On Monday, November 4, 1991, William Stewart had not heard from his daughter in two days. Helisa Hayes lived with her two children, Phillip, who was eight, and Darien, who was seven, in a trailer in Cumberland County, North Carolina. Worried, Stewart broke into her home. He found all three of them dead.
Among the people the sheriff's investigators talked to in the days that followed was Earl Richmond Jr., the best friend of Helisa's former husband, Wayne Hayes. Richmond knew Helisa and the children well. He told the police he had not been to her home that weekend, and he said he thought Wayne Hayes had been there. The investigation turned to Wayne Hayes, to Helisa's boyfriend and to her father. Richmond went to the funeral and served as a pallbearer.
It took about three months, and a phone call from one of Richmond's own sisters, before the police looked at him. DNA then tied him to the crime. And while he was awaiting trial in North Carolina, federal prosecutors in New Jersey charged him with an earlier killing: the April 1991 strangling of Lisa Ann Nadeau, an Army disbursing clerk at Fort Dix. He was convicted in both places, and on May 6, 2005, North Carolina executed him.
Almost everything known about the case in detail comes from two court opinions: the North Carolina Supreme Court's 1998 decision on his direct appeal and the Fourth Circuit's 2004 decision on his federal habeas petition. What follows draws on those and on official execution records. Where the courts describe Richmond's own account of events, that is what it is: his account, given to detectives after DNA evidence had been put in front of him, and changed in some details two days later.
The court records say little about Richmond's early life except what came out at his sentencing hearing in 1995, and that came mostly from his defense. His sister Andrea Knight testified that he was an alcoholic who had been introduced to drinking at an early age by their father, also an alcoholic. A forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Billy Royal, and a forensic psychologist, Dr. John Warren, both called by the defense, described a dysfunctional family and a father who was violent and aggressive, drank, had numerous affairs, and introduced his son to sex and alcohol at a young age. They diagnosed severe personality disorders, chronic depression and mixed substance abuse disorder, and they described him as a man with deep-seated anger, no sense of self, isolated from his own feelings, with a reduced capacity to control his behavior outside a structured setting.
Richmond had served in the military. A friend from that service, Robin Monita Jr., testified that Richmond "drank all the time" while in the military, that he went from easygoing to easily angered when he drank hard liquor, and that people stayed away from him when they knew he was drinking it. The opinions do not name the branch or the dates of that service, and nothing in the records found ties it to Fort Dix or to Fort Bragg.
One of his sisters later told his trial lawyers she believed their father had sexually abused him as a child. That claim was never put to the jury. Richmond himself told an expert retained by his appeal lawyers that he did not recall any abuse, and his father denied it. The Fourth Circuit called the belief unsubstantiated. It is recorded here because it became an appeal issue, not because it was ever established.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Richmond was 43 years old when he was executed in May 2005. Both he and the three Hayes victims were Black, according to the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction's execution list.
Lisa Ann Nadeau was an Army disbursing clerk at Fort Dix, the military base in New Jersey. She was killed on April 4, 1991, the date given by the Fourth Circuit. She left two small children. Her father, Arthur Nadeau, followed the investigation of her murder closely and attended Richmond's federal trial, in his words, "from day one."
Very little about her life appears in the sources found for this page, and very little about the crime. In 1995 Arthur Nadeau told the North Carolina jury that Richmond had strangled his daughter to death with his hands, as he would later do to Helisa Hayes. He described her injuries and the position of her body and identified photographs from the crime scene and the autopsy. A state expert, Dr. Daniel Greenfield, testified that her murder had required "complex, goal-oriented and sophisticated behavior." The North Carolina prosecutor told the jurors that the people Richmond became "close and intimate" with died; the state supreme court read that as a reference to evidence that both adult women were people he had known for some time and with whom he had had sexual relations. The court records do not say how Richmond and Lisa Nadeau knew each other, what he was doing at Fort Dix, or how the investigation of her death proceeded before he was charged.
