Two canine officers found him sitting under a stand of fir trees with knives sticking out of his pocket. When they searched him they turned up a purple watch and an iPod, and the back of the iPod was etched with three words: Property of Esme.
Police in Winton Hills had been going through abandoned houses and woodland since twenty past four on the afternoon of Saturday, March 7, 2009, after a woman called 911 to say her thirteen-year-old daughter had gone out jogging and not come home.
The man gave his name as Anthony Palmore and said he had found the things in the woods. Palmore was his father's name. Twenty minutes later he gave his own: Anthony Wayne Kirkland. At around three the next morning searchers found Esme Kenney's body a short distance away.
She was a seventh grader at Cincinnati's School for the Creative and Performing Arts, and she played the cello. She was found naked except for her shoes and socks, propped against a tree branch with her arms crossed, her groin, inner thighs and left hand severely burned. The coroner found a fractured hyoid bone, ligature marks, and petechial hemorrhaging that indicated a long struggle, and gave the cause of death as ligature strangulation. There was premortem injury consistent with rape. DNA consistent with hers was recovered from Kirkland's hands, from his penis, and from a stain on his shorts.
Two years earlier the Cincinnati police had sat in a room with this man and let him go.
In March 2007 Detective Keith Witherell interviewed him about two women. Kirkland looked at a photograph of one and said he did not recognize her. He admitted knowing the other, said their relationship had been sexual, and denied any part in her death. There was no forensic evidence, no witness and no admission, so there was nothing to charge. He was free for another two years, and Esme Kenney had two years left to live.
The two women Witherell asked about had been found in the spring and summer of 2006, and both of them had been burned.
Casonya Crawford was fourteen. On the night of May 3, 2006 she left her grandmother Patricia's house with her book bag, her gym shoes and her cell phone. Around midnight she called a friend from that friend's front porch, was told it was too late to come over, and said she was heading home. Walking back she was arguing with her boyfriend on the phone when the call cut off mid-sentence. He spent three days trying to reach her. Her grandmother reported her missing the following afternoon.
City workers landscaping at the end of a dead-end road found her on May 9, under a pile of old tires about ten feet down a hillside, so badly charred that the responding officer could not determine her race or her sex. Her front teeth had recently been knocked out. She was wearing one sock. Just past the end of the road was a burn pit, and a length of timber charred at one end that had been used to stir the fire. The pelvic area was burned past the point where a rape examination was possible; the hands and forearms past the point where anything could be recovered from beneath the fingernails. Dental x-rays identified her.
Mary Jo Newton was forty-five. On June 15 her remains were found still hot and smoking about thirty-five feet from the end of another dead-end street, her right foot two feet further on. The fire had been started with lighter fluid or paint thinner. The autopsy could not establish how she died, only that she had been dead before she burned.
In the spring of 2008 a third set of remains appeared in heavy woods at the end of a third dead-end street: scattered bones, hands and feet missing, a sharp-force injury to the neck. A forensic anthropologist could say only that she had probably been an African American woman between thirty and fifty-five. She had no name for nearly a year.
The interviews after the arrest ran more than four hours in the first session alone, and they were videotaped and eventually played to a jury.
Kirkland's account of Esme Kenney changed repeatedly. He had been picked up on outstanding warrants and knew nothing about a missing girl. He had seen nobody near the reservoir, and gave the impression he did not know what race the girl was. Then he admitted meeting her. They had literally run into each other, he said, and the collision made him drop his beer and lose his temper, and he had punched and kicked her but left her alive. Told her body had been found, he said he had chased her into the woods but that she was alive and dressed when he left. Then he said he had left her with a man he knew as Pedro. Then he conceded he had known all along that she was dead, and that he had gone back hours later to move the body.
He said Esme died "because of my hatred." Asked directly whether he had killed her, he said no.
A second detective, William Hilbert, took over about two hours later and asked about the two women from 2006. That time Kirkland talked.
He had met Mary Jo Newton at a bus stop across from the downtown Justice Center. She was working as a prostitute to support a drug habit and they had slept together a couple of times. On the day she died he picked her up in College Hill; they went to a liquor store, then a Rally's, took drugs and drove around. An argument started and he choked her to death from behind. He drove to Avondale, left her at the end of a dead-end street and used a gas can he kept in the vehicle. He told Hilbert he burned the body because fire purifies, and that burning was a proper burial, like the Vikings. It was still daylight and there was nobody around, so he stayed and watched it.
