On the morning of November 3, 1992, employees arriving at the Board Room restaurant in downtown Toledo found the owner, Peter Mihas, dead in the parking lot behind the building. He had been stabbed several times, and the knife was still in his chest. His trousers had been taken off and lay beside him, with his shoes. An empty bank deposit bag lay nearby.
A Toledo detective, William Gray, had seen a scene like it before. Three months earlier, Dale Pinkelman had been found dead on the floor of his collectibles shop on the northern edge of the city, killed by a single stab wound to the chest. His trousers were missing, and his shoes had been placed next to his body. That case had gone nowhere. Within days of the Mihas killing, police had a suspect for both, and his fingerprints were on a glass display case three feet from where Pinkelman died.
The man was Gregory L. Bryant-Bey, then thirty-seven. He was convicted of both murders in 1993, sentenced to life in prison for one and to death for the other, and executed by the state of Ohio in November 2008, still saying he had been framed.
Most of what is on record about Bryant-Bey's early life comes from the mitigation phase of his 1993 death penalty trial, as summarized by the Supreme Court of Ohio in 1999. He was born in Toledo; the Clark County, Indiana, prosecutor's execution file, drawing on Ohio prison records, gives his date of birth as August 6, 1955. His birth mother abandoned him as a baby. He was then taken in and raised in New York by a woman he believed was his mother. A defense psychologist, Dr. Barbara McIntyre, told the jury that this woman was strict, demanding, and physically and emotionally abusive, and that she beat him regularly. In the fourth grade he ran away and tried to walk back to Toledo.
When he was thirteen his birth mother came to New York and took him back to Toledo, then left him again, this time with her former husband, who was not his father. He learned who his father was only after the man had died. He had a large family, many of them in Toledo, but told the psychologist he had always felt alone and had no one to trust.
He finished high school and took some college courses without completing a degree. He married twice and had two children; neither marriage lasted. He served two years in the Air Force and was discharged, apparently for "inability to cope with stress" and "verbal belligerence." He worked steadily at a series of jobs and was rarely unemployed for more than a few weeks. He said he began using drugs as a high school junior to control his anger, and he admitted stealing, both to pay for drugs and, as he put it, for the adventure of it. He had no juvenile record. As an adult he was convicted of felonious assault and of theft that was raised to a felony because of his many misdemeanors.
Dale Pinkelman was known as "Pinky." He opened a retail shop called Pinky's Collectibles, which the Toledo Blade placed in North Towne Square and the Associated Press described as a sports collectibles and coin shop. It also sold watches. He was a father of six, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Most records give his age as forty-eight; the Dispatch gave it as forty-seven.
He kept a set routine at closing. According to the Ohio Supreme Court, he customarily left $100 in loose bills in the register drawer and then put the drawer away in a storage room. He parked his station wagon in front of the store.
Sunday, August 9, 1992, was the last day of his life. The Ohio Supreme Court said he was attacked on a Sunday evening while alone in the store. He was found near a back office, wearing a gold necklace, a ring and a watch on each hand. His trousers were gone and his shoes lay next to him. Deputy Coroner Cynthia Beisser found that he had died within a few minutes of a single stab wound to the chest.
Merchandise was missing from the inventory. The register was open and the cash drawer, still in it, held no visible currency, which meant the routine had not been completed. His station wagon was gone from the front of the store. Police later recovered it, abandoned. They found an unidentified fingerprint and palm print on top of a glass display case about three feet in front of his body. They never found his trousers or the weapon. In the words of the federal appeals court that reviewed the case in 2007, despite the unusual scene and the prints, the police "had no suspect for the apparent murder/robbery and no solid leads."
Peter Mihas, known as Pete, was sixty-one. He was a Greek immigrant, the Columbus Dispatch reported, and he owned the Board Room restaurant on Huron Street in downtown Toledo. At the Mihas trial a prosecutor described him as "a very good, local businessman who works hard for his living." The judge sustained the defense objection to that remark and told the jury not to decide the case on sympathy, but nothing in the record contradicts it.
