Alton Coleman was executed in Ohio on April 26, 2002, for the beating death of Marlene Walters, a 44-year-old Sunday school teacher who had invited him and his companion, Debra Denise Brown, into her home to talk about a camper she and her husband had for sale. Her death on July 13, 1984, came near the end of about seven weeks in which Coleman and Brown moved through Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky. Prosecutors later charged him with eight deaths in that period, four of them children.
He was tried in three states and convicted of four murders: Marlene Walters and 15-year-old Tonnie Storey in Cincinnati, seven-year-old Tamika Turks in Gary, Indiana, and nine-year-old Vernita Wheat, who was taken from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and found in Waukegan, Illinois. Each of those cases ended in a death sentence. By February 1987, UPI reported, he was the first man in the United States to receive four death sentences in three states. The other four deaths were never tried against him.
Coleman grew up in Waukegan, a lakefront city north of Chicago. A UPI report on the day of his execution described him as the third of five children and said he was raised by his maternal grandmother. Children nicknamed him cruelly because he wet the bed. A UPI profile written on the day of his arrest in 1984 said classmates taunted him and that he grew up confused and without direction. His grandmother told reporters then that he was always well behaved as a boy, and added that she would have beaten him if he had not been.
The fuller picture of his childhood came out years later, in mitigation evidence gathered after his trials. As the Sixth Circuit summarized it in 2001, reports prepared by doctors and investigators for his appeals described a grandmother who was his main caretaker and who abused and neglected him, ran her home as a brothel and gambling house, drew him into her practice of voodoo and controlled what he ate. The reports said he was exposed to sexual activity in the household from an early age. His mother spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals and was said to have abandoned him as an infant. He was hospitalized twice for head injuries and left high school in the ninth grade. At his clemency hearing in 2002, his lawyer argued that he had suffered brain damage at birth because of his mother's drug use.
Coleman's official criminal record began in 1973, according to UPI. That year he was charged with the rape and kidnapping of a Waukegan woman; he was convicted of a lesser robbery charge and served two years at Stateville prison in Joliet. Over the following years he was acquitted twice on rape charges, UPI reported in 1984.
Doctors examined him more than once before the 1984 crimes and in the months after his arrest. In 1976 a psychiatrist diagnosed a borderline personality. During a 1984 federal competency evaluation at the federal prison at Butner, North Carolina, psychologists found him competent to stand trial, measured his full-scale IQ at 82, in the low-normal range, and diagnosed a probable mixed personality disorder with antisocial, narcissistic and obsessive features. Later experts retained for his appeals diagnosed borderline personality disorder and a likelihood of organic brain dysfunction, and one suggested manic-depressive illness. Courts in Indiana and Illinois heard conflicting testimony on these points: Indiana's post-conviction court found he had neither disorder in a significant form, and an Illinois court did not find the defense psychiatrist credible.
Debra Denise Brown was 21 in July 1984. She had lived with Coleman and his grandmother in Waukegan for about two years, and authorities told UPI at the time of the arrest that she had been a "virtual prisoner" of Coleman. The two described themselves as common-law husband and wife. Experts later described their relationship as one of master and slave, in which Brown, who tested with a low IQ, did what Coleman told her, the Cincinnati station WCPO reported. She was charged alongside him in Ohio and Indiana and was convicted in both states. Her own death sentences were later reversed.
The first death in the series was that of Vernita Wheat, a nine-year-old girl from Kenosha, Wisconsin, just north of the Illinois state line. In May 1984 Coleman befriended her mother, using the name Robert Knight, the Illinois Supreme Court recorded. On May 29 he took the children to a carnival. Afterward he asked the mother to go with him to pick up a stereo; when she declined, he asked whether Vernita could come instead. She testified in 1987 that he promised to bring the girl right back. She never saw her daughter alive again.
Witnesses saw Coleman with the girl in Kenosha late that night, and a cab driver testified that he drove them south to Waukegan. The girl slept for much of the ride. On May 31, Coleman visited his sister in Waukegan, and a police officer chased him from her house. A friend later drove him to Chicago to obtain false identification. In those same days he spent a night at an acquaintance's home in Waukegan, borrowed the man's car to go to the store and never brought it back, according to the Ohio Supreme Court.