He had first seen Casonya Crawford on a bridge over Interstate 71 near Walnut Hills High School at around one in the morning, while he sat there smoking marijuana. He gave her twenty dollars and said he would go to sixty. The money, he claimed, was only to talk. They argued about girls playing games. She threw it back at him, he grabbed her, she kneed him, and he strangled her. He carried her to a wooded area, burned her with lighter fluid taken from a nearby house, dragged her down the hill and covered her with tires because he was frightened. He stayed with her all night.
Esme, he said, had run into him near the reservoir at about three in the afternoon and apologized, and the apology enraged him. He punched her, called her names, demanded to know her name and what she was listening to, and chased her into the woods, where she tripped over a low fence. He denied raping her, then said she had told him she would do whatever he wanted if he would not hurt her, then said he could not penetrate her completely. He strangled her with his hands and, when that did not work, with a rag from his pocket, because he did not believe she would stay quiet. He propped her against a tree and stayed two hours, talking to her and apologizing. Then he went to find lighter fluid, as he put it, to perform the ritual. He ate out of a garbage can, came back to the woods and fell asleep, and was still there when the dogs found him.
Thirty minutes into a third interview, detectives asked about the unidentified bones from 2008. Kirkland had been saying he killed three people. Then he said: "I, three, I wasn't honest totally. It was one more."
He knew her as Kim. He had met her working on Reading Road in December 2006, paid her forty dollars and had sex with her. They argued in the car, he pulled over, and he stabbed her in the throat with her own knife. He laid her out on a bed of wood at the top of a dead-end hill, sprayed her with lighter fluid and covered her. He went back a few weeks later and found the skeleton in place with the leg bones gone.
One detail he remembered gave her back her name. On the night she died, he said, the two of them had been stopped in a Clifton park after dark by a uniformed officer who ran her license. An investigator pulled a month of license-verification requests sent by Cincinnati police to the state of California and found one from December 22, 2006, for a license belonging to Kimya Bodi Iamaya Corrine Rolison. The date of birth roughly matched what Kirkland remembered seeing. Her family confirmed she was missing, and dental records confirmed the body. Without that memory the Rolison family would probably never have learned what happened to her, which is why the Ohio Supreme Court would later give his confession real weight in mitigation.
Reports give Kimya Rolison's age as both twenty-five and twenty-seven, and say she was reported missing in October 2006 although the killing is placed in December. The court record settles neither.
There was a fifth woman, and she came first. On May 20, 1987, when Kirkland was eighteen, he strangled his girlfriend Leola Douglas, who was twenty-seven, and set her body on fire. Accounts of that killing say he raped her after she refused him sex and burned her to destroy the evidence. He was allowed to plead to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated arson and was sentenced to ten to twenty-five years.
In prison he earned a GED and an associate degree, and he was placed in solitary confinement for disciplinary control twenty-one times between 1998 and 2003, four of them in his last nine months, for breaking rules or fighting. The parole board turned him down at first because of what he had done. He was released anyway, because a ruling of the Ohio Supreme Court required parole-eligible prisoners to be judged by the offense they had been convicted of rather than by the underlying crime, and the guidelines for voluntary manslaughter were far more lenient than those for murder. He was paroled in 2004 after sixteen years, and was out about two years before Casonya Crawford died.
In the middle of the sequence there is one more offense, and it became the most argued-over evidence in the case. In the fall of 2007 Kirkland was staying on and off with a woman whose thirteen-year-old daughter came home from school to find herself alone in the apartment with him. He brought her the hamburger she had left cooking, then appeared twice in her bedroom doorway with his pants down, the second time holding a note offering to pay her for a sex act. He came back a fourth time, dressed, and left five dollars on her dresser. She told her mother, the two of them went to the police, and he was convicted of importuning and served about a year.
Hamilton County indicted him on twelve counts, four of them aggravated murder with death specifications. On the first morning of trial he pleaded guilty to murdering Mary Jo Newton and Kimya Rolison and to two counts of abuse of a corpse. On March 12, 2010 the jury convicted him of everything else, including every death specification, and recommended death.
He was sentenced on March 31: death for the aggravated murder of Esme Kenney in the course of a rape, death for the aggravated murder of Casonya Crawford in the course of an aggravated robbery, and seventy years to life for Newton and Rolison. Five killings, all of them covered by a conviction.