According to the Ohio Court of Appeals, his employees found him on the morning of November 3, 1992, in the parking lot behind the restaurant. He had stab wounds to the back, chest and arms, and a knife was still embedded in his chest. His trousers and shoes had been removed and were lying next to him, beside the empty deposit bag. His jewelry was still on him. Employees first told officers the knife came from the restaurant; police learned later that it did not. The Associated Press gave the date of the killing as November 2, which suggests he was attacked late that night after closing.
On the evening of November 3, the same day Mihas was found, a man asked for a room at the Riverview Inn in Toledo and paid the desk clerk with a $100 bill. He asked about buying the clerk's car, saying he had $1,100 in cash with him, and he asked a bellman to take $500 to his wife at a local church. The clerk knew about the murder downtown that morning. He called a friend who was a Toledo police officer.
The guest was Gregory Bryant-Bey. Detective Tom Ross looked into him and concluded he was a possible suspect. Around noon on November 4, Ross and other officers went to his room at the Riverview Inn to serve two arrest warrants for misdemeanor theft. They knocked and announced themselves, heard movement but got no answer, and had a maintenance worker open the door with a pass key. Bryant-Bey asked the officers to bring some of his clothes to the station, including a pair of black pants lying on the floor.
At the station he was searched, and officers found $1,160 in cash in one of his socks. They counted it in front of him and sealed it in an envelope. While he waited in the interrogation room, officers examined the black pants and found a yellow paint stain like one on Mihas's trousers. A chemical analysis later found the two stains similar.
Bryant-Bey waited about five hours before questioning began. At about 5:30 p.m. Ross read him his rights, and he signed a waiver. He first said he had nothing to do with the killing, that he had been in another part of the city that night, and that his money came from gambling. Asked about the paint, he said he could not explain it.
Ross then suggested that perhaps Mihas had come out of the restaurant with a knife and things had gotten out of hand. Bryant-Bey changed his account. He said he had been urinating behind the restaurant when Mihas confronted and threatened him with a knife, that the two struggled, and that Mihas fell on his own knife. After a dinner break, and after again confirming he understood his rights, he said Mihas might have received the wounds to his back by rolling over after the fall. He admitted going through Mihas's wallet before he left. He could not explain how the trousers came off. The interview ended at about 10 p.m.
The federal court described this, more simply, as a confession: confronted with evidence of his guilt, "he confessed to murdering and robbing Mihas." The Ohio Supreme Court said he "admitted that he had killed Mihas." What he admitted was being there and taking money; his account of the death itself was an accident.
Gray's attention to the two crime scenes now paid off. Police took Bryant-Bey's fingerprints and palm prints and compared them with the unidentified prints from the display case at Pinky's Collectibles. They matched. The Pinkelman station wagon had been found less than two blocks from where he lived.
The day after the Mihas interview, police questioned him about Pinkelman. He first denied ever meeting Pinkelman or being in the store. Then he said he had bought a watch there as a gift for his wife, that he "owed" Pinkelman about $300 for it, and that he had gone back to ask for more time to pay, but Pinkelman "dogged" him for the money. Asked whether he had harmed Pinkelman or taken his car, he said he did not remember. Then he stopped talking.
A Lucas County grand jury returned a four-count indictment on November 12, 1992. It charged him with the aggravated murder of each man, each count carrying a death-penalty specification for murder committed in the course of an aggravated robbery with Bryant-Bey as principal offender, and with two counts of aggravated robbery, each with a prior-felony specification. His lawyers asked for separate trials, so that the case he had confessed to would be tried apart from the one he had not, and the court agreed.
The Mihas case went first. Bryant-Bey moved to suppress the evidence from the hotel room and the police station and his statements to Ross; the motion was denied. His defense at trial was that the death was an accident or self-defense. A prosecutor told the jury that defense counsel "will be doing cartwheels out of this courtroom if you buy any of this stuff, this ludicrous story of self-defense or accident." On June 8, 1993, the jury convicted him of aggravated murder with the specification and of aggravated robbery. It did not recommend death. On June 10 he was sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for thirty years, plus fifteen to twenty-five years for the robbery.