Vernita's body was found on June 19, 1984, in an abandoned building in Waukegan, about four blocks from his grandmother's apartment. She had died of ligature strangulation. A forensic entomologist estimated that she had been left there on May 29 or 30, and Coleman's fingerprint was found on a bathroom door, the Illinois Supreme Court recorded. The Daily Herald of Arlington Heights later reported that Brown was not involved in this killing.
Coleman and Brown were next in Gary, Indiana. In June 1984, the Indiana Supreme Court found, they lured two young girls into a wooded area with an offer of clothing. One was Tamika Turks, who was seven. Tamika was killed; the Ohio and Illinois supreme courts gave the cause as ligature strangulation. The other girl, a few years older, was attacked and left for dead but survived and walked out of the woods to find help. She later testified against Coleman. Tamika's body was found in mid-June; the Ohio Supreme Court gave the date as June 19, and the Illinois Supreme Court gave June 18.
On June 19, Donna Williams, a 25-year-old woman from Gary, disappeared. The Ohio Supreme Court recorded that Coleman had befriended her. Her car was found on Detroit's west side on June 26. Her body was found in July in an abandoned building about two blocks from where the car had been left, after an anonymous call to campus security at Wayne State University. The FBI said she had been strangled with a stocking. Her mother identified clothing and earrings found with the body. Investigators believed Coleman and Brown had taken her from Gary. Coleman was never tried for her death.
On June 28, 1984, Coleman and Brown entered the home of an older couple in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. According to the Ohio Supreme Court, Coleman handcuffed the husband, both were attacked, the telephone was torn from the wall, and the pair left with the couple's money and car. UPI also reported that police believed Coleman had beaten a 55-year-old Detroit woman and a friend of hers in that period; he was not tried for that attack.
By early July the pair were in Toledo, Ohio. There, the Ohio Supreme Court recorded, Coleman befriended Virginia Temple, a mother of several children, among them nine-year-old Rachelle. When relatives went to the home, they found the younger children alone and frightened. The bodies of Virginia and Rachelle Temple were found in a crawl space. Both had been strangled. A bracelet missing from the Temple home would turn up a week later in Cincinnati, under the body of Tonnie Storey. Coleman was charged in Ohio with the two Toledo deaths, but prosecutors did not try him on those counts, UPI reported in 1987, because he already faced death sentences elsewhere.
On July 7, in Toledo, Coleman and Brown entered the home of another couple. Coleman handcuffed the husband, the couple were tied with cut appliance and telephone cords, and the pair left with money and the couple's car.
By this point the FBI and several police forces were looking for Coleman across the region. The FBI added him to its Ten Most Wanted list on July 11, 1984, as fugitive number 388. Reporting the addition, UPI said the FBI described him as "street savvy" and believed he might be armed with handguns, butcher knives and baseball bats. Sightings poured in from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, and none was confirmed. "That is how we're going to get this guy," Richard Schwein, an assistant special agent in charge in Cleveland, said of help from the public. At that stage, UPI reported, Coleman was a suspect in five deaths: three young girls, one girl's mother and Donna Williams.
On July 7 Coleman and Brown arrived at the Dayton home of the Reverend Millard Gay and his wife. The couple took them in. On July 9 the four went together to a religious service in Lockwood, Ohio, and on July 10 the Gays drove the visitors to downtown Cincinnati and dropped them off, according to the Ohio Supreme Court.
Tonnie Storey was 15 and lived in Cincinnati. On the morning of July 11, 1984, she left home; WCPO reported that she was walking to summer classes. She was seen at her school shortly before noon. Between 5 and 6 p.m., a classmate saw her on a street corner with a man and a woman and later identified the man as Coleman. When Tonnie did not come home by late afternoon, her mother reported her missing.
On July 19, a real estate agent found her body in an abandoned building in the Walnut Hills neighborhood. The coroner gave the cause of death as homicidal asphyxia. The evidence that tied the killing to Coleman and Brown, as the Ohio Supreme Court described it, included Brown's fingerprint on a Michael Jackson button that belonged to Tonnie, Coleman's footprint in the building, pieces of an envelope from the Gays' home in Dayton, the bracelet from the Temple home in Toledo, and writing in capital letters on the wall above her body that was identified as Coleman's handwriting.
