Gregory Davis

Victims

4 attributed - 1 CONVICTION, for the capital murder of Addie Reid, 80, confirmed by the Supreme Court of Mississippi in 1989. The three earlier deaths are attributed to him and no conviction for any of them has been traced

Years active

1986 - 1987

Location

Georgia/Mississippi, USA

Method

Strangulation / Beating

Status

Indicted by a Hinds County grand jury for the capital murder of Addie Reid, an eighty-year-old widow who lived alone at 901 Manship Street in Jackson, and tried in Forrest County on a change of venue. On March 31, 1987 he unscrewed her porch light, entered through an unlocked bedroom window, took eight or ten dollars from her purse, beat her, strangled her and sexually assaulted her. He was arrested on April 27, 1987 after an unrelated burglary call and confessed the following day, leading officers to the purse and jewellery box he had thrown onto a roof. His trial began on January 13, 1988. He did not testify and ran a defence of insanity under the M’Naghten rule, his own psychologist and psychiatrist finding paranoid schizophrenia and a schizophrenic-like psychosis while the state’s experts found only a personality disorder. THE JURY DELIBERATED FOR THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES, convicted him of capital murder and sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court of Mississippi affirmed the conviction and sentence on July 26, 1989 and denied rehearing that September. He is black, and the jury that tried him was all white, seated after the prosecution used seven of its twelve peremptory challenges to strike every black member of the panel; the court upheld that under Batson v. Kentucky, but two justices wrote separately, one calling the outcome "fundamentally morally wrong" and the other urging that peremptory challenges be abolished altogether. He also alleged his confession had been coerced by threats and by the withholding of food and of access to a lawyer, and one sergeant testified that he had indeed asked for an attorney; the trial court found that testimony to be an honest mistake. No later disposition has been located and the archive does not know whether the sentence was carried out.

Gregory Davis, born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1966, the son of a Baptist minister, killed four elderly women in Georgia and Mississippi between 1986 and 1987: Lucy Spillers, 59, Mary Dewitt, 81, Bertha Tanner, 83, and Addie Reid, 80. He beat and strangled the victims, and the cases involved rape, mutilation and interference with the bodies after death.

He had developed a fixation on much older women as a teenager, and the Jackson public library was a place he frequented to approach them. He was arrested on April 27, 1987 and sentenced to death in Mississippi in 1988.

Sourcing is a single encyclopaedia summary and its detail on the individual killings cannot be checked against court records here.