Gerald Patrick Lewis was arrested in Mobile County, Alabama, in April 1998 for the murder of Kathleen Bracken. Questioned by Mobile police, he said he had information about the murder of another woman, Misty McGugin, in neighboring Baldwin County, and then confessed to killing her. In the months that followed he told investigators in Alabama and Georgia about earlier killings, including that of Peggy Lynn Grimes, a 22-year-old woman who was eight or nine months pregnant when she disappeared from Atlanta in the summer of 1993.
He was convicted of all three women's murders. A Baldwin County jury found him guilty of capital murder in February 2000, and he was sentenced to death. He was convicted of Kathleen Bracken's murder and given life without parole. In Georgia he pleaded guilty in November 2001 to the malice murder of Peggy Grimes and the feticide of her unborn child, and a Douglas County jury sentenced him to death in March 2003. He also confessed to killing a woman near Atlanta in 1993 who has not been identified. He died on Alabama's death row in July 2009, with both death sentences affirmed on direct appeal.
Little about Lewis's early life is on record. The Supreme Court of Georgia recorded that he had a tenth-grade education, had earned a GED and had taken some college courses. The court also set out the earliest violent offense in the record: an attack on a young child in Massachusetts in 1987, which the child survived. For it Lewis was held about five years in a mental hospital and a prison in Massachusetts for attempted murder, and after his release he moved south.
By 1993 he was living in Atlanta. His Alabama lawyers later sought his records from agencies in all three states where he had lived, among them corrections, jail, mental health, police and military records, according to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.
Peggy Lynn Grimes was 22 and expecting a baby when she went missing in the summer of 1993. A sonogram taken that May, later shown to the Georgia jury, recorded the pregnancy. Her mother reported her missing in Fulton County. The Douglas County Sentinel reported in 2013 that her mother went to Atlanta police on July 10, 1993, saying she had not heard from her daughter in nearly two weeks, and that the date Lewis gave for the killing was June 30, 1993.
Lewis later confessed that he killed her in Douglas County. According to the Supreme Court of Georgia's summary of his confession, she was strangled and stabbed.
For years nobody connected Peggy Grimes to a woman's death in Douglas County in 1993. Investigator Scott Cosper of the Douglas County police worked the case. Peggy Grimes was at the top of the list of women reported missing, the Sentinel reported, but he crossed her name off, because her missing person report said she was pregnant and nothing then known about the Douglas County case matched that. The woman stayed unidentified until Lewis confessed.
Lewis also confessed to killing another woman near Atlanta in 1993, according to the Supreme Court of Georgia. She has not been identified, and Lewis was never tried for her death.
In December 1993, a few months after Peggy Grimes disappeared, Lewis was jailed in Georgia on several charges, including theft by receiving stolen property and driving under the influence, the Supreme Court of Georgia recorded. The Sentinel traced that jail term to a fight with a girlfriend in Atlanta that December. He was released in November 1997 and moved to Alabama.
Within months of his release, Lewis killed two women on the Alabama Gulf Coast.
Misty McGugin disappeared in late January or early February 1998. The Sentinel gave the date as January 31, 1998. Lewis later confessed to killing her. In Baldwin County he was convicted of her murder, made capital because it was committed during a kidnapping, a rape and a robbery.
On April 12, 1998, Kathleen Bracken was found dead in Mobile. Witnesses gave descriptions that pointed police to Lewis, the Supreme Court of Georgia recorded, and he confessed.
The courts also heard of three women who got away from him. One attack was in Georgia and two were in Alabama. In each case, the Supreme Court of Georgia wrote, the woman escaped his attempts to kidnap and kill her. Two of those Alabama attacks were tried with the McGugin case.
Lewis was arrested in Mobile County for the murder of Kathleen Bracken. Once in custody, Cosper told the paper, Lewis talked freely and confessed to several killings, among them the killing of a pregnant woman in Douglas County.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals recorded the sequence that led to his capital case: when Mobile police questioned him about Kathleen Bracken, he told them he had information about the murder of Misty McGugin in Baldwin County, and he then confessed to murdering her.
The Supreme Court of Georgia later described "many confessions" to police in Alabama and Georgia. Each followed Miranda warnings and a waiver, the court found, and none was produced by threats or promises. Lewis also wrote letters from jail to a police officer and to the district attorney, and investigators recorded a videotaped interview with him. Cosper told the Sentinel that Lewis "wanted to die," and the paper reported that Lewis had said he did not want to grow old in prison.
After Lewis confessed, the Douglas County case was reopened. In 2002, DNA supplied by Peggy Grimes's mother confirmed that the woman who died in Douglas County in 1993 was her daughter, according to the Supreme Court of Georgia.