Helisa Hayes had been married to Wayne Hayes, Richmond's best friend, and was divorced from him by November 1991. She was raising their son, Phillip, and their daughter, Darien, in her trailer. At the time of her death she had a boyfriend, Barrett Parks. Her father, William Stewart, was close enough to her to notice within two days that something was wrong. Phillip was eight years old, Darien seven.
The records give no more than that about who they were. They describe the family only through what was done to them, and this page does not repeat more of that than is needed to explain the charges and the court decisions.
On the evening of Friday, November 1, 1991, Richmond went to a house party. His sister Sheila Jordan later testified that before the party she saw him drink two or three forty-ounce beers; that in the first couple of hours there he drank a lot of hard liquor, which was not his habit; that he drove her to buy twenty dollars' worth of crack cocaine, of which each of them took one hit; and that afterward he became so obnoxious that she was frightened, because she had never seen him react that way. He returned to the party at about 1:45 a.m. and kept drinking for about two more hours. Another sister, Erica Richmond, testified that she saw him with a glass in his hand all night.
At about 3:45 a.m. on Saturday, November 2, Andrea Knight dropped him off, at his request, about a mile to a mile and a half from Helisa Hayes's trailer. What he did and where he went after that was never established. The trial judge later listed the gaps in a ruling: whether he went straight to the trailer, whether he stopped or slept on the way, whether he walked or got a ride, and whether he arrived at once or two hours later. Defense counsel told the jury he had first gone to see a friend on Bruce Road and that Helisa Hayes's home was the last of several places he went that night.
What happened inside the trailer is known from Richmond's statements and from the physical evidence. According to the state supreme court's summary of the evidence, he had "forceful" sex with Helisa Hayes, beat her and strangled her to death. He poured rubbing alcohol on her body, which the court treated as an effort to destroy evidence. He took Phillip into the bathroom, stabbed him many times with a pair of scissors and wrapped an electrical cord around his neck. He then went into Darien's bedroom, sat her up on her bed and strangled her with the cord of a curling iron. He took the scissors with him when he left.
The medical examiner, Dr. John D. Butts, found that Helisa Hayes died of strangulation and that she had numerous blunt-force injuries and bleeding over part of her brain beneath a bruise on her scalp, along with injuries consistent with sexual assault.
The bodies lay in the trailer until William Stewart broke in on November 4.
Investigators interviewed people who knew the family, Richmond among them. He said he had not been to Helisa's home that weekend and suggested that Wayne Hayes had been. The police did not treat Richmond as a suspect. They focused instead on Wayne Hayes, on Barrett Parks and on William Stewart. The Fourth Circuit later wrote that by misleading the police, Richmond caused the dead woman's former husband, her boyfriend and her father "to endure the pain and stress of being considered a suspect in the murders of loved ones."
Richmond attended the funeral. The Fourth Circuit says he was a pallbearer at the funerals of all three; the North Carolina Supreme Court says he was a pallbearer for one of the children. Asked about it later, he said carrying the coffin of a child he had killed "never gave me a bad feeling." The prosecution used that statement at trial, and the state supreme court upheld its admission, holding that his conduct and demeanor at the funeral shed light on the circumstances of the killings and on his intent.
About three months after the murders, Andrea Knight went to the police. She told them that she had dropped her brother off near Helisa Hayes's home in the early hours of November 2, after an all-night party. That was the first information placing him near the trailer.
The investigators asked Richmond for a suspect rape kit. The DNA analysis showed that semen recovered from Helisa Hayes's body was his. In his appeal the Fourth Circuit noted that Knight's call to police "lead to Richmond's arrest," which the court said made her later testimony on his behalf more credible.
On April 3, 1992, detectives brought Richmond in for an interview. He denied any involvement at first. Then he was told about the DNA result, and he confessed. Lieutenant Don Smith later described that first account to the jury. Richmond said he went to the trailer at about 3:45 a.m. after leaving the party; that he and Helisa Hayes argued about her "messing" around on Wayne Hayes; that they had "forceful" sex and then argued again; and that she struck him with an object and called her son into the room. In that version he knocked her down with his fist, took Phillip to the bathroom and killed him, killed Darien in her bedroom, and then went back and strangled Helisa.
