convinced of his innocence or redemption. After more than two decades, his efforts succeeded, and Charles Wooten was paroled in May 1992. The freedom his father had fought so hard to secure was repaid with the ultimate betrayal. Just over a year later, in July 1993, Wooten murdered his father during an argument, dismembering his body and attempting to burn the remains.
For this final, monstrous act, Wooten was convicted of capital murder and given another life sentence. The legal system had granted him a second chance, a chance that ended in another family's devastation. His plea deal for his father's murder spared him the death penalty, a decision that disappointed many of his own family members who had hoped for a different outcome.
David Lee Daniels was laid to rest in Beverly Cemetery in his home state of West Virginia, far from the place where his life was so violently taken. He was a son, a decorated sergeant, and a young man with a future that was stolen from him. His name is forever linked to the dark legacy of his killer, a man who not only murdered strangers but also the very person who gave him life and, ultimately, a freedom he did not deserve. Charles Edward Wooten remains incarcerated, with his next parole eligibility set for 2028.