Marlene Walters was 44, a Sunday school teacher, a part-time librarian and a mother of three, WCPO reported. She lived in Norwood, a small city surrounded by Cincinnati, with her husband, Harry, 45, a construction worker who was home on vacation, and their 19-year-old daughter.
Around 11 a.m. on Friday, July 13, 1984, Coleman and Brown rode up to the house on bicycles and asked about a camping trailer the couple had for sale. They spent hours with the Walterses, who eventually invited them in. While Harry Walters was upstairs looking for the camper's title, according to WCPO's account, Marlene Walters was beaten to death. Coleman struck Harry Walters with a wooden candlestick, the Sixth Circuit recorded, and the couple were bound and left in the basement. Harry Walters survived with lasting injuries. Their daughter came home at about 3:45 p.m. and found her parents.
Money, jewelry, shoes and the family's Plymouth Reliant were taken. Police found the car two days later in a field in Lexington, Kentucky. Coleman's fingerprints were on a broken soda bottle in the living room, and within 24 hours police and the FBI had matched prints from the house to him, WCPO reported.
On July 16, Coleman and Brown abducted Oline Carmical Jr., a college professor from Williamsburg, Kentucky. According to federal prosecutors, he was forced at gunpoint into the trunk of his own car and made to call his wife to ask for ransom. He was found unharmed, still locked in the trunk, in Dayton. A Lexington man later pleaded guilty as an accomplice in the kidnapping.
On July 17 the pair went back to the Gays' home in Dayton. This time the minister recognized Coleman. The couple were confronted at gunpoint, and Coleman took their car. The Daily Northwestern later reported that Millard Gay, then 79, and his wife were beaten and gagged. Millard Gay testified that he asked Coleman why he would treat them this way. Coleman answered, in the words the Ohio Supreme Court quoted from that testimony, "I'm not going to kill you. * * * But we generally kills them where we go."
After Dayton, the pair headed back toward Illinois. When they were arrested in Evanston, officers found a car nearby that belonged to Eugene Scott, a man who had been found slain beside an Indiana interstate, the Daily Northwestern reported. Coleman was never tried for Scott's death; in 1987 UPI described him as the chief suspect in a second Indiana killing, which prosecutors did not plan to try.
On Friday, July 20, 1984, a former high school classmate of Coleman's recognized him in Evanston, the suburb just north of Chicago, and alerted police. A detective in an unmarked car heard the dispatch, spotted Coleman and Brown in a park and called for backup. Coleman had begun changing his clothes. Brown carried a gun and Coleman had several knives. Neither threatened the officers or tried to run, but both gave false names, and fingerprints at the station confirmed who they were, the Daily Northwestern reported in 2002. The FBI's own records credit local police and citizen cooperation, and its Chicago field office history says Chicago agents made the arrest. The search had lasted about seven weeks and covered six states.
Coleman and Brown were held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago on bonds that together totaled 45 million dollars. When Coleman was questioned about Vernita Wheat, he admitted knowing her mother but denied knowing or killing the girl, the Illinois Supreme Court recorded.
Six states had an interest in the case. Federal and state officials agreed that Ohio would go first. The U.S. attorney in Chicago, Dan K. Webb, said Hamilton County had "the best chance of securing a conviction and death penalty against the pair," UPI reported in August 1984. The federal kidnapping charge over Oline Carmical gave the government a way to move both defendants to Ohio.
Coleman and Brown pleaded guilty to the kidnapping on November 26, 1984. On January 7, 1985, U.S. District Judge Walter Rice in Dayton sentenced each of them to 20 years in prison and ruled that they could be transferred at once to Cincinnati to face murder charges.
Coleman and Brown were tried separately in Hamilton County. A grand jury indicted Coleman on five counts in the Walters case, including aggravated murder and aggravated robbery, and a jury convicted him on all of them in the spring of 1985. The jury found that he was the principal offender. During the trial he asked for new lawyers; the judge refused, and the Ohio Supreme Court later found no breakdown between him and his counsel, whom it described as thoroughly prepared. He was sentenced to death in May 1985; the Ohio Public Defender's record of executed prisoners gives May 6, 1985.
At his sentencing, WCPO reported, Brown claimed that she had killed Marlene Walters, and Coleman agreed, saying Brown had been high and that he had been upstairs searching the house. The judge did not accept that account. Brown was convicted of the Walters murder and sentenced to life in prison; the FBI dates her conviction to April 30, 1985.