On April 5, 1992, in a second interview described at trial by Captain Art Binder of the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office, he told it differently. Now he said the sex had been consensual, and that the argument that followed was about her flaunting other relationships in front of her former husband. After she struck him and called for her son, he said, he carried her into the bedroom, punched her in the face, had "forceful" sex with her and strangled her. Phillip, who had come into the room and left again, was lying in the hallway outside his mother's bedroom. Richmond said he took the boy to the bathroom and killed him, and then went into Darien's room and strangled her.
Later, while in pretrial confinement, he was interviewed by a forensic psychologist for the state, Dr. Louis Schlesinger, and, according to the state's evidence, gave him invented stories about when and why he had poured alcohol on Helisa Hayes. He also told an officer, in words the state supreme court quoted with an expletive abbreviated, "I can't say I won't kill again. [Expletive] just happens."
On July 6, 1992, a Cumberland County grand jury indicted him for the first-degree rape of Helisa Hayes and the first-degree murders of Helisa, Phillip and Darien Hayes.
While the North Carolina charges were pending, Richmond was charged in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey with the murder of Lisa Ann Nadeau. Although she was a soldier and was killed on an Army base, the case was not a court-martial: it was a civilian prosecution in federal district court. On May 28, 1993, he was convicted of her murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. Because Congress had abolished parole for federal crimes committed after November 1, 1987, that sentence carried no possibility of release.
The opinions found for this page do not describe the federal trial itself, the evidence that connected Richmond to Fort Dix, or whether the federal investigation was opened before or because of his arrest in North Carolina. They say only that he was charged "while awaiting trial" on the Hayes charges. The federal judgment became one of the central facts of the North Carolina trial two years later.
Richmond was tried capitally at the May 1, 1995, criminal session of Cumberland County Superior Court before Judge E. Lynn Johnson. Before the trial began, the judge ruled that the state could use the federal murder conviction as an aggravating circumstance if the case reached a sentencing hearing.
That ruling set up the first of the issues that would follow the case for a decade. One of Richmond's lawyers, Mr. Britt, wanted to tell prospective jurors that his client had a prior first-degree murder conviction and ask whether, knowing that, they could still consider mitigating circumstances. The judge refused. "No matter how you want to couch the question," he said, "it is always going to come back to being a stakeout question," meaning a question that commits a juror in advance to a position on particular facts. He allowed broader questions about whether jurors could weigh all aggravating and mitigating circumstances.
Two prospective jurors were excused because they said they could not fairly consider a death sentence. One of them worked for a newspaper and said he already knew that DNA had linked Richmond to the victim and that Richmond had been involved in another murder.
The guilt phase was short. The defense did not contest that Richmond had killed the three victims; its argument was that he had not premeditated the killings. His lawyers called only two witnesses, his sisters Sheila Jordan and Erica Richmond, to testify about his drinking and drug use at the party. The judge refused to instruct the jury on voluntary intoxication, finding no substantial evidence that Richmond had been "utterly incapable" of forming a deliberate and premeditated intent. He noted that the same testimony showed Richmond driving a car, following directions and asking to be dropped off at a particular place, and that his statements showed "a man aware of the events unfolding in the Hayes trailer."
The defense argued anyway, in closing, that alcohol, drugs, anger and being struck had put Richmond into "a rage" and that he had not acted in a cool state of mind. The prosecution answered that he had gone to the trailer to rape Helisa Hayes and had then searched out the children to leave no witnesses, going through the house for a weapon. "When you have to walk all the way to a back bedroom and you take a cord back there with you, that is premeditation," the prosecutor said. He also asked the jurors why, out of thirty-five or forty people at the party, the only witnesses to Richmond's drinking were "his own blood kin."
After a short deliberation, on May 24, 1995, the jury found Richmond guilty of the first-degree rape of Helisa Hayes and the first-degree murders of all three victims. The murder of Helisa Hayes was found to be first-degree murder both on premeditation and deliberation and under the felony murder rule; the children's murders were found premeditated and deliberate.
