The mother of Darlie Routier, the Texas woman on death row for the murder of her two young sons, remains committed to proving her daughter’s innocence.

“I still fight. I still go on. … We will never stop,” Darlie Kee, who is now in her 60s, said in a recent interview during a visit with her Altoona-area family.

Kee admits her struggle over the past 22 years is wearing on her.

During the past year, the Darlie Routier murder case has been the subject of an ABC special called “The Last Defense,” a seven-part series reviewing two murder cases in which the death row defendants continue to maintain their innocence.

Darlie Routier, who was born in Altoona, was arrested for the murder of her two young sons, Damon, 5, and Devon, 6, which occurred on June 6, 1996.

The other case involved an Oklahoma man, Julius Jones, who was charged with the murder of an Edmond, Okla., insurance executive during a car-jacking.

The series focused on possible flaws during their respective trials, and, by doing so, posed questions about the American justice system.

The series began in June and Kee, who was interviewed for it, agreed to participate because “I just wanted to do it for Darlie.”

While Kee was featured only briefly in the series, it took 10 hours to film her part — not something she enjoyed, but believed was necessary as a way to keep her daughter’s case from being forgotten.

Support grows

In October, a small group of Routier supporters picketed the Dallas County Courthouse for three days, continuing to shed light on the case.

Next June, to honor her deceased grandson, Devon, on what would have been his 30th birthday, Kee is planning a “Convoy for Justice.”

Supporters of Darlie Routier have doubled since the ABC series, Kee said, and will travel to Dallas and hope to gain the ear of Gov. Greg Abbott.

She is attempting to garner his support to run a bloody fingerprint found on a television room table — the scene of the crime — through the nation’s Automated Finger­print Identification System.

Routier contends she and her sons were sleeping in the downstairs room the night of June 6, 1996, when an intruder entered the home.

The alleged long-haired assailant, who was wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans, ended up stabbing her two sons to death and attacking her, slashing and bruising her neck, her face and right arm.

The bloody fingerprint did not belong to Routier, her children or her husband, Darin, who was sleeping upstairs with their youngest child, Drake. Nor did it belong to any of the plethora of police and medical personnel in and out of the house on Eagle Drive in Rowlett, Texas, following Routier’s frantic 911 call for help.

The pre-printed postcard that Kee is asking supporters to send to Abbott states, “Since logic dictates that (the print) had to have been during or after the murders had been committed and all of the above people have been eliminated, the question remains: Who is 85-J (the ID number of the print) and why have authorities refused to run this print through AFIS? …”

Kee complains that Darlie did not receive a fair trial.

The prosecution used character assassination to sway the jury, depicting her daughter as a cold, calculating mother who killed her children for insurance money.

Routier’s defense attorney did not challenge the prosecution’s scientific conclusions that the crime scene that night was staged, a fact that is prominent in an appeal of her conviction and sentence that was filed a decade ago in the U.S. District Court of West Texas.

And there were many other complaints Kee presents in Darlie’s favor. The trial was held just seven months after the killings. The judge often fell asleep during the trial. The original transcript of the trial had 30,000 mistakes and had to be redone.

Darlie’s arrest and trial are so tainted that the defense lawyers are asking the U.S. District Court to declare her innocence.

“I don’t want a new trial. I want her exonerated,” Kee said during her visit to her native Altoona during the Thanksgiving holidays.

Altoona roots

Kee, although living in Texas, often travels to Altoona because her father, Paul E. Mauk, is nearing his 90th birthday. She also has several sisters in the area.

The daughter of Paul and Martha Mauk (who died in 2007), Kee remembers attending Edison Elementary School and Keith Junior High School.

During her recent visit, she was interested to find the Altoona Area School District had constructed a new junior high, replacing the former Keith and Roosevelt junior highs.

She remembers the day Darlie was born at Altoona Hospital.

“I was 18 and scared to death,” Kee said. “When they said she was a girl,” Kee said she cried with happiness.

Darlie’s father, Larry Peck, was with the Seabees in Da Nang, Vietnam, at the time, and Kee said he was so happy he poured a concrete wall and wrote on it, “Darlie Lynn Peck, January 4, 1970.”

Peck, while still living in Altoona, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Kee said the marriage between her and Peck did not last, and, after a divorce, she met a man who took her to Texas.

Now married to Robbie Kee, she remains close to her Altoona roots, although she noted she also has a robust family in Texas.

After moving to Texas, she began working at a Texas Sizzlin’ Steakhouse in Lubbock and met Darin Routier, who at age 17 also worked there.

Darin said to her one day, “Hey, I hear you have a beautiful daughter.”

When Darlie Routier, who was 15 at the time, came into the steakhouse, the two met and her daughter, Kee said, was smitten and ready to join Darin after he went to college and she graduated from high school in Lubbock.

Life became ‘living hell’

Although young, they were a successful couple. Devon was born on June 14, 1989, Damon on Feb. 9, 1991.

The youngest, Drake, was born Oct. 18, 1995.

