On the night of October 26, 2010, in the state prison at Florence, Arizona, a 50-year-old man from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, spoke his last words. He thanked his family and friends for coming. Then he added two more: "Boomer Sooner," the cheer of the University of Oklahoma, whose teams he followed. Jeffrey Timothy Landrigan died shortly after 10:15 p.m., hours after the second of two Supreme Court rulings that had gone against him.
Somewhere in the long record of his case sits a letter from the woman who gave birth to him. His father, according to the letter, was on death row in Arkansas. "Jeff needs help mentally like his father did," she wrote, and she blamed his troubles on the "blood link" between the boy and the two people who had made him.
That letter, and the question it raised, followed Landrigan from a sentencing courtroom in Phoenix to the Supreme Court and back again. Was violence handed down in his blood? Courts do not decide questions of that kind, but they were asked, again and again, to weigh it. His was not the only such case. In California, a jury that condemned Gerald Gallego heard from the lawyer who had once defended his father, a man put to death in Mississippi’s gas chamber. In Richmond, Virginia, three brothers who grew up in one house went to prison together, and two of them died in the same electric chair six months apart. In southern Poland, a court sent one brother to the gallows for a series of 14 killings and another brother with him.
Jeffrey Landrigan was born on March 14, 1964. His birth mother drank and used amphetamines during her pregnancy, according to the account later presented by his lawyers, and she gave him up when he was about six months old. He was adopted and grew up in northeastern Oklahoma; at his death the Oklahoma City station News 9 still called him a Bartlesville man.
The record his lawyers assembled years later described a childhood in trouble from the start. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals summarized it: abandonment and attachment problems from his earliest years, violent tantrums, early drinking and drug use. His adoptive mother, according to the same filings, was herself an alcoholic. By his teens he had passed through juvenile detention, a psychiatric ward and two drug rehabilitation programs. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing in dissent at the Supreme Court in 2007, added an overdose in an eighth or ninth grade classroom and an education cut short. An adoptive sister later gave a sworn declaration about the family’s problems.
Landrigan was Native American, Amnesty International noted in 2010. When he learned that he had been adopted, or when he first heard of the man who was his father, has not been reported.
In 1982 an Oklahoma court convicted Landrigan of second-degree murder. The victim was Greg Brown, described by the Arizona Attorney General’s office as his best friend. The killing took place in Washington County, and he was sentenced to 20 years, News 9 reported at his death.
Four years into that sentence, in 1986, he attacked another inmate with a knife. The man survived, and Landrigan was convicted of assault and battery with a deadly weapon. Describing the episode in court years later, he said of the inmate, "It was lucky he lived."
He was being held at the John Lilley Correctional Center in Boley, Oklahoma, when he escaped in November 1989.
Within weeks he was in Phoenix. On December 13, 1989, according to the Arizona Attorney General’s office, he spent the evening drinking with Chester Dean Dyer in Phoenix. Dyer was strangled; his death was discovered on December 15, and his paycheck was missing.
The evidence against Landrigan was physical and plentiful. Investigators recovered seven of his fingerprints, and a shoe print and blood evidence tied him to the killing. When police arrested him a few days after the body was found, he was wearing a shirt that belonged to Dyer. He first denied knowing the dead man. An ex-girlfriend testified that he had talked to her about "robbing" and about having killed someone.
Before trial the state offered him a plea to second-degree murder with a 20-year sentence, Amnesty International reported. He turned it down. The court appointed a lawyer who had never handled a death penalty case. In June 1990 an Arizona jury convicted him of theft, second-degree burglary and felony murder, a killing committed in the course of a burglary. The jury did not find that the killing was premeditated.
The trial judge, not the jury, would decide the sentence. The case belonged to Judge Cheryl Hendrix.
The defense lawyer had prepared two witnesses: Landrigan’s birth mother and his former wife. Both had been subpoenaed. Both refused to testify. The lawyer told the judge the refusal came "at my client’s wishes." The judge turned to Landrigan.
Had he told his lawyer not to bring any mitigating circumstances to her attention? "Yeah," he said. Were there mitigating circumstances she should know about? "Not as far as I’m concerned."
When the lawyer tried to tell the court about legitimate work Landrigan had done, Landrigan cut him off. "If I wanted this to be heard, I’d have my wife say it." He told the judge that he had been "doing robberies supporting my family." When the lawyer suggested that the Oklahoma killing had elements of self-defense, Landrigan corrected him: "He didn’t grab me. I stabbed him."
Asked whether he had anything to say, he answered in words the Supreme Court later quoted in full: "I think if you want to give me the death penalty, just bring it right on. I’m ready for it."