The Storey case came next. A Hamilton County grand jury had indicted Coleman on October 10, 1984, for the aggravated murder of Tonnie Storey, with death penalty specifications, and for aggravated robbery. Prosecutors relied on other-acts evidence from the earlier crimes to prove identity and a "course of conduct," the specification that made the case a capital one. The Ohio Supreme Court later summed up that pattern as the targeting of young Black girls, the theft of cars, killing by ligature strangulation and leaving bodies in abandoned buildings. Because Coleman refused to give samples of his capital-letter handwriting, a prosecutor from the Walters case testified to authenticate handwritten motions Coleman had filed, which were used for comparison with the writing on the wall.
On June 15, 1985, the jury found him guilty of aggravated murder with the course-of-conduct specification. The next day it recommended death, and on June 24, 1985, the court sentenced him to death. At the penalty phase the judge asked whether he wanted a presentence investigation or a mental examination. He answered no to both. Brown was convicted separately in the Storey case and sentenced to death.
Indiana tried Coleman in Crown Point, the seat of Lake County, in the spring of 1986. He faced charges of murder, attempted murder and deviate sexual conduct, with Judge Richard Maroc presiding and Deputy Prosecutor Thomas Vanes for the state. The surviving girl testified for 41 minutes and identified Coleman in court, UPI reported; his lawyers challenged her identifications from photo lineups shown to her six times. He was convicted of murder, attempted murder and child molesting, and the jury recommended death, which the court imposed. In its 1990 review the Indiana Supreme Court described him as a manipulative sociopath of above-average intelligence and said it could find nothing pointing toward mitigation.
Illinois tried Coleman last, for the murder of Vernita Wheat. Jury selection took place in Rock Island County, and the jurors were brought to Waukegan and housed for a trial of about three weeks in January 1987. Six days before trial, Coleman asked to represent himself. The court allowed it and appointed his former public defenders as advisers.
Opening for the state, Assistant State's Attorney Matthew Chancey told the jury that Coleman had given Vernita's mother a false name and address, and that for three weeks she had hoped for a miracle. The mother identified Coleman as the man who left with her daughter, and the cab driver described the ride from Kenosha. Coleman kept his questioning short and told the jury that the state would not prove he was the killer. The prosecution's case included his fingerprint, the sightings in Kenosha and Waukegan, his sister's account of his visit on May 31 and testimony that he had asked a woman to leave town. Victims and relatives from six states testified.
The jury convicted him of murder and aggravated kidnapping. At sentencing the jury found him eligible for death on two grounds: his prior murder convictions in Ohio and Indiana, and the killing of a child under 12 with what the statute called exceptionally brutal conduct. Coleman called the trial a farce and a waste of taxpayers' money and told the jurors, "I'm dead already." They deliberated for about 30 minutes before returning a death sentence; the FBI dates the sentence to January 24, 1987. He also received 15 years for the kidnapping. Prosecutors said they had brought four trials to make sure at least one death sentence would be carried out. "You can't put a price tag on what it means to those people to have their day in court," said the Lake County state's attorney, Fred Foreman.
Coleman's four death sentences moved through state and federal courts for 15 years. He was held for part of that time at the federal maximum-security prison at Marion, Illinois, serving his federal kidnapping term.
In Ohio, the court of appeals upheld the Walters conviction on December 10, 1986, and the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed it unanimously on July 6, 1988, in State v. Coleman, 37 Ohio St.3d 286. The court rejected his claim that the evidence did not prove an intent to kill and found the death sentence proportionate. The Storey conviction was affirmed by the court of appeals on October 7, 1987, and unanimously by the Ohio Supreme Court on September 20, 1989, in State v. Coleman, 45 Ohio St.3d 298. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear both cases. The Ohio Supreme Court set execution dates of April 24, 1990, and January 5, 1995; each was stayed as Coleman pursued post-conviction claims, including a 1990 petition raising 104 claims in the Storey case.
In federal court, Coleman filed habeas petitions in both Ohio cases in January 1995. The district court denied them in 1998. On March 26, 2001, the Sixth Circuit affirmed the denial in the Walters case. It held that most of his claims were barred because he had not raised them in time, that the evidence of guilt was overwhelming, and that his lawyers had not been ineffective at sentencing because Coleman, who was competent, had directed them to argue residual doubt and refused to cooperate on mitigation.