Darin had a prosperous business testing electronic equipment, and the two bought a home in the Dallas suburb of Rowlett.

Kee said Routier had a bevy of friends, often distributed food throughout the neighborhood and was well-liked.

But, they began to experience financial problems. Darin bought a used Jaguar and a boat, and he urged Darlie to obtain a breast enhancement, which she did. She also became enamored with jewelry.

These were trappings of a couple living beyond their means, according to the prosecution, and the alleged motive for a mother to murder her two children for insurance money.

Darlie Kee’s life turned into a living hell the night of June 6, 1996.

She remembers the eerie nightime scene with outside lights covering the Routier home as investigators and medical personnel arrived.

There was the sadness of knowing immediately that her two oldest grandchildren had been stabbed to death, and that her daughter was hanging onto life in the Baylor University Hospital.

They wouldn’t let her visit Darlie, but a nurse told Kee her daughter was suffering from “defensive wounds.”

At the time, Kee didn’t know that Rowlett police, observing the chaos in the television room — blood everywhere including the furniture, the walls, and the floor, broken glass and a screen that had been cut with a knife — were, almost immediately concluding the crime scene had been staged.

Routier reported she and the kids had been attacked by an intruder, who, after fighting with and injuring her, fled through a window screen in a nearby utility room.

Investigators found inconsistencies that came out at trial. Darlie had blood splattered on her nightgown that stemmed from her striking the children with a knife, the prosecution contended.

The prosecution maintained a broken wine glass had been thrown onto the bloody floor to enhance the idea of an intruder, and that the screen had been cut with a knife from inside the home — facts, it was claimed, that showed the crime scene was staged.

They even found a hair in the screen that was consistent with Routier’s.

There was also a bloody sock found in a ditch three houses away. The prosecution stated Darlie had tossed the sock there as a way to support the intruder theory.

Two defense lawyers were court appointed, and with the help of forensic investigators were able to debunk the state’s scientific evidence. The blood splattered on the nightgown did not come from a stabbing motion by Darlie, the investigators concluded.

Glass was found on the wine rack that indicated a struggle — not that it had been thrown into the murder scene.

At odds with police

The defense concluded Darlie did not have time to run out of the house and toss the bloody sock containing her sons’ blood into the ditch, then return home, stab herself and call 911, all before Damon died within nine minutes after being stabbed.

This forensic review was never presented to the Routier jury because a new attorney, Douglas Mulder, replaced the original defense attorney and decided not to call the defense forensic experts to testify.

As for the blonde hair, subsequent tests show it came from a female police officer.

Kee remembers with bitterness how police high-fived and smoked cigars 12 days after the murders when they arrested her daughter.

She has been at odds with police ever since. She maintains that if they are going to criticize her daughter, she is going to criticize them.

Routier, meanwhile, has adapted to prison.

She makes afghans that are distributed to children. She started a garden where she raises vegetables.

There are bad moments, but her daughter doesn’t share them for fear it would affect her mother’s health.

Her daughter tells her, “Mom, I can sleep at night. I have no guilt. I did not kill my children.”

That is the same message she stated when the jury in 1997 returned its verdict. She cried out, “I did not kill my babies.”

Drake falls ill

While Kee has carried the burden of her daughter’s imprisonment for more than two decades, another traumatic event occurred when her youngest grandson, Drake, fell ill while in high school and was diagnosed with leukemia.

He was treated at Children’s Hospital in Dallas.

“We had tears running down our faces,” said Kee, when she and other family members were told that the disease was under control.

Now 22, Drake is working and lives in Lubbock.

The ordeals that Drake and Darlie experienced have convinced Kee that “the power of prayer is strong.”

A prayer page was started for Drake on Facebook, and she said, “We have prayed for Darlie for 22 years. God has a reason,” she said.

Kee is constantly in touch with Darlie’s lawyers, J. Stephen Cooper and Richard A. Smith of Dallas, as well and Houston attorney Richard Burr.

Cooper and Burr could not be reached for comment, but Smith, who has spent 15 years on the case, believes in Routier’s innocence.

“Absolutely!” he said. “I would not be in this if I didn’t believe in her 100 percent.”

Routier’s appeals at both the state and federal levels have been on hold for more than a decade so DNA testing can be done on the evidence.

It took orders from both the federal and state courts to approve the DNA testing of the nightgown, the knife, the bloody sock and other items.

So far, Smith said, the results of the testing have been “interesting,” but “nothing I would want to claim exonerative.”

Darin and Darlie went through a mutual divorce in 2011.

As to the question whether Darin had a part in the murders of the children — a question raised by the defense in its appeals — Kee said, “Darin is not violent. He never has been violent. He’s a soft-hearted person. No way he’d ever hurt the boys or Darlie.”

Kee remains sad because her mother, who died in 2007 after 62 years of marriage, was unable to give her oldest of eight grandchildren — Darlie — a hug before she died.

Kee said she will come back to Altoona in a couple of months for her father’s 90th birthday.

She also explained one other thing. The name “Darlie” has been in her family for at least four generations.