The Pinkelman trial followed in the fall. Before it began, Bryant-Bey asked the court to keep the jury from hearing anything about the Mihas killing, under the Ohio evidence rule that bars proof of other crimes to show a person's character. The trial court refused. In a written order it found the Mihas evidence admissible to prove identity: "Both victims were male business owners who were confronted in or near their place of business. In both cases, the perpetrator directed violence to the two men through the use of a knife and inflicted the fatal stab wound to the chest. Further[,] the uniqueness of the removal of the trousers and the shoes of the two men supports the admissibility of the evidence." The court promised to tell the jury the limited purpose of that evidence, and at the defense's request it did so even during jury selection. His trial lawyers, including Ron Wingate, chose to take the sting out of the evidence by raising it early.
The jury heard about the Mihas conviction, the prints on the display case, the station wagon near his home and his statements about the watch. A prosecutor told jurors in closing that "this detective knows [that Bey] is guilty," a remark the judge struck on objection. The jury convicted Bryant-Bey of aggravated murder with the death specification and of aggravated robbery. The Associated Press dated the verdict November 11, 1993; a later Ohio Court of Appeals decision gave November 19.
In the penalty phase the defense called Dr. McIntyre, who described his childhood and found no major mental illness but a long-term, low-level depression and a serious personality disorder with antisocial and paranoid features. She said he had few resources for coping with stress, was impulsive and could be overwhelmed by anger, and called him "a man with a near life-long history of psychological and behavioral problems." She also said he wanted to change. He had been reading the Bible, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and books on psychology and philosophy, and he hoped to help younger men in prison.
Bryant-Bey gave an unsworn statement. He said he was "sorry for all the hurt" he had caused and that his life had been "nothing but a struggle ... a struggle that [he had] lost." He asked God for forgiveness and said, "I'm sorry for the incident and my heart will always have to regret it." At the same time, the Ohio Supreme Court noted, he appeared to question whether the evidence proved he had killed Pinkelman.
When a prosecutor told the jury in closing that his statement blamed "his mother and his family," Bryant-Bey interrupted: "Hey, don't you talk about my mother." When the judge cautioned him he answered, "You would have me ... removed. You don't talk about my mother." The jury was sent out. The judge refused a mistrial and refused to question the jurors individually, but let the defense apologize to them.
The jury recommended death. On December 22, 1993, the trial court imposed it, ordering death by electrocution "in the manner and place directed by" the Ohio statute, which then let a prisoner choose lethal injection instead. In its sentencing opinion the court described how he had "dehumanized the helpless dying victim by removing his trousers and ritualistically placing his shoes near the body as if the deceased were an object or trophy." Neither court nor police ever gave an explanation, from him or from evidence, for why the trousers were taken.
On March 10, 1995, the Sixth District Court of Appeals, in State v. Bryant-Bey, upheld the Mihas conviction. It rejected his claims that the police had entered his hotel room illegally, finding exigent circumstances; that his statements were involuntary; and that the prosecutor's closing argument required a new trial. On the interrogation, the court found that Ross had not knowingly lied about the knife, since he believed at the time that it came from the restaurant, and that a suggested scenario was not coercion. It found that Bryant-Bey had been questioned for about two and a half hours after waiting five, had never asked to leave or to talk to anyone, and had not been rewarded with dinner for his admissions. The Supreme Court of Ohio declined to hear a further appeal in 1995, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in 1996.
The Pinkelman appeal reached the Supreme Court of Ohio, as all Ohio death sentences do, after the court of appeals affirmed on September 19, 1997. Bryant-Bey's appellate lawyers, Jeffrey M. Gamso and Spiros P. Cocoves, raised twenty-two propositions of law. Assistant Prosecutor Craig T. Pearson argued for Lucas County. The court decided State v. Bey, 85 Ohio St.3d 487, on May 19, 1999, in an opinion by Justice Deborah Cook, and affirmed the conviction and the death sentence. Justices Douglas, Grady, F.E. Sweeney and Lundberg Stratton joined it; Chief Justice Moyer and Justice Pfeifer concurred in the judgment only.
The first question was the one that decided the case: whether the jury should have heard about Mihas. The court held that it could. Other-acts evidence is admissible to prove identity where there is substantial proof the defendant committed the other act and the two crimes share a distinctive method. Here Bryant-Bey had admitted the Mihas killing and been convicted of it, and the two deaths "occurred under practically identical circumstances": both victims were businessmen killed at their businesses, apparently alone; both were stabbed in the chest; both businesses were robbed while jewelry was left on the bodies; and, "uniquely, both men had their trousers removed and their shoes were placed next to their bodies." The court called this a "behavioral fingerprint." It acknowledged the differences. Mihas had several wounds and the knife was left in him, and his trousers, pockets turned out, were found at the scene. The jury, the court said, could weigh those differences, and the limiting instructions reduced any unfair prejudice.
