When Wade Hayslip was 13 years old, a youth pastor pulled him aside and told him he needed to get out of his mother’s house. “Move in with your grandmother or I’m calling Child Protective Services,” the minister said.
The pastor was concerned that a toxic situation with Hayslip’s mom and her on-and-off boyfriend, Chuck Thompson, could soon reach a boiling point. Going to his dad’s house wasn’t an option because that situation wasn’t great either. The teen, an only child, packed a bag and moved in with his grandma in Spring.
Five months later, Hayslip’s mother was dead, and Thompson was charged with capital murder. And almost three decades later, the state of Texas is preparing to execute Thompson by lethal injection at the end of January.
Back on April 30, 1998, Hayslip was pulled out of an eighth-grade science lab at Trinity Klein Lutheran School, where the same youth pastor who had encouraged the boy to move out told the teen that his mother had been shot in the face.
“It was Chuck, wasn’t it?” Hayslip asked. “I knew it. I told her.”
He didn’t cry. He went back to class and didn’t say a word to his buddies from the basketball team. He would later find out that his mother wasn’t the only one shot that night. Dennise’s new love interest, bartender Darren Cain, was shot at least four times and died at the scene.
Six days after the shooting, Hayslip and other family members made the decision to remove Dennise from life support at Memorial Hermann Hospital. As his mother took her last assisted breaths in a vegetative state at the hospital, Hayslip attended his confirmation ceremony at Trinity Klein Lutheran Church, something he’d been working toward for months.
“My spirituality was at an all-time high, so I said we need to let her go,” he said. “My first communion was at 8:30 that night and she died at 9. None of my mom’s side was very religious, but here we are, all united together at a church.”
“I think in a lot of ways that’s a silver lining consolation prize in this whole ordeal. They ended up in a church at my confirmation ceremony and they would not have been there otherwise. When she passed on, things were changing eternally with people’s hearts. I felt like that was a small victory.”
In the years that followed, Hayslip would testify in court three times: twice as a character witness for his mother and once in a civil suit against the hospital. He saw crime scene photos of a bullet lodged so tightly in his mother’s cheek that experts suggested the gun could have been touching her, and was certainly at close range.
But that was far from the end of things.
In 2005, when Hayslip was 21 years old, he got a call from authorities advising that Thompson, after being sentenced to death for a second time, had escaped custody at the Harris County Jail. They offered Hayslip police surveillance; he declined. Thompson was recaptured in Shreveport, Louisiana, after three days on the run posing as a Hurricane Katrina evacuee. A girlfriend whom he’d reached out to for money tipped off police in exchange for a CrimeStoppers reward.
Hayslip’s mother wasn’t around to see him graduate from the University of North Texas with a psychology degree. There was no mother of the groom at either of his weddings, no doting grandmother when his child was born. This is the part of the conversation where Hayslip gets emotional.
“He took her life, but he took so much from me,” he said. “She taught me how to love. Humility came to me through my mother.”
Today, when someone Googles “Wade Hayslip,” they see an Internet Movie Database page reflecting his appearance in the 2018 Netflix documentary I Am a Killer. He has dozens of messages in his phone from strangers spewing venom about his mother and pledging their support for Thompson. He also has messages from people who tell him he’s a brave young man and some who ask if he’s single. He doesn’t respond but he saves the messages.
However, several years ago, he did answer questions for another young man who wanted to know what happened the night of the murder. The man who reached out over Facebook Messenger said he’d been lied to for years and just wanted the truth. That young man was Charles Thompson’s son.
Over meatloaf and a Dr Pepper at a restaurant in The Woodlands last week, Hayslip, now 41, talked for almost three hours about the night in 1998 that changed his life and devastated his already broken family.
His parents had been divorced — after 18 years of marriage — for about a year when Thompson came into the picture.
Hayslip says his parents engaged in plenty of embarrassing behavior, including arguing in public. The adults liked to hang out at beer joints but neither of his parents “met the definition of an alcoholic,” Hayslip said.
“He didn’t need the alcohol, but he needed the beer joint, and the beer joint produced the alcohol, and the byproduct of that was almost daily conflict between him and my mom,” Hayslip said of his late father, who died in 2009. “I give my parents credit for this: they knew they weren’t great parents. We all loved each other immensely and both of them loved me so much. I don’t doubt that at all, for one second.”
Over the past 27 years, there’s been a lot of global media coverage about the crime, Thompson’s escape, and now the upcoming execution, but little attention has been paid to the 13-year-old who lost his mother.
