On the morning of July 13, 1984, a man and a woman bicycled into Norwood, Ohio, a small city inside Cincinnati, and went to the home of Harry and Marlene Walters to talk about buying a camper the couple had for sale. Less than three hours later they drove away in the Walterses' red Plymouth Reliant. Harry Walters had been beaten unconscious with a wooden candlestick and survived to testify. Marlene Walters, forty-four, had been bludgeoned twenty to twenty-five times and was dead. Shards of a broken soda bottle in the living room carried Alton Coleman's fingerprints, and in the basement were bloody prints from two pairs of shoes. The visitors had left behind two bicycles, clothes and shoes that were not the Walterses' and taken money, jewelry and shoes that were.
By then Coleman and his girlfriend, Debra Denise Brown, had been on the run for six weeks. He was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on November 6, 1955; his mother worked three jobs, and he lived with his seventy-three-year-old grandmother. He was well known to the police: between 1973 and 1983 he was charged with sex crimes six times. Two cases were dismissed. In a 1973 case in which he and another man kidnapped and raped a woman and took one hundred dollars from her car, he pleaded guilty to armed robbery and served three years. In 1976 he was charged with raping three fellow inmates in jail and convicted only of battery. Psychiatrists diagnosed a mixed personality disorder with antisocial, narcissistic and obsessive features, among other conditions. In 1984 he was due to stand trial in Illinois for the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl when he fled.
Brown, born on November 11, 1962, was one of eleven children, borderline intellectually disabled, with a head injury from childhood and a diagnosis of dependent personality disorder. She had been engaged to another man when she met Coleman in 1983, and she left her family to move in with him. She had no record of violence before him.
Their first victim was nine-year-old Vernita Wheat of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Coleman had befriended her mother, Juanita, and on May 29, 1984, he took the girl to Waukegan. Her decomposed body was found on June 19 in an abandoned building four blocks from his grandmother's apartment; she had been raped and strangled with a ligature. In June, in Gary, Indiana, they came upon two girls, Annie Turks, nine, and her niece Tamika Turks, seven, and sexually assaulted both. Annie survived. Tamika's body was found on June 19. The same day Donna Williams, twenty-five, of Gary, disappeared; she was found raped and strangled in Detroit on July 11, half a mile from her car. On June 28 they beat Palmer and Marjorie Jones severely in their home in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, and took their money and car.
In Toledo, Ohio, Coleman befriended Virginia Temple, a mother of several children. When she stopped answering her relatives, police went in and found her young children alone and frightened, and Virginia and her eldest, nine-year-old Rachelle, strangled in a crawl space. That same morning the pair tied up Frank and Dorothy Duvendack in their Toledo home with electrical cord and took their money and car. In Dayton they stayed with the Reverend Millard Gay and his wife, Kathryn, went to church with them on July 9, and were dropped off in Cincinnati the next day. On July 12 Tonnie Storey, fifteen, of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, disappeared; she was found eight days later with a bracelet stolen from the Temples under her body. That day the FBI put Coleman on its Ten Most Wanted list as a special addition, only the tenth person so added since the list began in 1950.
After Norwood they abandoned the Walterses' car in Kentucky, kidnapped Oline Carmical Jr., a college professor from Williamsburg, and drove him back to Ohio locked in the trunk of his own car; he was rescued in Dayton on July 17. They returned to the Gays' home with guns. The minister, who now knew who Coleman was, asked why he would do this to them. "I'm not going to kill you," Coleman said, "but we generally kill them where we go." They took the Gays' car. In Indianapolis they stole another and kidnapped its owner, Eugene Scott, seventy-five, whose body was found in a ditch, shot repeatedly.
On July 20, 1984, a motorist from Coleman's Waukegan neighborhood saw the pair crossing an intersection in Evanston, Illinois, and called police from a gas station. Officers found them on the bleachers in an empty Mason Park. Brown had a gun in her purse; Coleman had a steak knife between two pairs of socks. They carried a shopping bag of T-shirts and caps and had been changing every few blocks. More than fifty officials from six jurisdictions met a week later to decide who would try them first, and chose Ohio as the state most likely to produce a swift death sentence.
Ohio convicted both of the rape and murder of Tonnie Storey and the murder of Marlene Walters, though not of the Temple killings, and sentenced both to death; both also got twenty years in federal court for taking Carmical across a state line. Illinois convicted Coleman in 1987 of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Vernita Wheat, 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. His death sentence for Storey was later overturned, but the Walters sentence stood through years of appeals, several of which reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
On April 26, 2002, reciting the twenty-third psalm, he was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, at forty-six, and relatives of his victims watched on the prison's closed-circuit television after a judge ruled that did not count as a broadcast. Beforehand he released a letter apologizing. The state's prisons director said he had never directly expressed remorse but had admitted what he had done "in his own convoluted way." He was the only condemned person in the country then under sentence of death in three states.
Brown's death sentences did not last. Ohio's governor commuted hers in 1991, citing her low IQ and what was described as a master and slave relationship with Coleman, and her Indiana death sentence was vacated in 2019 on evidence of intellectual disability and replaced with 140 years. She is serving life. Tamika Turks's mother said Brown had been at his side, bore the same responsibility and should share his punishment.