GATESVILLE — The Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit sits north of Gatesville, on 97 acres in Coryell County. To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, it is one women’s prison among many, with custody levels, medical services, education programs, work assignments and reentry efforts.
But O’Daniel has one role no other women’s prison in Texas has. It houses the state’s female death row.
The prison, formerly known as the Mountain View Unit, holds women classified from G1 through G5, along with women in security detention and women sentenced to death. TDCJ lists the unit’s capacity at 644 and its current senior warden as Andrea Lozada. The agency says the unit has 300 employees, including 224 security staff. Its operations include medical, dental and mental health services, a chronic care clinic, 20 inpatient mental health beds, a braille facility, faith-based programming, reentry work, horticulture, cosmetology, peer recovery support, the Women’s Storybook Project, Patriot Paws and a prison podcast and radio program called The Tank.
The name changed recently. TDCJ says Mountain View opened as a boys’ school in 1962. The prison system acquired it in 1975, and it reopened as a women’s prison. In December 2023, the Texas Board of Criminal Justice voted unanimously to rename it for Patrick L. O’Daniel, a former board chairman who served from 2017 to 2023 and became chairman in 2020. TDCJ credited O’Daniel with work tied to pandemic response, correctional officer pay, rehabilitation, faith-based programming, prison libraries and the Windham School District.
The new name is formal. The old one had a bleak irony. Mountain View was a prison without a mountain, and for the women on death row, not much of a view.
For condemned women in Texas, O’Daniel is the waiting place. Executions are not carried out there. TDCJ says male death row inmates are housed at the Polunsky Unit near Livingston, while female death row inmates are housed at O’Daniel. Executions take place at the Huntsville Unit.
That makes O’Daniel a small but important piece of the Texas death penalty system. Most of the unit runs like a women’s prison. Classes continue. Medical appointments happen. Work programs operate. Volunteers come through the gate. But inside the same institution is the state’s smallest and most unusual death row.
TDCJ’s public roster currently lists seven women on Texas death row. They are Taylor Parker of Bowie County, Kimberly Cargill of Smith County, Melissa Lucio of Cameron County, Linda Carty of Harris County, Brittany Holberg of Randall County, Darlie Routier of Dallas County and Erica Sheppard of Harris County.
The cases have drawn different kinds of attention. Routier’s case has long attracted claims of wrongful conviction. Carty, a British citizen originally from St. Kitts, has drawn international attention. Lucio’s case became one of Texas’ most prominent death penalty controversies after lawmakers, advocates and jurors questioned her conviction in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah. In April 2024, a Cameron County judge recommended overturning Lucio’s conviction and death sentence, finding that prosecutors withheld evidence favorable to the defense. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals still had final authority over the case.
Brittany Holberg’s case also changed in 2025. A federal appeals court reversed her conviction after finding problems tied to testimony from a paid informant, according to NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. Holberg remained listed at O’Daniel while further proceedings continued.
Taylor Parker is the newest woman on Texas death row. She was sentenced to death in 2022 for killing Reagan Hancock and abducting Hancock’s unborn child in Bowie County. TDCJ’s inmate record lists Parker’s current facility as the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit and her maximum sentence as death row.
O’Daniel’s death row has historically been described as different from the men’s death row at Polunsky. TDCJ says death row inmates are assigned special death row numbers rather than regular TDCJ identification numbers. The agency also says male death row inmates at Polunsky are housed in single-person cells with windows and recreate individually. Women sentenced to death are housed separately at O’Daniel.
Older reporting described the women’s death row as smaller and, in some ways, less stark than the men’s version. Contemporary accounts from around 2000 described condemned women moving into a renovated one-story red-brick building that had previously housed psychiatric patients. The area was described as having two rows of cells, a day room, a work area and a recreation yard. Those details should be treated as historical descriptions unless TDCJ confirms current conditions, because prison housing rules and internal operations can change.
That is one of the difficulties in writing about O’Daniel. The women’s death row is often discussed in softer terms because it is small and because some programming has historically existed there that men on death row did not receive. But small is not gentle. A work assignment, a radio or a religious visit does not change the sentence.
One of the unit’s better-known programs is its braille operation. TDCJ lists a braille facility among O’Daniel’s manufacturing and logistics work. The program has been described in past reporting as one of the largest prison braille programs in the country, training incarcerated women to transcribe textbooks and other educational materials for blind and visually impaired students. It is a complicated image, and a useful one. Women held by the state produce school materials for children they will never meet.
Religion also has a strong presence at the unit. In 2025, The New Yorker reported on the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, a contemplative Catholic order whose members began visiting women on Texas’ death row after an invitation from Deacon Ronnie Lastovica, who had ministered to condemned women at the unit. Texas Standard later discussed the reporting and described the relationships that formed between the nuns and the women housed at O’Daniel.
Texas has executed six women since the death penalty resumed. TDCJ records list Karla Faye Tucker in 1998, Betty Lou Beets in 2000, Frances Newton in 2005, Kimberly McCarthy in 2013, Suzanne Basso in 2014 and Lisa Coleman in 2014. Tucker’s execution drew international attention. She was the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War era, and her religious conversion and clemency effort made her a national figure before her death.
O’Daniel also houses women who are not on death row but remain widely known. Yolanda Saldívar, convicted of murdering Tejano star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in 1995, is serving a life sentence at O’Daniel. She became eligible for parole in 2025 and was denied. NBC 5 reported that her next review is set for 2030.
Amber Guyger, the former Dallas police officer convicted of murdering Botham Jean in his own apartment, has also been listed by TDCJ at the facility.
Those names give O’Daniel an outsized place in public memory. From the outside, it can look like a holding place for Texas’ most notorious women. That is true only in the narrowest sense. Most of what happens at O’Daniel is ordinary prison work. Medical care, mental health treatment, education, job training, chaplaincy, reentry planning, family programs and volunteer services make up much of the unit’s daily function.
In a 2024 TDCJ publication, Lozada, who began her career as a field officer at the then-Mountain View Unit and became senior warden in November 2021, described the warden’s role as running the unit while encouraging inmates and staff through difficult periods. The same publication highlighted O’Daniel’s STRIVE program, Billman Braille Center, The Tank radio station and individualized housing dorms.
That language belongs to rehabilitation. Death row does not fit neatly inside it.
A woman sentenced to death may take part in programs, receive visits, write letters, seek religious guidance and pursue appeals for decades. But unless a court, the governor or the parole board intervenes, the legal endpoint remains the same. O’Daniel holds the women. Huntsville carries out the sentence.
That is the central contradiction of the unit. It is a prison with school programs and death sentences, braille work and isolation, chaplains and execution dates. It was once a boys’ school, then a women’s prison, then the home of Texas’ female death row. In 2023, it received a new name. The function stayed.
The paperwork now says Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit.
There is still no mountain.