Now, as Texas prepares to execute Thompson, Hayslip said a genuine apology would be nice but what he really wants to know is why the convicted killer took his mother’s life.
“What has haunted me over the last few years is that he is the only human being who is alive today who can tell us what actually happened,” Hayslip said. “He’s never done that. He’s never actually apologized. Part of an apology is owning what you’ve done. Telling some British interviewer that you were a dumb kid and made a mistake isn’t an apology. You were a grown man. You paid taxes. You had children.”
Shooting on Wunderlich Drive
On the morning of April 30, 1998, Thompson went to Dennise Hayslip’s home in the Waterman Crossing development on Wunderlich Drive in north Houston. He’d been at the house the night before after shutting down Bimbo’s bar with Dennise at 2 a.m. Cain showed up, “one thing led to another, and me and him fought,” Thompson has said.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Department was called and officers separated the two men, allowing Thompson, who says he was drunk and high on cocaine, to drive away in his car.
“If they’d done their job, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Thompson told the Houston Press in an October interview at the prison in Livingston where he’s been housed for decades. “I should have gone to jail for public intoxication.”
But he didn’t go to jail, and he returned to Wunderlich Drive a few hours later.
Police say he arrived with a gun, kicked in the door and confronted the couple. Thompson says he had a key to the apartment and went to see his girlfriend, with whom he was still in a relationship, and pick up some clothes for work.
Thompson claims Cain came at him with a knife and he grabbed a gun from inside the home to defend himself. Hayslip says there was no gun in the house.
Thompson maintains he shot Cain in self-defense and the hospital is responsible for Dennise’s death, arguing that if Dennise hadn’t died due to negligence at Memorial Hermann, the crime wouldn’t have met the eligibility requirements for capital murder, therefore taking the death penalty off the table.
A jury found in a civil suit that the hospital was not at fault for Dennise’s death, and Hayslip pointed out that she wouldn’t have been in the hospital if Thompson hadn’t shot her.
Retired Harris County prosecutor Vic Wisner told the Press that even if Dennise hadn’t died, it was still a capital case because Cain’s death occurred during the commission of other crimes, including burglary.
A bullet penetrated Dennise’s airway, and medical records showed that her breathing tube was dislodged from her windpipe, causing her to go without oxygen for five to 10 minutes. Medical expert Dr. Paul Radelat testified in the civil case that hospital staff made mistakes but they weren’t malicious.
Wade Hayslip has seen the crime scene photos. The front door frame was smashed, and the crime occurred in the living room area adjacent to the front door, Hayslip said, drawing a diagram on a reporter’s notepad.
“Darren didn’t have a knife,” Hayslip said. “Darren was at the door. Look where his body is. By the time [Thompson] kicks in the door, Darren is up and in the living room.”
Hayslip said he believes that his mother ran from a bedroom to the kitchen to get a knife. She had a graze wound on her leg and a bullet was found lodged in the baseboard of the pantry, Hayslip said.
A friend of Thompson’s, Diane Zernia, told police that Thompson went to her house after the crime occurred and admitted that he shot Cain, then grabbed Dennise, put the pistol up to her jaw and said something along the lines of, “I can shoot you too, bitch.”
Thompson was later accused of trying to hire an undercover police informant to kill Zernia. Harris County didn’t charge him with solicitation of murder because he already had a death sentence, said Wisner, who tried the case with former Assistant DA Kelly Siegler as second chair.
Recordings of Thompson’s interactions with a jailhouse snitch and “fake hitman” Gary Johnson, who worked for Harris County law enforcement in the 1990s, were played at a sentencing hearing but later thrown out because of a Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that it was a Sixth Amendment violation. That resulted in a second sentencing hearing, at which another jury handed down the death penalty.
Hayslip said he occasionally wonders if things would have shaken out differently if he’d never moved out of his mom’s house.
“If I’d been there, it wouldn’t have happened,” Hayslip said. Many have speculated that’s not the case, that Hayslip could have been wounded or killed had he been at his mother’s home that night.
There were warning signs, Hayslip said, that the relationship between his mom and Thompson wasn’t going to end well.
“I had found drugs and witnessed other behaviors from Chuck at the house,” he said. “Even at 13, I knew that wasn’t right.”
Thompson was 27 years old when he started dating Dennise; she was 39. Thompson was, by his own admission, an alcoholic and drug addict. Several people testified at trial that Thompson had beaten Dennise, and she had shown up to her job as a nail technician with bruises on her face. Thompson has admitted publicly to slapping Dennise, giving her a black eye and cutting her lip during a single incident prior to the shooting. He claims that was the first time he’d ever hit a woman.