The sentencing hearing began the next day. The state introduced a certified copy of the federal murder judgment and called Arthur Nadeau, who described his daughter's death and told the jury she had left two small children. Captain Binder testified about the April 5 interview. Dr. Schlesinger and Dr. Greenfield testified for the state that Richmond's conduct in the trailer had been goal-oriented and purposeful despite his personality disorder and whatever he had drunk or smoked, and that he could appreciate that what he was doing was criminal. Dr. Schlesinger also described to the jury what Richmond had told him about both the Nadeau and Hayes killings.
The defense called eight witnesses: Andrea Knight; Woodrow Rowell, a prison GED instructor; Lieutenant Darryl Morin, a jailer; Franklin York, director of prison ministries; Robin Monita Jr.; and the two defense experts, Dr. Warren and Dr. Royal. The prison witnesses testified that Richmond had not been cited for any disciplinary infraction while held. There was evidence that he had become involved in prison ministry and Bible study.
Before and during the hearing, the defense asked that the jury be told that Richmond could never be paroled from his federal life sentence. Judge Johnson refused, following North Carolina law at the time, which did not allow juries to consider parole eligibility. The prosecutor's closing argument then ended this way:
"When you know that someone has killed not just once, Lisa Ann Nadeau, not just twice, Helisa Hayes, not just three times, Darien Hayes, not just four times, Phillip Hayes. Four times, folks. What does it take? What does it take? There is only one way you can ensure that this defendant does not kill again, and that is to impose the penalty that he has earned and worked for and deserves. I ask you to impose the death penalty on all three cases."
The defense asked again for an instruction on Richmond's federal parole ineligibility. It was again refused.
For each of the three killings the jury found that Richmond had a prior conviction for a violent felony and that the murder was part of a course of conduct that included other crimes of violence. For Helisa Hayes it also found that the murder was committed during a first-degree rape. For both children it found that the murder was committed to avoid arrest. For Phillip it found as well the statutory aggravating circumstance for an especially atrocious or cruel killing. Of the thirty mitigating circumstances the defense submitted, the jury found five: that Richmond acted under a mental or emotional disturbance; that he acted under the influence of alcohol; that he had a severe personality disorder; that his alcohol and drug use affected his behavior; and that his father had mentally abused him.
The jury recommended death for each murder. On June 1, 1995, Judge Johnson imposed three death sentences and a consecutive life sentence for the rape.
The case went to the North Carolina Supreme Court on direct appeal. Michael F. Easley, then Attorney General, was the state's counsel of record; Richmond was represented by Sam J. Ervin IV. The court heard argument on December 10, 1996, and on February 6, 1998, affirmed the convictions and sentences by a vote of five to two, in an opinion by Justice Whichard.
The majority rejected every assignment of error. The "stakeout" ruling was proper, the court held: asking how a prior murder conviction would affect a juror's vote was asking how a particular fact would affect a decision, and it made no difference that the fact was undisputed rather than hypothetical. The refusal to instruct on intoxication was proper, because Richmond had "methodically killed everyone in the house," led one victim to the bathroom and sat another on her bed, and tried to hide what he had done. Arthur Nadeau's account of his daughter's injuries, though not based on his personal knowledge, was reliable enough given his close involvement in the case, and any error was harmless because the certified judgment proved the federal conviction anyway.
On the parole question, the majority read the prosecutor's "only one way you can ensure" argument in context. Coming after arguments that Richmond might kill "in a jail cell" or "in prison," it held, the argument was about danger inside prison, which did not trigger the rule of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1994 decision in Simmons v. South Carolina. That decision requires that a jury be told a defendant is ineligible for parole when the prosecution argues he will be dangerous in the future to society at large.
In the same opinion the court changed a point of North Carolina law. Richmond had argued that the "serious personal injury" needed for first-degree rape could not be an injury that caused death. The court disavowed earlier language suggesting that, writing that it would be "absurd to allow a defendant to escape a first-degree rape conviction because his victim did not survive the injuries he inflicted."