The court refused to reopen the Mihas suppression issues, holding that they had been fully litigated in the earlier case and that the record of the Pinkelman trial did not contain the evidence needed to review them. It found the voir dire instruction proper, and in any event invited by the defense.
It found several prosecution arguments improper but not grounds for reversal. A remark that defense counsel would "confuse issues, create a cloud of doubt" arguably denigrated the defense. In the penalty phase the prosecutor misstated the weighing process, treated the facts of the crime as aggravating circumstances, called the verdict a "recommendation" after the judge discouraged the word, and commented on statutory mitigating factors the defense had not raised. The court "condemn[ed]" some of these remarks but held that the trial court's correct instructions cured them and that none changed the outcome. It found errors in the jury instructions on mitigation harmless.
Two holdings went beyond this case. The court ruled for the first time that an Ohio trial judge does not have to question a defendant on the record about a decision not to testify. And it held that the judge did not have to declare a mistrial or question jurors after the outburst about his mother, because a defendant cannot gain from an error he created himself. It rejected his arguments that a death penalty unused in Ohio for more than thirty years was cruel and unusual, that no Lucas County court had imposed death between 1986 and 1993, and that a life sentence from the Mihas jury made a death sentence from the Pinkelman jury arbitrary. A different jury, it reasoned, had heard a different case, and the Pinkelman jury knew he had also killed Mihas.
In its own independent review of the sentence, the court found nothing mitigating in the crime, describing how he "attacked, robbed, and killed a defenseless shopkeeper on a Sunday evening" and then took money, merchandise and the victim's car. It gave modest weight to his abandonment, abusive upbringing, depression and personality disorder, his education and work history, and his remorse, and "very minimal" weight to his drug and alcohol problems. It rejected residual doubt as a mitigating factor under its 1997 McGuire decision, and it gave little weight to the existing Mihas life sentence because the Mihas killing also cut against him. It found the aggravating circumstance outweighed the mitigation beyond a reasonable doubt, and that the sentence was proportionate to other robbery-murder cases. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on December 6, 1999.
While the direct appeal was pending, Bryant-Bey filed a petition for post-conviction relief in Lucas County on September 20, 1996. Represented by new counsel, he argued that his trial lawyers had been ineffective at the penalty phase and relied on a new evaluation by a second psychologist, Dr. Ort. The trial court denied the petition without a hearing on October 31, 1997. The court of appeals affirmed on June 16, 2000, finding that the claims could have been raised on direct appeal and that the new evaluation, while "highly detailed," was cumulative and did not say Dr. McIntyre's was wrong. The Ohio Supreme Court declined further review in October 2000.
In October 2001 Bryant-Bey filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Toledo, raising twenty-five grounds. Judge Paul R. Matia denied it in September 2004 and refused a certificate of appealability. In November 2005 the Sixth Circuit granted one on a single question: whether the trial court violated his constitutional rights by admitting the Mihas evidence without first weighing its prejudice against its value.
A panel of Judges Alice M. Batchelder, John M. Rogers and Jeffrey S. Sutton heard argument on December 5, 2006. Richard M. Kerger of Toledo argued for Bryant-Bey; Stephen E. Maher of the Ohio Attorney General's office argued for the warden, Margaret Bagley. On September 25, 2007, in Bey v. Bagley, 500 F.3d 514, the court unanimously affirmed.
Judge Batchelder's opinion split his claim in two. To the extent he said the trial court had broken Ohio's evidence rule, that was a state-law question a federal habeas court could not review. To the extent he said the evidence was so prejudicial that it made his trial fundamentally unfair, the court found no Supreme Court precedent holding that properly admitted other-acts evidence violates due process, and pointed to Dowling v. United States, where the Court had allowed similar evidence. The opinion set out, in a footnote, the differences between the crimes: the scenes were several miles apart, one on the northern edge of the city and one downtown; Pinkelman was stabbed once and Mihas several times; one body was inside and one outside; Pinkelman's store and car were taken and Mihas's were not; and Mihas's trousers were found and Pinkelman's never were.