Hayslip said he was always wary of Thompson, who showed up uninvited at Hayslip’s 13th birthday party at Mountasia Houston, an amusement park on Texas 249 that’s no longer in operation.
“I knew he was leeching off my mom,” Hayslip said. “I was nice, I was cordial, because I love my mom. I didn’t really start giving him a hard time until I noticed the abuse.”
Looking back on what happened in April 1998, Hayslip says he believes Thompson went to the house to kill Cain.
“My theory, knowing his personality, is that it was about control that he no longer had,” Hayslip said. “It was high school boy jealousy, with all the testosterone and cocaine and alcohol on top of an immature psyche. There’s about a dozen ingredients to the situation that led to what happened. I think he planned to kill Darren.”
According to police reports, before Life Flight arrived to transport Dennise to the hospital, Hayslip’s Uncle Mike showed up. Dennise’s tongue had been severed and her dentures, required at a young age due to a genetic gum disease, were blown out, so she was unable to speak but she passed her brother a note that said, “Chuck did this.”
Growing Up Without a Mom
Hayslip is smart, hardworking and polite. He knows his childhood was not “normal,” but he didn’t let his mother’s murder shape the man he would become. He says he’s never done drugs or even smoked a cigarette. He’s the vice president of business development for a physical therapy rehabilitation company and it’s clear that family is a top priority for him. He’s not angry. He doesn’t curse or refer to Thompson as anything other than “Chuck.”
“There’s a level of fear, maybe. I don’t want to screw up. I think overall, I’m inherently a good human being with a good soul. I’m a little off-color sometimes, but for the most part, I like to think I’ve done a good job with him,” he says, nodding to his son, who showed up briefly at the interview to return his dad’s debit card, which he’d borrowed for a Starbucks run earlier that day.
Hayslip moved to Chicago in 2020 and married in 2022. He speaks about his wife and three children but asked that their names not be included in this story. While he’s not afraid of retaliation, others close to him have concerns. The man convicted of his mother’s murder, after all, has escaped from police custody and once tried to have a witness killed.
When asked if he thinks his mother and Thompson loved each other, he shakes his head.
“Nope,” he said. “She had a self-esteem issue and he made her feel good about herself.”
One night after Hayslip moved out of the home on Wunderlich, Dennise picked up her son at his grandmother’s house and took him to dinner. She told the child that she still loved his father but they couldn’t be together.
“That same night,” Hayslip said, wiping tears from his eyes, “she told me that she and Chuck went to a fair and they had a little tent for tarot card reading. She said that — this is very surreal; I haven’t thought about it in a long time — after the tarot card reading, the lady grabbed my mom’s wrist and pulled her back into the tent after Chuck wandered off. She said, ‘The person you’re supposed to be with, that’s not him.’”
“I don’t believe in any of that, and I don’t think she [did] either, but it’s just a coincidence that a stranger recognized that and chose to tell her that. And she made sure to tell me that. I think she felt trapped by him.”
Hayslip said he’s never shared that story before. “In 30 years, I haven’t ever been asked if they loved each other,” he said. “Everybody just assumes that they didn’t.”
Hayslip remains “extremely close” to his Aunt Cindy and a few other relatives. The grandmother who raised him, his father’s mother, died in 2019.
“I’ve been fortunate and blessed in the sense that I was granted some pathway in my brain to deal with this in, I guess, a healthy manner,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I crack up sometimes, but nothing that affects my life. If I’m having those moments, I’ll call Aunt Cindy or I’ll talk to my wife.”
He said he hopes to check in again with Wisner and Siegler before the execution and has the utmost respect for the team that brought his mother’s killer to justice.
“I felt very protected by them,” Hayslip said. “[Siegler’s] aggression made me feel safe.”
He recalled being on the stand during Thompson’s trial. Just 14 at the time, he says he attempted to stare down Thompson, but the man on trial wouldn’t meet his gaze.
The murder weapon, which had been recovered after Thompson drew a map for the purported hitman, was on a platform in front of Hayslip in the witness box. He said a weapons expert testified before he did and he wasn’t sure whether the pistol was left there intentionally but “it had an effect.”
Wisner questioned the teenager and the defense opted not to cross-examine. Hayslip said he was just a kid with a limited vocabulary and had to stop the prosecutor and ask, “What does ‘prior to’ mean?”
“I know that’s going to be in the transcript,” he said. “Everybody laughed.”