Judge Hendrix found two aggravating circumstances: the murder was committed for pecuniary gain, and Landrigan had prior convictions for violent felonies. She found two mitigating ones that were not listed in the statute: his family loved him, and the jury had not found premeditation. She called him "a person who has no scruples and no regard for human life and human beings." On October 25, 1990, she sentenced him to death, with 20 years for the burglary and six months for the theft.
The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed in 1993.
In January 1995, Landrigan filed a petition for postconviction relief arguing that his trial lawyer had failed him. A proper investigation, the petition said, would have explored the "biological component" of his violent behavior. His lawyer should have interviewed his biological father and other relatives, who could have confirmed that his birth mother drank and used drugs while she was pregnant. The later federal filings went further, arguing that he may have been genetically predisposed to violence and that exposure to alcohol and drugs before birth may have caused deficits consistent with fetal alcohol syndrome.
The birth mother’s letter became part of that record. Quoted by the Ninth Circuit and again by Justice Stevens, it said that Landrigan’s father was on death row in Arkansas, that the boy’s "blood link" to her and to a man she called Darrel had "messed up his whole life," and that Jeff needed help mentally, as his father had. The letter also accused his adoptive mother of drinking and of other conduct in the home.
The experts added their own findings. A psychologist, Dr. Mickey McMahon, had interviewed Landrigan before the 1990 sentencing but said the lawyer never authorized the testing that should have followed. A defense investigator spent 13 hours on the case and did no mitigation work. Later, Dr. Thomas C. Thompson diagnosed antisocial personality disorder, and, according to Justice Stevens, his testing pointed to an organic brain disorder and "very limited impulse control." A neuropsychologist who examined Landrigan in 1998 concluded that inherited factors, prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, early rejection by his birth parents and troubled relations with his adoptive family had "severely impaired" his ability to function in society, Amnesty International reported.
Judge Hendrix, now hearing the postconviction case as well, rejected the claim as frivolous without a hearing, pointing out that Landrigan himself had refused to allow mitigating evidence. The Arizona Supreme Court declined review on June 19, 1996. A second state petition was dismissed in 1999.
Landrigan moved into federal court in October 1996. The district court in Arizona denied relief in December 1999, finding that even if his lawyer had done more, the result would have been the same. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit agreed in 2001. That panel’s view of the inheritance argument was blunt: in a case like his, "assuring the court that genetics made him the way he is could not have been very helpful."
The full Ninth Circuit then reheard the case and, in March 2006, reversed. Landrigan, it held, had a colorable claim that his lawyer’s failure to investigate his background prejudiced him, and he was entitled to an evidentiary hearing to prove it.
Arizona took the case to the Supreme Court. Kent Cattani, chief counsel of the Attorney General’s capital litigation section, argued it on January 9, 2007. On May 14, 2007, the Court reversed the Ninth Circuit by a vote of five to four. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito. A defendant who refused to let his lawyer present mitigating evidence, the majority reasoned, could not later win a hearing by showing that the lawyer should have found more of it; the state courts had reasonably concluded that Landrigan would have blocked any such evidence, and much of what he now offered overlapped with what his birth mother could have said in 1990. The district court had not abused its discretion in refusing a hearing.
Justice Stevens dissented, joined by Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. He pointed out that the lawyer had never developed the history of Landrigan’s childhood or his drug use, and he faulted the majority for assuming that a birth mother and a former wife could have explained the medical effects of fetal alcohol syndrome to a judge. "Without the benefit of an evidentiary hearing," he wrote, "this is pure guesswork."
The judge whose sentence the Supreme Court had restored was no longer on the bench. Cheryl Hendrix had retired in 2001. In 2007, in a sworn statement to Landrigan’s appeal lawyers, she said that if she had heard the evidence about his background she would not have sentenced him to death, and that the 1998 neuropsychological findings would have left her "no choice" but a life sentence.
Arizona set his execution for October 26, 2010. The final days brought two fights at once, one over evidence and one over the drug the state intended to use.
The evidence fight concerned DNA. Under a 2000 Arizona law, Landrigan had sought testing of items from Dyer’s apartment, and preliminary results released on October 20, 2010, showed that biological material on a pair of jeans and a blanket did not come from him. On October 22, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency heard the case. Judge Hendrix appeared and said he should have received a life sentence. The board split two to two on recommending commutation, so no recommendation went forward, and voted three to one to recommend a temporary reprieve while the courts resolved the DNA litigation. On October 25, Governor Jan Brewer refused the reprieve.
