Four men went into a house on Barton Avenue in Richmond on the night of October 19, 1979. Two of them went to the electric chair. One got life for testifying against the others. The fourth is sixty-eight years old and still asking the Virginia Parole Board to let him out.
The difference between those outcomes came down to a rule about whose finger was on the trigger.
Virginia at the time had what lawyers called the triggerman rule. Capital murder, and with it the death penalty, was available only against the person who had actually done the killing. An accomplice could be as deeply involved as anyone in the room and still be beyond the reach of a capital charge.
Nobody could prove that Anthony Ray Briley had personally killed anyone. So the Commonwealth convicted him as a principal in the second degree, on four counts of first-degree murder, and he is the only one of the three brothers still alive.
He was born on February 17, 1958, and was twenty-one that autumn, the youngest of the three who stayed. There had been a fourth, Edward Jerome Briley, known as Boot, who left home in his early teens for relatives in North Carolina and had nothing to do with any of it; he died in November 2020.
Between March and October of 1979 the three brothers and a sixteen-year-old named Duncan Eric Meekins robbed and killed across Richmond. How many people died depends on who is counting. Contemporary reporting settled on eleven, most later accounts say at least twelve, and one tally reaches twenty-one by folding in a killing Linwood committed alone in 1971 and every death anyone ever attributed to the group.
The known dead of 1979, in order, were Michael Wayne McDuffie, twenty, a vending machine serviceman kidnapped, shot and robbed in his car on March 21; Edric Alvin Clark, twenty-eight, shot by Linwood on March 31 over a drug dispute involving Meekins; Mary Gowen, seventy-six, followed home from her babysitting job on April 9 and beaten, raped and shot; Christopher Phillips, seventeen, killed on July 4 when Linwood dropped a cinderblock on his head; John Gallaher, a disc jockey, taken from outside a South Richmond nightclub on September 14 and shot on Mayo Island; Mary Wilfong, sixty-two, a private nurse beaten to death with a baseball bat outside her apartment on September 30; Blanche Page, seventy-five, and her boarder Charles Garner, fifty-nine, killed on October 5; Thomas Saunders, thirty-two, on October 14; and the Wilkerson household on October 19.
The attack where Anthony's own part is least in doubt came first. On March 12, 1979 Linwood knocked on the door of William and Virginia Bucher in Henrico County, said he had car trouble and needed to use a telephone, and forced his way in. He held the couple at gunpoint and waved his youngest brother inside. The two of them tied the Buchers up, stripped the house of a television, a citizens' band radio, a .32 pistol and jewelry, poured kerosene through the rooms, and threw a lit match into it on their way out.
William Bucher worked himself and his wife loose; Meekins had not pulled the bindings tight, and the two of them got out just ahead of the fire. They are the only people known to have survived an encounter with the Brileys. Their cat did not. Anthony was convicted of robbery in Henrico County for that night.
The last of it was the house on Barton Avenue.
Harvey Wilkerson was twenty-seven and had known the brothers for years. He lived a short walk from their house with his common-law wife, Judy Diane Barton, who was twenty-three and eight months pregnant, and her five-year-old son Harvey Wayne Barton. Seeing the group coming down the street, Wilkerson shut his door and locked it. They saw him do it. He let them in anyway, because of what refusing would have cost him.
The two adults were overpowered, bound and gagged with duct tape. Linwood raped Judy Barton in the kitchen within earshot of her partner and her child, and Meekins continued the rape. The three were covered with sheets. James told Meekins he had to take one, and Meekins shot Harvey Wilkerson in the head. James shot Judy Barton and then her son.
Police were in the neighborhood that night and saw men running hard down the street without knowing what had happened inside. The bodies were not found for two or three days. Arrests came within the week: Linwood and Meekins after a short car chase, while by most accounts James and Anthony turned themselves in.
Meekins was the one who talked. He took a plea agreement, described the whole series, and gave evidence against all three brothers. He was sentenced to life plus eighty years and imprisoned out of state under a different name, away from them.
The structure of Anthony's sentence is set out in the Virginia Parole Board's own published records, and it is more specific than the accounts that summarize it as simply life. Three first-degree murder convictions were entered in the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond and sentenced on April 30, 1980, at thirty years each. A fourth was sentenced separately on June 24 and carried life. Alongside them sit three weapons offenses at a year apiece, a robbery at fifteen years, an abduction at ten, and the Henrico robbery at twenty. Reported at the time as life plus a hundred and nineteen years.
Three of the four murder counts were the Wilkerson household. Which killing the fourth covered is not stated in the published parole records. The gang was charged over the deaths of Blanche Page, seventy-five, and her boarder Charles Garner, fifty-nine, killed on October 5 two blocks from the Briley house, and those are the likeliest candidates, but the record does not say so.
Because his sentence carries parole eligibility, Anthony Briley has spent decades coming up for consideration and being turned down. The board refused him in March 2024, saying he should serve more of his sentence, that release would diminish the seriousness of the crime, and citing the nature of the offenses and an extensive criminal record. It refused him again in December, this time on a geriatric application, citing the three first-degree murders, a history of violence, and the offenses again. By its own reckoning he had then served forty-five years, two months and six days.
Meekins has been refused every time too, and in his case the prosecutors who tried the Brileys have argued for his release. Robert J. Rice and Warren Von Schuch have both pointed out what his evidence made possible. Without him the Commonwealth had very little.
Anthony took no part in the escape from Virginia's death row at Mecklenburg on May 31, 1984, in which his two brothers were the ringleaders. He was not on death row and he was not in that prison. Linwood went to the electric chair on October 12, 1984. James followed on April 18, 1985.
He is held at the Lawrenceville Correctional Center. He has been in a Virginia prison since October 1979, longer than either of his brothers was alive when they died.