The court did not doubt the evidence's force. "The peculiar factual similarities between these two crimes strongly suggested Bey's involvement in the Pinkelman murder, and no doubt greatly increased in the minds of the jurors the likelihood that Bey committed that crime," Batchelder wrote. "But, all evidence tending to prove guilt is prejudicial to a criminal defendant." The question was whether the prejudice was unfair, and "nothing in the record indicates that the prejudice was unfair." His lawyers had known about the evidence well before trial, had been able to challenge it, and had obtained limiting instructions. And, the court noted, Bryant-Bey himself had admitted in his habeas petition and again on appeal that the other evidence of his guilt "was very strong." The Toledo Blade reported the ruling under the headline "Convicted Toledo murderer a step closer to execution." The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on March 24, 2008.
Ohio's executions had been on hold, along with most of the country's, while the U.S. Supreme Court considered Kentucky's lethal injection method; the Associated Press reported that Bryant-Bey was the second Ohio prisoner put to death after that pause ended. His execution was set for November 19, 2008.
The Ohio Parole Board heard his clemency case in October 2008. According to the Toledo Blade's Jim Provance, his lawyers made little effort to argue innocence and concentrated on his childhood: abandonment by his mother, the abusive godmother in New York, the attempt to walk home to Toledo. Assistant State Public Defender Rachel Troutman presented the case. The board was not persuaded. It relied in part on testimony from his half-sister, Ruth Williamson-Bey, who told the board tearfully that she had asked her father to bring him into their home after she learned he existed. The board wrote that after he returned to Toledo at thirteen "he was able to adjust adequately and conform to societal norms, and experienced a more stable family life." It added that he "does not accept full responsibility for the crimes of conviction" and found the sentence "fair and just." The seven members who took part voted unanimously against clemency. Board member Jim Bedra, a former Lucas County victim advocate who had dealt with the victims in the case, did not take part.
Troutman said she was "disappointed that they didn't give more weight to the childhood that ended up creating this." His lawyers asked Governor Ted Strickland to commute the sentence to life without parole or, failing that, to grant a ninety-day reprieve to examine the evidence further. On November 18, 2008, Strickland denied clemency in a one-page statement, WOSU reported, after reviewing the materials in the case. The same day Bryant-Bey asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a sixty-day reprieve to give him more time to present information to the governor, citing a pending argument by a Tennessee prisoner. The Court denied it late that night.
Bryant-Bey was moved from death row at the Ohio State Penitentiary near Youngstown to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility at Lucasville. His last meal, as listed in the execution file compiled by the Clark County prosecutor, was fried chicken, spaghetti with meat sauce, potato salad, cherry pie with strawberry ice cream, and a cola.
On November 19, 2008, he entered the death chamber at 10:22 a.m., holding a rosary, according to Alan Johnson of the Columbus Dispatch. He smiled and made a peace sign to his witnesses: his half-brother, the Rev. Elton Williamson, pastor of the Increased Ship of Zion Church in Detroit; Troutman; and his spiritual adviser, Stephen Sparling. He kept mouthing a question his brother later said was "Where's Darlene?", meaning his sister Darlene Hines, who he had expected to be there. She did not come.
He read a two-page handwritten statement held up for him by a corrections officer. In it he named the detective, two other men he said had fabricated evidence and the prosecutor who used it, and he criticized his trial lawyer by name. "My brothers and sisters wonder what can be done to protect their sisters and brothers and children and friends from being framed, lied on and convicted on invisible evidence," he said. "My heart was just seeking a sense of fairness and a dose of justice but it was not to be." He ended: "My heart calls out to God, 'Come get me on the double.'"
The drugs began at about 10:30 a.m. He was pronounced dead at 10:41 a.m. He was fifty-three. He was the 28th person executed in Ohio since the state resumed executions in 1999, and, by the Death Penalty Information Center's count, the 1,133rd in the United States since 1976.