That same day a Ninth Circuit panel of Judges Pamela Rymer, Kim McLane Wardlaw and William Fletcher refused to let him file a new federal petition based on the DNA. The court doubted he had acted with diligence, since he had waited years to seek the testing. Even taking the results at face value, the judges wrote, they showed only that he had not left that material on those items, not that he was a minor participant in the killing. They pointed to an account Landrigan had once given a psychologist, in which he described taking part in the attack alongside a partner.
The drug fight went further. The only American maker of sodium thiopental approved by the Food and Drug Administration had run out and could not supply more until March 2011. On October 25, the Arizona Attorney General disclosed that the state had obtained the drug from an unidentified source in Britain. A federal district judge stopped the execution, saying that a drug without FDA approval "raises issues regarding its efficacy and possible side-effects." On October 26 a Ninth Circuit panel upheld that order.
The Supreme Court lifted it the same day. In a short unsigned order, the Court said nothing in the record suggested the imported drug was unsafe, and that speculation could not substitute for evidence that a drug was "sure or very likely to cause serious illness and needless suffering." Nor was there any showing that the drug had been obtained unlawfully. Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would have denied the state’s application. The vote was again five to four.
Landrigan was executed that night.
In March 1955 the state of Mississippi put a new gas chamber into use at its penitentiary at Parchman. The first man put to death in it, according to Donald A. Cabana, writing for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, was a convicted murderer named Gerald Gallego. The Associated Press later reported that he had been condemned for killing a police officer and a jail guard. He left behind a son who carried his name.
Gerald Armond Gallego grew up in Sacramento. In 1983 a jury in Contra Costa County, California, had to decide whether he should die too. His defense called a Mississippi lawyer, Frank J. Hammond Jr., who testified that he had represented the father in a murder case in the mid-1950s and that the father had been executed in 1955. Gallego’s mother testified by telephone that her son had suffered physical and emotional abuse as a child and that his father had been absent from his life. A clinical neuropsychologist, Dr. Charles Golden, told the jury that the right frontal lobe of Gallego’s brain was damaged and that alcohol and drugs made the condition worse. A psychiatrist, Dr. William Reed, described a severe personality disturbance.
The crimes that brought him to that courtroom were these. In the early hours of November 2, 1980, Gallego and Charlene Williams, the young woman who lived with him, abducted two Sacramento State students in Sacramento. Craig Miller was 22 and Mary Beth Sowers was 21, and they were engaged to be married. A friend of Miller’s who saw them taken wrote down the car’s license number. Both students were shot and killed; Sowers’s death was confirmed in Placer County about three weeks later. Her father, speaking to CBS Sacramento in 2013, remembered her simply: "She always had a smile."
The license number led police to Williams’s family. The couple fled through Reno, Salt Lake City, Denver and Pueblo, Colorado, and were arrested in Omaha, Nebraska, when they tried to collect money her parents had wired to them. Ballistics matched the bullets from both bodies to slugs recovered from the ceiling of a bar where Gallego had fired a gun. Williams turned state’s witness. Under an agreement with prosecutors in California, Nevada and Oregon, she pleaded guilty to two murders, accepted a sentence of 16 years and 8 months and received immunity for eight other killings, in return for telling what she knew of ten deaths and testifying against Gallego.
In 1983 the Contra Costa jury convicted Gallego of the first degree murders and kidnappings of Miller and Sowers and, after about two and a half hours of deliberation in the penalty phase, returned a verdict of death. Nevada tried him next, in the small town of Lovelock, for the deaths of Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, who had disappeared from a Sacramento-area shopping mall on April 24, 1980, and whose bodies were found near Lovelock that July. They had been beaten to death. Rope found in the trunk of Gallego’s car matched rope recovered in the case. In 1984 a Pershing County jury convicted him of both murders and both kidnappings and sentenced him to death.
Six more deaths were attributed to him on Williams’s account and were never tried, among them two girls from Sparks, Nevada, who had vanished in June 1979. In 1997 the Ninth Circuit set aside the Nevada death sentence because the jury had been misled about the realistic chance of parole. A new Lovelock jury heard the penalty case in September 1999. This time his lawyers argued that he was brain-damaged and had been harshly punished as a boy; two defense experts testified that testing and a brain scan pointed to significant damage and to post-traumatic stress. The jury deliberated for about an hour and sentenced him to death again. Gallego stood and apologized for the pain he had caused, the Las Vegas Sun reported.
He was never executed. He died of colon cancer at the prison medical center in Carson City on the night of July 18, 2002, one day after his 56th birthday, with federal challenges to both death sentences still pending.