The Storey case came out differently. On October 10, 2001, a divided Sixth Circuit panel upheld the conviction but found that his trial lawyers had been ineffective at the penalty phase: they had stipulated to his competency, had not contacted the doctors who examined him at Butner and had not looked into his background, and their closing argument did not mention his personal history. The court ordered the death sentence in that case vacated unless Ohio held a new penalty hearing within 180 days. It said the ruling did not affect any other sentence. Judge Alice Batchelder dissented on that point, writing that Coleman knew his options and chose to present no mitigation.
In Indiana, the state Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence in 1990 and, on December 29, 1998, affirmed the denial of post-conviction relief. It found that his trial lawyer should have presented hair evidence that excluded Coleman and Brown, but that the omission did not change the outcome.
In Illinois, the state Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence on June 19, 1989, and affirmed the denial of post-conviction relief on November 2, 1995, finding him competent to have waived counsel. The Seventh Circuit denied federal habeas relief on November 10, 1999. Illinois then halted executions under a moratorium in 2000, so his Illinois sentence could not be carried out, the Daily Northwestern noted.
Ohio scheduled his execution for April 26, 2002, on the Walters sentence. At a clemency hearing on April 16, his lawyer, Dale Baich, argued that Coleman had suffered brain damage at birth and that his upbringing had harmed his development. Baich also argued that prosecutors had used nine of their 12 peremptory challenges to exclude Black jurors, and that Coleman's trial lawyer had been unprepared. The parole board voted unanimously against clemency. Governor Bob Taft agreed, saying he could find "no compelling reason to grant clemency in this case."
In a letter to the parole board, Coleman wrote that he would not deny that he had destroyed lives, but that he "did not kill Mrs. Marlene Walters," WCPO reported.
Because so many victims' relatives were entitled to attend, state prison officials planned to show the execution on closed-circuit television in another room of the prison. Coleman's lawyers sued, arguing that state law barred broadcasting equipment. Judge Beverly Pfeiffer of the Franklin County Common Pleas Court dismissed the suit, ruling that the law covered recording and that the closed-circuit setup could not record. "It goes from one room to another," she said. One of Coleman's lawyers, Lori Leon, said the ruling made the execution a spectator sport. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously that his jury-bias claim came too late. On April 25, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution and declined to hear his last appeal from the Sixth Circuit, in Coleman v. Coyle.
Coleman was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville at 10:13 a.m. on April 26, 2002. He was 46. He was the fourth prisoner executed under Ohio's 1981 death penalty law. UPI reported that he spent his last hours listening to religious tapes and music, had a final meal of filet mignon and fried chicken, and prayed with spiritual advisers; his brother and two sisters did not arrive in time for a final visit.
More than a dozen people, among them victims' relatives and reporters, watched on television. The Lantern, the Ohio State University paper, reported that 15 witnesses related to the victims were to watch from the closed-circuit room. The state corrections director, Reginald Wilkinson, said he allowed the families to watch because "the death penalty can be imposed only once." Outside the prison, opponents of capital punishment from several Ohio groups held a vigil.
Officials were plain about how they saw him. A spokesman for Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery called him "a guilty man" and "the worst of the worst killers on death row in Ohio." Mike Allen, the Hamilton County prosecutor, had called him one of the most vicious serial killers in the history of the Midwest. Baich said he did not feel that justice had been served.
Harry Walters, his son and son-in-law, and Tonnie Storey's father and aunt told reporters before the execution that they planned to go to Lucasville. Investigators did not forget the case either. In 2008 Marc Hansen, who had been the lead Waukegan detective on the Wheat case, told the Daily Herald that some cases stay with an investigator for good. "It was 24 years ago, but in a lot of ways it seems like yesterday," he said.
Brown's sentences changed over the following decades. Ohio Governor Richard Celeste granted her clemency in 1991 and her Ohio death sentence was commuted to life, WCPO and the Daily Herald reported. In November 2018, Lake County prosecutors and the Indiana attorney general's office withdrew the demand for her execution in the Tamika Turks case, on evidence that she is likely intellectually disabled; she must serve 140 years on top of a life sentence without parole, the Daily Herald reported. Tamika's mother said the family had not been told in advance. "Debra Brown was right there with (Coleman), committing the same crimes," she said.