Jay Clark, Dale Pinkelman's son-in-law, spoke to reporters afterward. "This is a difficult day," he said. "There aren't any winners on either side." He thanked the detectives, judges and others who had worked on the case, and called both victims "brave, hardworking family men." "We're thankful this event brings closure to the senseless murders of Dale Pinkelman and Pete Mihas," he said. "We'll cherish the memories we have and the lessons they taught us."
Elton Williamson took a different view. "This was not punishment. This was murder," he said. "The same thing that he was convicted of, the state of Ohio did to him." He said his brother had looked him in the eye and denied the killing, and that he believed him. "I'm sad, but at the same time I'm proud of my brother," he said. "He went bravely."
The case is closed. The Ohio Attorney General's 2023 Capital Crimes Annual Report, checked for this page, lists Gregory L. Bryant-Bey of Lucas County as executed by lethal injection on November 19, 2008, 5,446 days after his death sentence, with no proceedings pending in any court. The reprieves that Governor Mike DeWine has issued since 2019, which the Death Penalty Information Center describes as a halt to all Ohio executions pending a new protocol, came more than a decade after his death and did not involve him. The most recent execution listed in that report, as of December 31, 2023, is Robert Van Hook's in July 2018.
Proven: two juries convicted Bryant-Bey of aggravated murder, one for Peter Mihas and one for Dale Pinkelman, and every state and federal court that reviewed the convictions upheld them.
Admitted, in part: he told police he was behind the Board Room when Mihas died and that he went through Mihas's wallet. He said the death was an accident during a struggle over Mihas's own knife. The jury rejected that account, and the knife turned out not to have come from the restaurant.
Denied: he never admitted killing Pinkelman. He said he had bought a watch there and owed money for it, and said he did not remember whether he had harmed Pinkelman. The case against him rested on his prints at the scene, the car found near his home, his statements and the Mihas evidence. Before the Ohio Supreme Court he argued residual doubt; the court did not treat it as mitigating. In his last statement he said he had been framed with "invisible evidence," that a witness for the state had testified that "2 young men were seen in the victim's automobile" and his lawyer had not followed it up, and that his trial and post-conviction lawyers failed him. None of these claims was upheld by a court, and the record available for this page does not include that witness's testimony. His own habeas lawyers conceded that the other evidence of his guilt was very strong.
Unexplained: no court record or press account gives a reason for the removal of the victims' trousers and the placing of their shoes. The trial judge's description of it as ritual, "as if the deceased were an object or trophy," was his own characterization; the Ohio Supreme Court called it "colorful" but accurate as a description of the scene. No source suggests any other victims.
August 6, 1955: Gregory L. Bryant-Bey born in Toledo, per Ohio prison records.
August 9, 1992 (a Sunday): Dale Pinkelman, 48, stabbed and robbed in Pinky's Collectibles, Toledo; his station wagon taken.
November 2-3, 1992: Peter Mihas, 61, stabbed in the parking lot behind the Board Room restaurant; found by employees the morning of November 3.
November 3, 1992: Bryant-Bey checks into the Riverview Inn with a large sum of cash; the desk clerk alerts a police officer.
November 4, 1992: arrested at the hotel on misdemeanor theft warrants; questioned about Mihas and admits being present.
The next day: questioned about Pinkelman after his prints match those in the store.
November 12, 1992: indicted on four counts; the cases are later severed.
June 8 and 10, 1993: convicted of murdering Mihas; sentenced to life with parole eligibility after thirty years.
November 1993: convicted of murdering Pinkelman.
December 22, 1993: sentenced to death.
March 10, 1995: Ohio Court of Appeals affirms the Mihas conviction.
September 19, 1997: Ohio Court of Appeals affirms the Pinkelman conviction and death sentence.
May 19, 1999: Supreme Court of Ohio affirms in State v. Bey, 85 Ohio St.3d 487.
December 6, 1999: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
June 16, 2000: Ohio Court of Appeals affirms denial of post-conviction relief.
October 2001: federal habeas petition filed; denied September 2004.
September 25, 2007: Sixth Circuit affirms in Bey v. Bagley.
March 24, 2008: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
October 2008: Ohio Parole Board unanimously recommends against clemency.
November 18, 2008: Governor Ted Strickland denies clemency; U.S. Supreme Court denies a sixty-day reprieve.
November 19, 2008: executed at Lucasville, pronounced dead at 10:41 a.m.