The son of a triple killer was arrested and thrown in jail after he banged on an execution chamber window and screamed "no" as he watched his father take his final breaths.

Billie Wayne Coble, 70, was executed by lethal injection for murdering his estranged wife’s parents and brother in an apparent act of vengeance.

After the triple murder, the Vietnam War veteran abducted his wife and told her: "They are all dead, and nobody is going to come help you now."

As Coble lay dying on a gurney on Thursday evening, his son Gordon pounded on glass separating the witness room and execution chamber, cursed and shouted "no".

Gordon’s son Dalton joined the commotion and both men, along with a relative, were removed from the witness room before the execution ended at about 6.20pm at the state prison in Huntsville, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Gordon and Dalton were arrested and thrown in the Walker County Jail, and are facing charges of resisting arrest.

At 70, Coble, from Waco, became the oldest Texan executed in the modern era of capital punishment.

He made a bizarre final statement apparently referencing his nickname of Five Dollar Bill.

Before the lethal drug was administered, he said: "That will be five dollars. I love you, I love you, and I love you."

The witness room then erupted into chaos, according to media witnesses.

In August 1989, Coble was angry over the breakdown of his third marriage when he kidnapped and stabbed his estranged wife, Karen Vicha, and fatally shot her parents, Robert and Zelda, and police officer brother, Bobby, before an unsuccessful attempt to take his own life.

He first went to his wife’s house, but she wasn’t home so he tied up her children and left to kill her family, court documents state.

After killing the trio, he told Ms Vicha as he returned and abducted her: "Karen, I’ve killed your momma and your daddy and your brother.

"They are all dead, and nobody is going to come help you now."

He had been bailed just days earlier for an earlier kidnap of Ms Vicha, his third wife.

Coble was executed despite a number of appeals and pleas for clemency.

His attorneys argued the ageing inmate had demonstrated good behaviour in prison, did not pose a danger even behind bars and was in failing health.

They said a pair of experts who testified at Coble’s trial that he would be a future danger even in prison were "discredited", and that he would be executed on such evidence was "unconscionable".

Coble, who served as a machine gunner in Vietnam, was suffering post-traumatic stress and bipolar disorder, and was no longer the same after returning from the war, his attorneys and family said.

He won a retrial in 2007 but was convicted and sentenced to death a second time.

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