Alton Coleman was born in Waukegan, Illinois on November 6, 1955. His mother worked three jobs and he was raised largely by his grandmother. He was well known to the police there long before 1984: he was charged with sex offences six times between 1973 and 1983, and the cases collapsed one after another, some dismissed, some ending in acquittal, one after the complainant refused to give evidence about the rape and he served two years for the robbery instead.
In early 1984 he was indicted over the rape and murder of a girl in suburban Chicago whose mother was a friend of his. He learned he was wanted and disappeared with his girlfriend, Debra Denise Brown.
What followed ran from late May to July 20, 1984, about fifty-three days, and crossed Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky. Nine-year-old Vernita Wheat was abducted in Kenosha, Wisconsin and found in Waukegan. On June 18 seven-year-old Tamika Turks was killed near Gary, Indiana on her way to a sweet shop; her nine-year-old aunt was badly beaten and survived. Donna Williams, twenty-five, was killed in Gary. In Ohio they killed Virginia Temple and her nine-year-old daughter Rachelle, fifteen-year-old Tonnie Storey in Cincinnati, and on July 13 Marlene Walters, forty-four, beaten to death in her home in Norwood; they took her car and drove to Kentucky. A seventy-seven-year-old man was also among the dead. Alongside the eight murders, prosecutors counted seven rapes, three kidnappings and fourteen armed robberies.
Coleman was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. He and Brown were arrested in Evanston, Illinois on July 20, 1984 after residents recognised him from a wanted poster and called the police.
He was tried separately in three states. Illinois convicted him of the first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping of Vernita Wheat in 1987, on his sister's eyewitness account of the abduction, a taxi driver who had seen him with the girl, and his fingerprint in the family's home. Indiana convicted him over Tamika Turks. Ohio convicted him of the murders of Tonnie Storey and Marlene Walters. Each state sentenced him to death, which made him the only person in the country at the time under sentence of death in three separate states.
He was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville on the morning of April 26, 2002 for the murder of Marlene Walters. He was forty-six.
Debra Brown's sentences did not hold. Ohio commuted hers in 1991, citing her low IQ and what the authorities described as a master and slave relationship with Coleman, and the Indiana death sentence was vacated in 2019 on evidence that she is intellectually disabled. She is serving life. Tamika Turks's mother said publicly that Brown had been there beside him, bore the same responsibility, and should share the same punishment.