District Attorney David McDade later said Lewis had admitted killing five young women. The Sentinel reported that Lewis himself claimed more than 20 killings. Those larger figures were his own claims, and no court tested them.
Alabama tried Lewis first. In February 2000 a jury in the Baldwin County Circuit Court convicted him of the capital murder of Misty McGugin, committed during a kidnapping, a rape and a robbery. The same jury convicted him of two counts each of attempted murder, attempted kidnapping, attempted rape and robbery in the attacks on two other women. The jurors voted 10 to 2 to recommend a death sentence, and the circuit court sentenced him to death.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in 2003, in Lewis v. State, 889 So. 2d 623. The certificate of judgment, which closes a direct appeal in Alabama, issued on April 30, 2004.
He was also convicted of the murder of Kathleen Bracken and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Georgia's case began with a Douglas County grand jury, which indicted Lewis on February 23, 2001, for malice murder, two counts of felony murder, feticide, aggravated battery and kidnapping with bodily injury in the death of Peggy Grimes. On March 21, 2001, the state gave notice that it would seek the death penalty.
Lewis pleaded guilty to every count on November 19, 2001. Before the plea a court-appointed psychologist, identified in the opinion as Dr. Richards, read earlier reports, met with Lewis twice and found no acute mental disorder. He described Lewis as of average intelligence and very knowledgeable about legal terms and courtroom procedure, and found him competent to plead and to stand trial. Earlier psychologists had reached the same conclusion about his competence.
Because District Attorney David McDade was seeking death, a jury had to decide the sentence. The sentencing trial ran from March 3 to March 27, 2003.
The prosecution presented the facts of the Grimes killing and evidence of Lewis's other crimes: the Alabama murders, the unidentified woman near Atlanta, the 1987 offense against a young child in Massachusetts and the attacks on the three women who escaped. The jury saw photographs and the May 1993 sonogram. In closing the prosecutor urged jurors not to let Lewis "escape punishment."
The defense presented evidence of mental illness in mitigation. Lewis was taking several psychiatric medications during the trial, and his lawyers worried that jurors would read side effects such as drowsiness as indifference or a lack of remorse. The judge told the jury it could take into account that he was on medication that affected his demeanor, and the defense raised the point with the jury several times. On the other side, several psychologists had concluded that Lewis was faking or exaggerating his symptoms, and records showed he had tried to feign psychiatric disturbance.
Pretrial publicity was an issue. Some prospective jurors had heard of the case, though they remembered few details, and most of what they recalled was accurate. One woman in the panel blurted out a false claim about the women Lewis targeted; she was excused on both sides' motions. Lewis asked that the jury not be sequestered, and it was.
The jury found three statutory aggravating circumstances: that the murder was committed during an aggravated battery, that it was committed during a kidnapping with bodily injury, and that it was outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman because it involved torture, depravity of mind and an aggravated battery. It recommended death for the malice murder. The court imposed life imprisonment for feticide, 20 years for aggravated battery and life without parole for kidnapping with bodily injury; the felony murder counts were vacated by operation of law.
Lewis moved for a new trial on April 10, 2003, and amended the motion in November 2003. It was denied on August 5, 2004.
The case reached the Supreme Court of Georgia in February 2005 and was argued on June 13, 2005. Lewis was represented on appeal by Michael Mears, Lindsay Nicole Bennett and Kenneth W. Krontz. The state was represented by District Attorney McDade and his assistants, and by Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker's office.
On September 19, 2005, in an opinion by Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears in which all the justices concurred, the court affirmed the death sentence. It rejected each of Lewis's claims. It held that evidence of his other crimes was admissible at a sentencing trial, that the jurors excused for their views on the death penalty were properly excused and those kept were properly kept, and that the photographs and the sonogram were relevant. It declined to extend the constitutional bar on executing people with intellectual disabilities to people with mental illness, noting the psychologists' findings that Lewis had exaggerated his symptoms. It found his confessions voluntary and his letters admissible, and it upheld Georgia's lethal injection method.
The court turned aside the rest of his challenges as well. It found that the trial judge had not unduly limited the questioning of prospective jurors, and that keeping a municipal court employee who knew many county officers, and a man who had taken a citizens' police class, did not taint the panel, since both said they could be impartial. It found no error in the handling of juror pay and hardship excuses. It held that Georgia's death penalty statutes are constitutional and that the jury's own findings of aggravating circumstances met the requirement of the United States Supreme Court's decision in Ring v. Arizona. It noted that a verdict of guilty but mentally ill does not bar a death sentence in Georgia, and it rejected his arguments about the form of the indictment and the use of aggravating facts not listed in the statute, relying on its earlier decisions. Lewis had raised his competence to plead guilty as well, and the court found no error there either, pointing to the psychologist's findings.
