Anthony Kirkland was born in Cincinnati in December 1968 into a household of severe neglect and violence. In 1987, aged eighteen, he strangled his girlfriend Leola Douglas and set her body on fire. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and aggravated arson and served sixteen years. The Ohio press called him the Cincinnati Killer.
He was released in 2003. Between 2006 and 2009 he killed four more: Mary Jo Newton, forty-five, and Kimya Rolison, twenty-five, both women living on the street in the Avondale area, and then two children, Casonya Crawford, fourteen, in 2006, and Esme Kenney, thirteen, in March 2009. Each body was burned. The first two deaths were not linked and were slow to be investigated, which is a pattern this archive records repeatedly where the victims are poor women without settled addresses.
Esme Kenney was a schoolgirl who went out jogging near a reservoir in Winton Hills on a Sunday afternoon and did not come back. Police found Kirkland nearby wearing her watch and iPod, and he confessed to all five killings.
He was convicted in 2010 of the aggravated murders of Crawford and Kenney and pleaded guilty to the two adult women, and was sentenced to death. In 2017 the Ohio Supreme Court vacated the death sentence because the prosecutor had told the jury in closing that the two adult victims were, in effect, free killings for which he had received nothing, which the court held improper. A new penalty phase was held in 2018 and a second jury again returned death. He remains on Ohio's death row.