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HOUSTON (AP) — Texas' highest criminal court has rejected an appeal from a man on death row for suffocating a 2-year-old Utah girl on Christmas Day 1997.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused the appeal from 44-year-old Britt Allen Ripkowski, saying in a brief ruling Wednesday that it failed to meet legal standards and was being denied.
Ripkowski was convicted of abducting and killing 2-year-old Dominique Frome, folding her body into a suitcase and burying it northeast of Houston. Days earlier in December 1997, authorities say he strangled the child's mother, his ex-girlfriend Monica Allen, in Salt Lake City and left her body in a field near the Utah-Colorado border.
A scheduled February 2013 execution was halted by a Texas judge and Ripkowski does not yet have a new death date.
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