On July 17, 1984, Alton Coleman and Debra Brown walked back into the Dayton home of the Reverend Millard Gay and his wife, Kathryn, a couple who had taken them in the week before and driven them to church. This time they had guns. Gay, who by then knew Coleman's face from the news, asked him 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 and drove toward Illinois. In Indianapolis they took another car and its owner, Eugene Scott, whose body was later found shot in a ditch. He was the eighth person to die in fifty-three days.
Debra Denise Brown was born on November 11, 1962, one of eleven children. She had suffered a head injury as a child, was assessed as borderline intellectually disabled, and was diagnosed by a psychiatrist with dependent personality disorder. She had no criminal record and no history of violence. In 1983 she was engaged to another man when she met Coleman, a Waukegan man seven years older who had been charged with sex crimes six times since 1973 and had served three years for an armed robbery in which a woman was kidnapped and raped. She left her family and moved in with him. In May 1984 he was due to stand trial in Illinois for raping a fourteen-year-old girl, and he ran.
Their first victim was Vernita Wheat, nine, of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Coleman had befriended her mother, Juanita, and on May 29 he took the child to Waukegan. Her 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. On June 18, in Gary, Indiana, Tamika Turks, seven, was walking home from a candy store with her aunt, Annie Turks, who was nine. Coleman and Brown took both girls into woods and sexually assaulted them. Annie survived. Tamika's body was found the next day. That same day Donna Williams, twenty-five, of Gary disappeared; her body was found on July 11 in Detroit, half a mile from her car, raped and strangled. On June 28 they beat Palmer and Marjorie Jones in their home in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, and took their money and car.
In Toledo, Coleman befriended Virginia Temple, a mother of several children. When she stopped answering her relatives, police went into the house and found the young children alone and frightened. Temple and her eldest, Rachelle, nine, had been strangled and left in a crawl space. The same morning the couple tied up Frank and Dorothy Duvendack in their Toledo home with electrical cord and took their money and car. From Dayton the Gays drove them to downtown Cincinnati, and on July 12 Tonnie Storey, fifteen, disappeared from the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood; her body was found eight days later with a bracelet from the Temple house beneath it. That day the FBI added Coleman to its Ten Most Wanted list as a special eleventh name.
On the morning of July 13 they rode bicycles into Norwood, Ohio, to see Harry and Marlene Walters about buying their camper. Within three hours they had driven off in the Walterses' red Plymouth. Harry Walters, struck with a wooden candlestick, survived and testified. Marlene Walters, forty-four, had been bludgeoned twenty to twenty-five times. Coleman's fingerprints were on shards of a soda bottle, two sets of bloody shoe prints led through the basement, and the couple had left their bicycles and clothes behind. The Plymouth turned up in Kentucky, where they kidnapped Oline Carmical Jr., a college professor from Williamsburg, and drove him back to Ohio locked in the trunk of his own car; police found him alive in Dayton on July 17.
On July 20 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 sitting on bleachers in an empty park. Brown walked away as two sergeants approached Coleman and was stopped at the park's edge with a gun in her purse. Coleman had a steak knife tucked between two pairs of socks. They were carrying a shopping bag of T-shirts and caps, and officers learned they had been changing clothes every few blocks.
She was tried separately in Ohio and Indiana. In Hamilton County, Ohio, she was convicted on June 27, 1985, of the aggravated murders of Tonnie Storey and Marlene Walters, with counts of attempted aggravated murder, aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery, and sentenced to death for the Storey murder. In Lake County, Indiana, a jury convicted her in May 1986 of murdering Tamika Turks and of the attempted murder and molestation of Annie Turks, and on June 23, 1986, Judge Richard W. Maroc sentenced her to death, with forty years on each of the other counts. The Indiana courts upheld her confession, although she had asked for a lawyer, and the Indiana Supreme Court affirmed in 1991 (Brown v. State, 577 N.E.2d 221). Coleman was sentenced to death in three states.
Neither of her death sentences stood. In January 1991 the outgoing Ohio governor, Richard Celeste, commuted the Ohio sentence to life, saying she was intellectually disabled and dominated by Coleman. Indiana kept her on its death row, its only woman there, while she served her Ohio terms. In late 2018 the Lake County prosecutor and the Indiana attorney general's office agreed to withdraw the demand for her execution, on evidence that she was likely intellectually disabled, which Supreme Court rulings put beyond execution. Because life without parole had not existed in Indiana in 1984, she was given the maximum term instead, 140 years in all, on top of her Ohio sentences. Tamika's mother, LaVerne Turks, said she had not been told and was angry: "Debra Brown was right there with (Coleman), committing the same crimes." Coleman was executed in Ohio on April 26, 2002.