On January 12, 1935, deputies waited at a post office in Shaw, Mississippi, for the man who rented a box there under the name James H. Coyner. When he came for his mail he went for his gun, and they overpowered him before he could use it. In his pockets they found more of the obscene letters that had led postal inspectors to the box, the pocket watch of Aurelius Turner, a packet of human hair the color of Louella Turner's, and strips of human flesh, salted and cured, that carried bite marks. The man's real name was Alonzo Robinson. Five weeks earlier the Turners had been killed in their home in nearby Cleveland, and less than two months after his arrest Mississippi hanged him for it.
Robinson was born in 1895 into a poor family in Cleveland, in Bolivar County in the Delta, and it was the authorities of his own town who first arrested him, in 1918, for mailing obscene letters to local women. He escaped on the way to jail and got clear with a bullet in his shoulder.
By 1926 he was living in Ferndale, Michigan, as James H. Coyner. Around that time the decapitated bodies of women began turning up there, and the police suspected him. By 1927 he was in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City, convicted of stealing a girl's corpse from a graveyard. A trunk holding the heads of women was found at a house he had occupied in Ferndale. Questioned in prison by Ferndale officers, he told them he could tell them a great deal about murders and murderers but would "die first." The evidence was never enough to charge him with killing anyone in Michigan. Michael Newton's account of the case puts the heads in the trunk at four.
He was paroled in June 1934 (Newton gives July) and went home to Cleveland, still calling himself Coyner, and went back to writing obscene letters. One went to a woman in Indianapolis, and postal inspectors were still working that complaint when he killed again.
On the night of December 9, 1934, according to the Associated Press reports of the case (some later accounts give December 8), Robinson broke into the Cleveland home of Aurelius Burns Turner and his wife, Eunice Louella Turner, who was born Sherrill and was pregnant. Turner was sitting in a chair reading a newspaper when Robinson struck him with an axe and then shot him. He hit Mrs. Turner about five times with the axe, mutilated both bodies and cut away some of her flesh, which he carried off. He struck one of the Turner children over the head and left the child for dead; another child, asleep in a crib, was not touched.
After his arrest he was moved to the jail in Hinds County, where District Attorney Greek Rice questioned him for hours in his cell with Sheriffs E. R. McLean and John Roberts. He confessed to killing the Turners and said he "had an impulse to kill somebody." At the request of officers in Pontiac, Michigan, he was also asked about the Ferndale trunk. He said it was his, but denied killing the women and claimed the heads were trophies he had taken on grave-robbing expeditions.
The trial took a single day. The Mississippi National Guard patrolled the streets of Cleveland and the courtroom itself, and when the judge sentenced Robinson to death in early February 1935 he was taken to the jail in Jackson for safekeeping under an escort of two hundred Guardsmen. On March 5, 1935, with between two and three hundred troops around the Bolivar County jail, Sheriff McLean prepared him for execution, and he was hanged on the jail scaffold. The Associated Press reported that he grinned broadly as the hood and noose were put over his head.
The figure of six victims that older summaries carry counts the Turners and four Ferndale women. Only the Turner killings were ever proven, and they are the only murders for which he stood trial; he denied the Michigan killings to the end. Cleveland's tourism office has since claimed that the cured flesh found on him influenced Thomas Harris's novel The Silence of the Lambs.