Texas double murderer Charles Thompson probably has some regrets as he faces lethal injection at some point on Wednesday – the scheduled time of which the Texas Tribune did not mention in their reporting. Most would assume that first and foremost would be the fatal 1998 shooting of his ex-girlfriend Dennise Hayslip and her friend Darren Cain at Hayslip’s apartment. But maybe just as high on the list would be the way Thompson squandered the daring escape he pulled off in November 2005 just days after he was resentenced to death after getting it tossed on a technicality.

Thompson, who had managed to hang onto the defendant clothes he’d worn to the resentencing hearings, simply changed into them and confidently walked out of a Harris County jail he’d been staying at during the appearances, waved through by guards who had assumed he was an employee with the state Attorney General’s office. He then spent three days on the lam, riding a freight train to Louisiana and then mixing in with the thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Where he fucked up was in Shreveport, getting drunk at a liquor store and then spotted in a phone booth outside while calling friends to ask them to wire him money so he could head north and escape to Canada.

Yeah, Thompson would have in all likelihood been caught eventually but that’s so freaking lame to get picked up like that instead of getting tackled while bolting across rooftops or cornered in an alleyway by a dozen squad cars in a full-on manhunt. That’s gotta sting worse than the needle.