Execution Day
Thompson, 55, will spend his last Christmas on death row this year unless his attorneys can pull off a temporary reprieve known as a stay of execution. For a stay to be granted, an inmate must produce new evidence that’s never been heard before. Current and former Harris County prosecutors have told the Press they can’t begin to speculate what that would be.
“This isn’t a whodunit,” Wisner said. “There was never any issue of his identity or racially disparate treatment or an Atkins issue [of mental disability]. Enough is enough. He’s just been glorifying himself all this time.”
In an October interview with the Press, Thompson said he didn’t want to tip his hand but noted that he’d hired a private investigator and hoped he’d get to live a little bit longer.
“It’s in God’s hands,” Thompson said. “I’ve been told by the guys to not be arrogant, don’t expect it, just humble yourself before God. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”
It’s possible that Thompson, in his petition for a stay, could accuse Siegler of orchestrating the jailhouse snitch and fake hitman to secure a death sentence, a matter referenced in a 2019 appeal.
Thompson has said repeatedly in emails to the Press that he wants to talk about the “Siegler issues” but he hasn’t made any claims yet that can be substantiated or that haven’t already been addressed in open court.
Wisner said Siegler was an excellent prosecutor and has been “unfairly maligned” because she rose to fame and a television career, something he says many people in Harris County’s legal circles resented. Siegler didn’t have anything to do with the hitman visit, nor did Wisner, the former prosecutor said. Court documents show that Harris County Sheriff’s Department officers who were working on the case sent the informant.
“Nobody promised anybody anything,” Wisner said. “Our office didn’t have anything to do with Gary Johnson, or if they did, I didn’t have anything to do with it. They might have run it past Special Crimes.”
Thompson has spent almost half his life behind bars in an isolated one-man cell at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston. He said he isn’t sure why he got an execution date when others have been on death row longer for more egregious crimes. He speculates that perhaps the 2005 escape embarrassed Harris County, an assertion the DA’s office denied.
Legal experts say the execution is long overdue. Andrew Smith, division chief for post-conviction writs at the Harris County DA’s Office, said the office requested a judge sign the execution order because Thompson has exhausted all his appeals and is therefore “date-eligible.”
“It’s been since 2021 since he exhausted all his appeals, and there’s zero question as to his culpability in this case,” Smith said. “He murdered two people. He’s a dangerous individual and the jury’s verdict needs to be respected.”
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has been on the job since January 2025 and secured two death penalty convictions, but Thompson’s will be the first execution of his tenure.
Hayslip didn’t attend the September 11 hearing at which the execution date was set. He was traveling for work but said he would have moved some things around if Thompson had appeared in person. Instead, the condemned man showed up on Zoom with a new pro bono attorney, Eric Allen of Ohio.
Hayslip says he’ll travel to Huntsville to witness Thompson’s death next month.
A victims’ assistance coordinator told him to expect protesters and lots of media on the execution day. The case gained notoriety because of the escape and has been covered extensively by independent journalists in Europe, where Thompson has many female supporters and capital punishment has been abolished or is under moratorium in all countries except Belarus.
Hayslip says he’s not an outspoken advocate for or against the death penalty. He won’t even say definitively that he believes Thompson deserves it. “I don’t feel like I’m qualified to make that judgment,” he said.
“It’s the law of the land right now in Texas and I’m OK with it,” he said. “I’ve been at peace with it my entire adult life. Do I want him to die? Not actively. Do I want him to live? Not actively.”
He said he doesn’t think an execution is intended to grant relief to the victims’ families but rather to serve justice.
“If he gets clemency, I will continue to live my life,” Hayslip said. “I was involuntarily put on a journey that nobody wants to be on, so I am going to voluntarily watch it end.”
Cain’s parents are expected to attend the execution, along with Cain’s former roommate and good friend Will Bowden, and Hayslip’s Uncle Mike and Aunt Cindy.
Thompson’s family members, if any choose to attend, will be in a separate room facing the gurney through a window. Hayslip said he doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Thompson’s parents.
“We feel for them because we know they’re kind of caught in the middle in all this,” he said.
Hayslip’s wife will join her husband for the trip to Huntsville but she won’t be in the death chamber when the lethal cocktail is administered. Hayslip said he doesn’t want both of them to be “messed up.”
And he hates the word “closure.”
“There’s no closure,” he said. “I’ve never been able to forgive him because he’s never owned it. It’s transactional now. In order for me to forgive you, you have to sacrifice something and we’re at the point now where it’s your life.”
“I think everybody on the outside thinks we’re all seeking closure, and that’s really the farthest from the truth,” he added. “This is just the end of this chapter in the book. How does that change us afterward? We’re all kind of waiting and seeing.”