[08/12/03] Texas has executed the gunman hired to kill a couple and their young child who had moved from Vicksburg to Houston 25 years ago.

The July 24 death by lethal injection of Allen Wayne Janecka may close the books on the case that might have never been solved except for the work of a determined police detective, as documented by a Houston reporter.

On July 5, 1979, the bodies of John and Diana Wanstrath and their 14-month-old son, Kevin, were found in their Houston home. Each had been shot in the head.

The family had moved to Houston from Vicksburg a little less than a year earlier when John Wanstrath, an oceanographer, left a job with the Hydraulics Laboratory of Waterways Experiment Station to take another post with Petro Tech Co. of Houston.

When they lived here, the Wanstraths were members of St. Michael Catholic Church.

Initially, the deaths were ruled two murders and a suicide because there were no signs of forced entry, there were no signs of a struggle and nothing was missing. The fact that no gun was found was explained by the assumption that someone had taken the weapon to protect the family’s reputation.

Lead investigator Johnny Bonds did not believe the ruling, and his investigation led to the arrest of Markham Duff-Smith, the adoptive brother of Diana Wanstrath. The investigation also led to Walter Waldhauser Jr., the middleman who found hitman Allen Wayne Janecka for Duff-Smith.

Duff-Smith, Waldhauser and Janecka were also linked to the strangling death of Gertrude Duff-Smith Zabolio, his mother, who was killed in 1975. Mrs. Zabolio was found strangled with pantyhose in a case also initially ruled a suicide. Duff-Smith was executed in 1993.

Waldhauser took a plea bargain for a 30-year sentence and was paroled after serving nine years. After his release, he changed his name to Michael Davis and is now serving a life sentence for a different crime. Janecka was convicted of the killings twice, the last time in a 1993 retrial. He spent more than 20 years on death row.

As indicated by Bonds’ investigation and detailed in the book “The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit” by reporter Rick Nelson, Duff-Smith hatched the plot to kill his mother and the Wanstraths to clear the way for him to inherit $800,000 in family money.