On proportionality, the court noted that it had never found a death sentence disproportionate in a case with more than one murder victim, and that all three murders rested on premeditation and deliberation.
Justice Webb dissented, joined by Justice Frye. He would have ordered a new sentencing hearing on both main issues. The defense should have been allowed to ask jurors about an undisputed prior conviction, he wrote, and when the prosecutor told the jury there was "only one way" to ensure Richmond did not kill again, Simmons required the jury to be told about his federal sentence. "I do not believe this statement was so related to a previous argument that the jury would know the prosecuting attorney was referring only to killings in prison," Webb wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case on October 5, 1998.
On September 13, 1999, Richmond's new lawyers filed a motion for appropriate relief in Cumberland County Superior Court. They argued that his trial lawyers had been ineffective: for failing to present a substance-abuse expert and his military friend at the guilt phase in support of an intoxication defense; for failing to call a substance-abuse expert at sentencing; and for failing to retain an expert on childhood sexual abuse after one of his sisters said she believed their father had abused him. The court appointed Dr. Roy Matthew, an addiction psychiatrist, and authorized more funds for Dr. David Lisak, a sexual-abuse expert.
On November 22, 1999, the court denied the motion on the pleadings, finding the claims procedurally barred because they were not supported by affidavits or other documents, and without merit in any event. An affidavit from trial counsel Jonathan Broun was filed a day later. A motion for reconsideration was denied on December 10, and the North Carolina Supreme Court refused to review the denial on April 6, 2000.
Richmond filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina on April 28, 2000, raising sixteen claims. The district court granted the state summary judgment on January 13, 2003, and later allowed an appeal on several issues.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard argument on May 4, 2004, and ruled on July 20, 2004, in an opinion by Judge Roger L. Gregory, joined by Judges Wilkinson and King. The court agreed with Justice Webb on one point. The North Carolina Supreme Court's reading of the "only one way" argument, it held, was an unreasonable application of Simmons, because "the State's arguments about Richmond's future dangerousness were not limited to the potential danger he posed in prison." Richmond had been entitled to have the jury told he could never be paroled.
That finding did not save him. Under the federal harmless-error standard, the court had to ask whether the error had a substantial and injurious effect on the verdict. It concluded it had not. It listed what the jury had before it: the rape and strangling of Helisa Hayes "while her eight-year-old son, Phillip, listened and watched," the killing of Phillip, the killing of Darien while she was "sound asleep," his service as a pallbearer, his effort to shift suspicion onto his best friend, his denials until he was confronted with the DNA, and the federal conviction for strangling Lisa Nadeau with his bare hands. "We find it highly unlikely," the court wrote, "that the jury, had it received a Simmons instruction, would have declined to sentence Richmond to death."
The court held the jury-selection claim without merit, finding that Richmond had been given a fair opportunity to question jurors on their views of the death penalty. It held all three ineffective-assistance claims procedurally barred under the state rule, and found no prejudice in any case: the jury had already heard about his substance abuse and found it mitigating, and the sexual-abuse claim rested on a sister's unconfirmed belief. The denial of habeas relief was affirmed. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on February 28, 2005.
North Carolina set an execution date of May 6, 2005. On May 4 the North Carolina Supreme Court denied Richmond's petition for review and his application for a stay. On May 5 the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay application, which had been presented to the Chief Justice and referred to the full Court, and denied review.
On May 6, 2005, Richmond was executed by lethal injection. The North Carolina Department of Adult Correction lists him as the 36th person executed in the state since 1984, for the Cumberland County murders of Helisa, Philip (as the list spells it) and Darien Hayes. The Death Penalty Information Center lists the execution as the 964th in the United States since 1976 and one of sixty in 2005. He was 43.
The case is closed. Richmond was executed on May 6, 2005, a fact checked in this run against the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction's official execution list and the Death Penalty Information Center's 2005 list. No later proceedings concerning the Nadeau or Hayes killings appear in the sources found.