How many people died. Prosecutors charged Coleman with eight deaths, a figure repeated by UPI in 2002. He was convicted of four. The Temple deaths were charged in Ohio and never tried; the deaths of Donna Williams and Eugene Scott were attributed to him by investigators and never tried. Some 2002 student reports said he had been convicted of eight murders; the court records show four.
Who killed Marlene Walters. The jury found that Coleman was the principal offender, and the Ohio Supreme Court called that finding undisputed. Brown claimed at his sentencing that she had done it, and Coleman agreed then and repeated the claim to the parole board in 2002. The judge rejected their account, and no court accepted it.
Dates and counts. Accounts differ on several details. Tamika Turks's body was found on June 18 (Illinois Supreme Court) or June 19 (Ohio Supreme Court). Donna Williams disappeared on June 19 (Ohio Supreme Court and UPI) or June 17 (Daily Northwestern), and her body was found on July 11 (Ohio Supreme Court) or a day later (UPI). Rachelle Temple was nine (Ohio Supreme Court) or ten (Daily Northwestern). Oline Carmical was taken on July 16 (UPI, 1985) or July 17 (Daily Northwestern). One 2002 report counted five states instead of six.
Mental health. Experts retained for his appeals described brain dysfunction and serious personality disorders; courts in Indiana and Illinois found the evidence conflicting and did not credit it, and the Sixth Circuit found him competent to direct his own defense. Only in the Storey case did a court find that the failure to present that history mattered.
1973: Charged in Waukegan with rape and kidnapping; convicted of a lesser robbery charge; serves two years at Stateville.
May 29, 1984: Leaves Kenosha with nine-year-old Vernita Wheat.
June 1984: Tamika Turks killed in Gary, Indiana; a second girl survives.
June 19, 1984: Donna Williams disappears in Gary; Vernita Wheat's body found in Waukegan.
June 28, 1984: Couple attacked and robbed in Dearborn Heights, Michigan.
Early July 1984: Virginia and Rachelle Temple killed in Toledo.
July 7, 1984: Toledo couple bound and robbed; Coleman and Brown arrive at the Gays' home in Dayton.
July 10, 1984: Dropped off in Cincinnati.
July 11, 1984: Tonnie Storey disappears; Coleman added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
July 13, 1984: Marlene Walters killed in Norwood; Harry Walters injured.
July 16 or 17, 1984: Oline Carmical abducted in Kentucky.
July 17, 1984: Gays confronted at gunpoint in Dayton; their car taken.
July 19, 1984: Tonnie Storey's body found.
July 20, 1984: Coleman and Brown arrested in Evanston.
October 10, 1984: Indicted in Hamilton County for the Storey murder.
November 26, 1984: Guilty pleas to federal kidnapping.
January 7, 1985: Sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.
May 1985: Sentenced to death for the murder of Marlene Walters.
June 24, 1985: Sentenced to death for the murder of Tonnie Storey.
1986: Convicted in Crown Point, Indiana, for the murder of Tamika Turks; sentenced to death.
January 1987: Convicted in Waukegan for the murder of Vernita Wheat; sentenced to death.
July 6, 1988: Ohio Supreme Court affirms the Walters conviction and sentence.
June 19, 1989: Illinois Supreme Court affirms the Wheat conviction and sentence.
September 20, 1989: Ohio Supreme Court affirms the Storey conviction and sentence.
1990: Indiana Supreme Court affirms the Turks conviction and sentence.
1991: Ohio governor commutes Brown's death sentence.
November 2, 1995: Illinois Supreme Court affirms denial of post-conviction relief.
December 29, 1998: Indiana Supreme Court affirms denial of post-conviction relief.
November 10, 1999: Seventh Circuit denies habeas relief in the Illinois case.
March 26, 2001: Sixth Circuit upholds the Walters conviction and sentence.
October 10, 2001: Sixth Circuit upholds the Storey conviction but orders the death sentence vacated unless Ohio holds a new penalty hearing.
April 16, 2002: Ohio Parole Board recommends against clemency; Governor Taft denies it.
April 25, 2002: U.S. Supreme Court denies a stay.
April 26, 2002: Executed at Lucasville.
November 2018: Indiana withdraws its demand for Brown's execution.