The Briley house stood in North Richmond, Virginia. The parents were respected in the neighborhood, the Richmond reporter Mark Holmberg wrote for WTVR in 2014. They raised three sons: Linwood, the oldest; James, the middle brother; and Anthony, the youngest.
The first death connected to the family came in 1971, when Linwood was 16. According to Holmberg, he shot an elderly neighbor from inside the family home and told police he had been aiming at a bird. Her name and the legal outcome have not been reported. James, for his part, had a 1973 conviction for armed robbery and attempted murder, the Supreme Court of Virginia recorded.
In 1979 the three brothers and a 16-year-old neighbor, Duncan Eric Meekins, robbed people across Richmond. Police and prosecutors linked the group to at least 11 killings that year. On September 14, 1979, John Harvey Gallaher, a Richmond radio disc jockey known on the air as Johnny G, stepped out the back door of a restaurant during a break in his band’s set and did not return. His body was found two days later. Meekins later testified that Linwood took Gallaher’s wallet and keys, forced him into his own car and shot him.
On October 19, 1979, the four men went to rob a man they knew in Richmond. Harvey Wilkerson, 26, Judy Diane Barton, 23, and her five-year-old son, Harvey Wayne Barton, were killed. Police officers had the men under surveillance that night without knowing a crime was under way; their observations of the men’s clothing and movements later corroborated Meekins’s account. Linwood and Meekins were arrested the next evening.
Meekins made a deal, received a life sentence and testified against all three brothers. In January 1980 a Richmond jury convicted James of the capital murders of Judy Barton and her son and of Wilkerson’s first-degree murder, with other charges, and he was sentenced to death. Linwood was convicted in the same killings of three counts of first-degree murder, with other charges, and received five life terms; a separate jury convicted him of the capital murder of John Gallaher and fixed his punishment at death. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed both death sentences on November 26, 1980. Anthony, described by a prosecutor as present at many of the killings without killing anyone himself, was serving life plus 139 years in 2009, Virginia Lawyers Weekly reported.
On May 31, 1984, Linwood and James led four other condemned men out of the death row unit at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center in Boydton. The Brileys were the last of the six to be caught, in Philadelphia, on June 19, 1984.
Linwood died in the electric chair at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond at 11:05 p.m. on October 12, 1984, still saying he was innocent. He had spent his last hours with his mother, his young son and his lawyer, and took telephone calls from both brothers. Warren Von Schuch, a Richmond prosecutor who had tried the brothers, called them "killing machines." Six months later, on April 18, 1985, James followed him into the same chair. He was pronounced dead at 11:07 p.m.
Between November 1964 and March 1970, women walking alone in the mining and industrial towns of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie and neighboring Upper Silesia, in southern Poland, were attacked and beaten. The Citizens' Militia attributed 21 attacks, 14 of them fatal, to a single unknown offender; the victims ranged in age from 16 to 57, according to the legal news site Infor.pl. The press called him the "Wampir z Zagłębia," the Vampire of Zagłębie. The last of the 14 deaths was that of Jadwiga Kucianka, a lecturer at the University of Silesia, in 1970.
Zdzisław Marchwicki was born on October 18, 1927, in Dąbrowa Górnicza, the forensic scientist Ewa Gruza of the University of Warsaw wrote in 2019. His mother died when he was two, a few days after his younger brother, Jan, was born. His father married again several times, and a half-brother, Henryk, was born of a later marriage. As a grown man Zdzisław worked as an escort guard at a coal mine and painted apartments with Henryk, Super Express reported in 2022.
He was arrested in Dąbrowa Górnicza in January 1972, long after the last attack in the series, when his wife went to the authorities about his abuse of her and their children. The investigation then turned to his family. Jan and Henryk were arrested in May 1972, and his sister and her son later that year, Gruza wrote. The trial began in Katowice in September 1974.
On July 28, 1975, the Voivodeship Court in Katowice convicted Zdzisław Marchwicki of 14 murders and six attempted murders and sentenced him to death. Jan and Henryk were convicted with him of the murder of Jadwiga Kucianka. Jan was sentenced to death and Henryk to 25 years in prison, Infor.pl and Super Express reported. None of the brothers admitted guilt. The Council of State refused clemency, and Zdzisław was hanged at the Katowice remand prison on April 26, 1977, and buried without a name at the Panewniki cemetery. Jan’s sentence was also carried out.
Henryk served his term and was released in 1993. He spent his remaining years trying to clear the family’s name and died in 1997, in circumstances Infor.pl described as unexplained. The conviction still stands, but it has never been accepted by everyone. The film director Maciej Pieprzyca, who made a documentary about the case in 1998 and a feature film drawn from it in 2016, has said the investigation and trial involved manipulation and that it is not certain the man sentenced to death was guilty, the Polish Press Agency reported.
