On the evening of March 31, 1987, Gregory Davis walked to Manship Street in Jackson, Mississippi, to see a friend who lived in an apartment there. The friend was out. Next door, at 901 Manship, lived Addie Reid, an eighty-year-old widow who lived alone. Davis checked her doors and windows to see whether she was home and by herself, unscrewed the bulb in her front porch light, went around to the back of the house and, standing on a small table, climbed in through an unlocked bedroom window.
He took eight or ten dollars from her purse and hid behind the bedroom door. When Mrs. Reid came in and saw him, she screamed. He struck her in the face several times, got an arm around her neck and dragged her into the dining room, where he strangled her. He covered her face with a towel and sexually assaulted her, then left by the front door and walked west up Manship Street. Passing a doctor's office, he threw her pink purse, a small flashlight and a jewelry box from the house onto its roof.
Nearly a month went by. On April 27 Jackson police answered a burglary call on Bailey Avenue and arrested Davis and his younger brother, Thomas, in the parking lot of the Jackson Mall. The complainant identified him. Questioned for a few minutes at Precinct Three, he said he did not want to talk about the burglary any more, and he was taken to the city jail. The next afternoon Detective Charles Crisco, who suspected that a string of similar incidents in the area was tied to the Reid killing, took him into an interrogation room with his partner, Detective Robert Jordan. Davis signed a written Miranda waiver, denied the murder and then admitted it. The detectives drove him to Manship Street and found the purse, the flashlight and the jewelry box on the doctor's roof.
Before trial he tried to have the confession thrown out. He testified that he had been given nothing to eat from the morning of April 28 until after he confessed that night, that Crisco had threatened to have him electrocuted, that he had asked for a lawyer and been told he could have one if he signed the waiver, and that he had been promised help from a judge. Crisco denied all of it, and no threat could be heard on the tapes of the session, though the two detectives admitted they had lied to Davis about the evidence they held. One officer, Sergeant Cleon Butler, swore that Davis had asked for an attorney at Precinct Three on April 27. Four other officers who had been there remembered no such request. On January 4, 1988, the trial judge found Butler's account "the result of an honest mistake" and let the confession in.
The case had been indicted in Hinds County and moved to Forrest County on a change of venue. Trial opened on January 13, 1988. Davis did not testify, though his parents did, and his lawyers conceded that he had killed Mrs. Reid. The fight was over whether he had been insane under the M'Naghten rule. A defense psychologist, Dr. Charlton Stanley, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, although his own written report had called Davis sane and he changed his view about an hour before he took the stand. A defense psychiatrist, Dr. Timothy Summers, found a borderline character disorder, seizure disorders and a schizophrenic-like psychosis. The state's experts, Dr. Michael Whelan and Dr. Rodrigo Galvez, found a personality disorder and no psychosis. The jury took thirty-five minutes to convict him of capital murder and then sentenced him to death.
That jury was four men and eight women, all of them white. The prosecution used seven of its twelve peremptory strikes to remove every black potential juror, and the reasons it gave included one woman's age and her husband's ministry, another's "sullen" manner and her status as a divorced single parent, and two men's conversations about the case outside court. The record showed that the same reasons had not been used against white panelists: a white minister was left on, and so were white panelists who had also talked about the case. On July 26, 1989, the Supreme Court of Mississippi held the strikes permissible under Batson v. Kentucky, affirmed the conviction and the sentence, and set September 20, 1989, as the date of execution. Rehearing was denied on September 27.
Two justices wrote separately. Justice Robertson joined the result while calling what had happened "fundamentally morally wrong": a black man had been tried for his life for the rape and killing of an elderly white woman before a jury from which every black candidate had been struck, and the evidence was so strong that the strikes had not even been needed to convict. Justice Sullivan went further and urged Mississippi to abolish peremptory challenges in criminal trials altogether.
Three more deaths are attributed to Davis: those of Lucy Spillers, 59, Mary Dewitt, 81, and Bertha Tanner, 83, elderly women who died in Georgia and Mississippi in 1986 and 1987. The Mississippi Supreme Court's opinion in the Reid case does not mention them, and no charge in any of them has been traced. What became of the death sentence after the execution date set in 1989 is not established.