The defense called one witness in mitigation. Dr. Scott Bresler, a forensic psychiatrist, diagnosed an adjustment disorder and an antisocial personality disorder and told the jury that in plain language Kirkland is a psychopath. He described the household: a father, George Palmore, alcohol-dependent and violent, who beat Kirkland and beat his mother and made the boy watch him rape her. Palmore left when Kirkland was nine or ten. His mother remarried and got help for herself and for some of the children, but not for the oldest. Under cross-examination Bresler said Kirkland's sisters had been sexually abused by their father, and also by Kirkland, when he was thirteen. His conclusion was that Kirkland "cannot live responsibly in society ever."
Kirkland was born in Cincinnati on September 13, 1968, to Carol Yvonne Kirkland, an unmarried seventeen-year-old. His birth certificate names his father as Donald Pettijohn. The man described to the jury as his father, and whose surname Kirkland gave police on the night of his arrest, was George Palmore; the record does not reconcile the two. His mother later married Clarence Spencer, by one account when Kirkland was eighteen.
Kirkland made an unsworn statement. He accepted responsibility for the four deaths, said he got so angry he could not stop himself and that this was not an excuse, and asked to be locked away forever. "I cannot believe how horrible I am. I will never forgive, forget or rest or be at peace, nor should I." Then: "I do not blame you if you kill me. I don't deserve to live, but please spare my life."
And then the prosecutor said the thing that has defined this case ever since.
Joseph Deters, urging the jury toward death, told them Kirkland was already going to prison for the rest of his life for Mary Jo and Kimya, and that "so I guess Casonya and Esme are just freebies for him." The trial judge did not sustain the defense objection. Deters added that life in prison "should not be something you even consider."
On May 13, 2014 the Ohio Supreme Court agreed the remark was improper. A prosecutor may not argue that a sentence short of death is meaningless for a defendant already serving life, and the court found the argument had prejudicially affected Kirkland's substantial rights.
It found three more categories of improper argument in the same closing. Deters had invited the jury to imagine what the girls felt in their last minutes. He had told them Esme "was no longer begging that man to let her live. She's begging that man to let her die." Nothing in the record supported it. He had described Casonya's father as being in prison at her birth and her mother as choosing drugs over her daughter, and none of that was in evidence either. And he had told the jury to weigh the circumstances of the murders themselves as though they were the aggravating circumstances.
Then the court affirmed the death sentence anyway, reasoning that Ohio law requires it to conduct its own independent weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and that its own review could cure what had happened below.
Three justices disagreed. Justice Lanzinger would have sent the case back for a new sentencing jury, writing that due process requires a jury to be free from prejudice before it recommends death and that an appellate reweighing cannot repair a verdict that may have been the product of passion. Justice Pfeifer, who wrote that Kirkland's crimes plainly qualified him for the penalty, argued that the state's overzealousness had tainted its own case and that the attempted-rape conviction over Casonya should not stand. Justice O'Neill dissented outright.
The court stayed his execution that October, and on April 6, 2015 the United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. Then, in May 2016, on Kirkland's motion for relief, the same court vacated both death sentences and sent the case back to Hamilton County.
His appointed lawyers, Perry Ancona and Norm Aubin, asked to be removed from the case in November 2017, telling Judge Patrick Dinkelacker that a state public defender who was not his attorney of record had been discussing the case with him. The resentencing opened on July 25, 2018 and ran into August before a new jury of six white men, four white women and two Black women. They heard videotaped depositions from Esme Kenney's mother Lisa and Kimya Rolison's father Gary, and days of the recorded police interviews. The defense put on expert evidence of childhood abuse and head injury. On August 6 the jury deliberated a little over two hours and recommended death again. The judge imposed it on August 28.
The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed unanimously on August 18, 2020, rejecting all eleven of Kirkland's propositions of law and finding that he "failed to identify any significant error; he was resentenced in a fundamentally fair proceeding." A petition to the United States Supreme Court followed the next year.
Kirkland is held at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown. Ohio's last execution took place on July 18, 2018. Mike DeWine, governor since January 2019, has postponed every execution date set during his tenure, citing the refusal of drug suppliers to provide lethal-injection drugs, and on June 16, 2026 he asked the legislature to abolish the death penalty or, if it would not, to put the question to the voters. No execution date for Kirkland appears on any public record.
Deters said afterward that the testimony of the thirteen-year-old girl he had propositioned in 2007 was what made the difference on Casonya Crawford's count, and that without it the verdict would have been "a coin flip." Two justices of the Ohio Supreme Court thought that testimony should never have been admitted at all.