Proven by conviction: the murder of Lisa Ann Nadeau (federal jury, District of New Jersey, May 28, 1993), and the first-degree rape of Helisa Hayes and the first-degree murders of Helisa, Phillip and Darien Hayes (Cumberland County jury, May 24, 1995). Both sets of convictions were affirmed or left standing on every appeal found.
Richmond's own account: the sequence of events inside the trailer, including the argument, who was killed first, and whether the sex was consensual at the start, comes from two statements he gave on April 3 and April 5, 1992, which differ from each other. The jury convicted him of rape, so it did not accept that the encounter was consensual. His later stories to Dr. Schlesinger about the alcohol were, according to the state's evidence, made up.
Disputed or unproven: the claim that his father sexually abused him rests on one sister's belief, which Richmond himself did not confirm and his father denied; no court treated it as established. How intoxicated he was when he entered the trailer was never resolved; the jury found he was under the influence of alcohol, but the courts held there was no evidence he was incapable of premeditation. The court records do not establish how Richmond knew Lisa Nadeau or why he was at Fort Dix.
Not in the record: no source found suggests Richmond was suspected of any killing other than these four.
The case produced two rulings of wider legal reach: the North Carolina Supreme Court's holdings on "stakeout" questions and on fatal injuries as the serious personal injury in first-degree rape, and the Fourth Circuit's finding of a Simmons violation, a failure to tell a jury about parole ineligibility, that it then held harmless.
The two dissenting North Carolina justices and the Fourth Circuit agreed that the jury should have been told Richmond would never leave federal prison. Whether it would have made a difference is a question the Fourth Circuit answered against him.
For the families, the records give only glimpses: a father who broke into his daughter's trailer after two days of silence; a former husband, a boyfriend and a grandfather treated as suspects while the killer carried a coffin; another father who sat through a federal trial in New Jersey from the first day and then testified before another jury in North Carolina about how his daughter died. Lisa Ann Nadeau left two small children. Helisa Hayes and her children, Phillip and Darien, are the other three people this case is about.
April 4, 1991: Lisa Ann Nadeau, an Army disbursing clerk, is killed at Fort Dix, New Jersey (date per the Fourth Circuit).
November 1-2, 1991: Richmond drinks and uses crack cocaine at a house party; at about 3:45 a.m. his sister drops him off about a mile from Helisa Hayes's trailer in Cumberland County, North Carolina.
November 2, 1991: Helisa Hayes and her children, Phillip, 8, and Darien, 7, are killed.
November 4, 1991: William Stewart breaks into his daughter's home and finds the bodies.
November 1991: Richmond is interviewed, denies being at the trailer and points to Wayne Hayes; he attends the funeral as a pallbearer.
About February 1992: Andrea Knight tells police she dropped her brother near the trailer; a rape kit and DNA match follow.
April 3, 1992: Confronted with the DNA result, Richmond confesses.
April 5, 1992: He gives a second, revised account.
July 6, 1992: Indicted in Cumberland County for first-degree rape and three counts of first-degree murder.
May 28, 1993: Convicted in U.S. District Court in New Jersey of murdering Lisa Ann Nadeau; sentenced to life without parole.
May 1, 1995: Capital trial begins in Cumberland County Superior Court.
May 24, 1995: Jury convicts him on all four counts.
June 1, 1995: Judge E. Lynn Johnson imposes three death sentences and a consecutive life term.
February 6, 1998: North Carolina Supreme Court affirms, 5-2.
October 5, 1998: U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
September 13, 1999: Motion for appropriate relief filed; denied November 22, 1999.
April 6, 2000: North Carolina Supreme Court declines review of the denial.
April 28, 2000: Federal habeas petition filed.
January 13, 2003: District court denies relief.
July 20, 2004: Fourth Circuit finds a Simmons error but holds it harmless; denial of relief affirmed.
February 28, 2005: U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
May 4, 2005: North Carolina Supreme Court denies a stay.
May 5, 2005: U.S. Supreme Court denies a stay and review.
May 6, 2005: Richmond is executed by lethal injection, aged 43.