Comparing the case with others, the court found the sentence neither excessive nor disproportionate, citing cases that involved multiple murders, murders during kidnappings with bodily injury and the same "vile" aggravating circumstance. It found that the sentence was not imposed under the influence of "passion, prejudice, or any other arbitrary factor."
In Alabama, Lewis filed a petition under Rule 32 of the Alabama Rules of Criminal Procedure on April 25, 2005, challenging his capital conviction and death sentence. The petition ran to 309 pages and argued in many claims that his trial lawyers had been ineffective. He was represented by William Robert Montross Jr. of Atlanta.
His lawyers sought records from agencies in Alabama, Georgia and Massachusetts, and in June 2006 asked for 14 subpoenas, among them one to the Mobile County District Attorney's Office. On September 20, 2007, Baldwin County Circuit Judge J. Langford Floyd quashed that subpoena and ordered that the state be given access to the whole case file of Lewis's trial lawyer.
Lewis asked the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals to set aside those rulings. On July 25, 2008, the court granted his petition in part. It held that a prisoner who claims his lawyer was ineffective gives up the attorney-client privilege only for matters relevant to those claims, and it ordered the circuit court to inspect the file privately and keep back the parts unrelated to them. It upheld the quashing of the subpoena, holding that a subpoena is not a discovery device under Alabama law. Attorney General Troy King's office represented the state.
Lewis died on Alabama's death row in July 2009. The Douglas County district attorney's office announced the death in a news release, and the Times-Georgian reported on August 19, 2009, that he had died on July 25. The Douglas County Sentinel, in 2013, gave the date as July 24, 2009, and the cause as cancer.
"Gerald Patrick Lewis was a violent man who took the lives of many innocent women," McDade said in 2009. He said he hoped news of the death would bring closure to the families of all his victims. Four years later he told the Sentinel that Lewis was "as evil a man as ever lived."
The total number of victims is uncertain. Lewis was convicted of three murders, those of Peggy Grimes, Misty McGugin and Kathleen Bracken, and confessed to a fourth, the killing of the unidentified woman near Atlanta in 1993. McDade said Lewis admitted killing five young women; Lewis claimed more than 20. No other killings were charged.
Accounts differ on when Peggy Grimes was identified. The Supreme Court of Georgia dated the DNA identification to 2002. The Sentinel's 2013 account linked the identification and a small funeral to May 1998.
The Sentinel's 2013 account placed Misty McGugin's death in Mobile and Kathleen Bracken's in Baldwin County. The court records place Bracken's murder in Mobile and McGugin's capital case in Baldwin County.
The Times-Georgian reported in 2009 that the Georgia jury sentenced Lewis to death in 2004; the Supreme Court of Georgia's record shows the sentencing trial ended in March 2003, with the motion for a new trial denied in August 2004.
1987: An attack on a young child in Massachusetts, for which Lewis is held about five years in a mental hospital and prison for attempted murder.
May 1993: A sonogram records Peggy Grimes's pregnancy.
Summer 1993: Peggy Grimes, 22, disappears from Atlanta; her mother reports her missing in Fulton County (July 10, 1993, according to the Douglas County Sentinel).
1993: Lewis kills another woman near Atlanta, by his own later confession.
December 1993: Lewis is jailed in Georgia on several charges.
November 1997: He is released and moves to Alabama.
January or February 1998: Misty McGugin is killed in Baldwin County, Alabama.
April 12, 1998: Kathleen Bracken is found dead in Mobile; Lewis is arrested in Mobile County and confesses.
February 2000: A Baldwin County jury convicts him of capital murder and other charges; the jury votes 10 to 2 for death, and he is sentenced to death.
February 23, 2001: A Douglas County grand jury indicts him in Peggy Grimes's death.
November 19, 2001: He pleads guilty to all counts in Georgia.
2002: DNA from her mother confirms that the woman who died in Douglas County in 1993 was Peggy Grimes.
2003: The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the Baldwin County convictions and death sentence.
March 3 to 27, 2003: Douglas County sentencing trial; the jury recommends death.
April 30, 2004: Certificate of judgment issues in the Alabama direct appeal.
August 5, 2004: Georgia motion for a new trial denied.
April 25, 2005: Rule 32 petition filed in Baldwin County.
September 19, 2005: The Supreme Court of Georgia affirms the death sentence.
July 25, 2008: The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals rules on discovery in the Rule 32 case.
July 2009: Lewis dies on Alabama's death row.