HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A man who pleaded guilty to killing a neighbor couple during a shooting rampage 13 years ago and said he wanted to be put to death for the crime was executed Wednesday evening.

Barney Fuller Jr., 58, has asked that all his appeals be dropped to expedite his death sentence.

Fuller never made any eye contact with witnesses, who included the two children of the slain couple.

Fuller became the seventh convicted killer executed this year in Texas and the first in six months in the nation’s most active capital punishment state.

Fuller surrendered peacefully at his home outside Lovelady, about 100 miles north of Houston, after a middle-of-the-night shooting frenzy in May 2003 that left his neighbors, Nathan Copeland, 43, and Copeland’s wife, Annette, 39, dead inside their rural home. The couple’s 14-year-old son survived two gunshot wounds, and their 10-year-old daughter escaped injury because Fuller couldn’t turn the light on in her bedroom.

Court records show that Fuller, armed with several weapons, barged into the Copeland home and opened fire. Fuller had been charged with making a threatening phone call to Annette Copeland, and they had been in a dispute over that.

Fuller pleaded guilty to capital murder. He declined to appear in court at his July 2004 trial and asked that the trial’s punishment phase go on without his presence.

Last year, Fuller asked that nothing be done to prolong his time on death row. ‘‘I do not want to go on living in this hellhole,’’ he wrote.

Fuller’s execution was the 16th in the United States this year, a downturn fueled by fewer death sentences overall, courts halting executions for reviews, and some states encountering difficulties obtaining drugs for lethal injections.

Associated Press