The courts that heard these cases were asked, in different ways, what a family’s history could explain. In Gallego’s California trial, the defense put his executed father, his absent childhood and a damaged frontal lobe in front of the jury, and the jury chose death after about two and a half hours. In Landrigan’s case, a federal appeals panel doubted that telling a judge "genetics made him the way he is" would have helped him at all, and the Supreme Court decided the matter on narrower ground: a man who refused to let his lawyer speak for him in 1990 could not complain afterward that the lawyer had not found enough to say.
The judge who sentenced Landrigan saw it differently by 2007. Given the evidence of what he had inherited and what had been done to him before and after birth, Cheryl Hendrix said, she would have had no choice but to spare his life. Her sentence was carried out anyway, in October 2010, with a drug the state had obtained from a source in Britain.
• 1955 (March): Gerald Gallego’s father, also named Gerald Gallego, is the first person executed in Mississippi’s new gas chamber at Parchman.
• March 14, 1964: Jeffrey Timothy Landrigan is born; his birth mother gives him up at about six months old, and he is adopted.
• November 7, 1964, to March 4, 1970: The series of attacks on women in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie and Upper Silesia, 14 of them fatal.
• 1971: Linwood Briley, 16, shoots an elderly neighbor from the family home in Richmond, by WTVR’s later account.
• January 1972: Zdzisław Marchwicki is arrested in Dąbrowa Górnicza; his brother Jan and half-brother Henryk are arrested in May.
• July 28, 1975: The Voivodeship Court in Katowice convicts Zdzisław Marchwicki of 14 murders and six attempted murders; Jan and Henryk are convicted of one murder. Zdzisław and Jan are sentenced to death, Henryk to 25 years.
• April 26, 1977: Zdzisław Marchwicki is hanged in Katowice.
• September 14, 1979: John Gallaher is killed in Richmond.
• October 19, 1979: Harvey Wilkerson, Judy Diane Barton and her son, Harvey Wayne Barton, are killed in Richmond; Linwood Briley is arrested on October 22.
• January 1980: James and Linwood Briley are convicted in Richmond in the October 19 killings.
• April 24, 1980: Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs disappear from a Sacramento-area mall.
• November 2, 1980: Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers are abducted in Sacramento and killed.
• November 26, 1980: The Supreme Court of Virginia affirms the death sentences of Linwood and James Briley.
• 1982: Landrigan is convicted in Oklahoma of second-degree murder.
• 1983: A Contra Costa County jury convicts Gerald Gallego of the murders of Miller and Sowers and sentences him to death.
• 1984: A Pershing County, Nevada, jury convicts Gallego of the murders of Redican and Twiggs and sentences him to death.
• May 31, 1984: Linwood and James Briley lead an escape of six condemned men from Mecklenburg Correctional Center; they are caught in Philadelphia on June 19.
• October 12, 1984: Linwood Briley is executed in Richmond.
• April 18, 1985: James Briley is executed in Richmond.
• 1986: Landrigan stabs another inmate in an Oklahoma prison and is convicted of assault and battery with a deadly weapon.
• November 1989: Landrigan escapes from the John Lilley Correctional Center in Boley, Oklahoma.
• December 1989: Chester Dean Dyer is killed in Phoenix; his body is found on December 15.
• June 1990: An Arizona jury convicts Landrigan of felony murder, second-degree burglary and theft.
• October 25, 1990: Judge Cheryl Hendrix sentences Landrigan to death.
• 1993: The Arizona Supreme Court affirms Landrigan’s sentence.
• 1993: Henryk Marchwicki is released from prison; he dies in 1997.
• January 31, 1995: Landrigan’s postconviction petition raises the "biological component" of his violence.
• September 4, 1997: The Ninth Circuit sets aside Gallego’s Nevada death sentence.
• September 1999: A new Lovelock jury sentences Gallego to death again.
• July 18, 2002: Gallego dies of cancer in Nevada prison custody in Carson City.
• March 2006: The full Ninth Circuit orders a hearing on Landrigan’s claim.
• May 14, 2007: The Supreme Court reverses, five to four, in Schriro v. Landrigan.
• 2007: Retired Judge Cheryl Hendrix says in a sworn statement that she would not have imposed death had she heard the background evidence.
• October 22, 2010: The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency splits two to two on commutation and recommends a reprieve; Governor Jan Brewer refuses it on October 25.
• October 26, 2010: The Supreme Court vacates the order blocking the execution; Landrigan is executed at Florence, Arizona, shortly after 10:15 p.m.