On the morning of July 13, 1987, a man came to Ernestine Griffin's house in Indianapolis asking about a car. The car belonged to Dr. Victor Seaman, whose dental office was next door and who had been her neighbor and close friend for years. Griffin could not answer his questions but offered to pass his details on. He wrote his name and home telephone number on a check stub and left it with her.
She was killed the following day. Police found the check stub on her kitchen counter.
Griffin was seventy-four and partially disabled by childhood polio. The autopsy showed she had been struck about the head hard enough to knock her down, and that while she lay prone and unable to defend herself a large knife taken from her own kitchen was driven into her chest. She was then struck about the head with a toaster. What was taken from the house was her wallet and its contents, a camera and its case, and a battery charger.
A neighbor confirmed the conversation about the car. Police found Griffin's camera at the car wash where Howard Arthur Allen worked, and he was brought in on August 4, 1987. He admitted striking her and denied killing her.
He had done this before. On August 19, 1974 he beat eighty-five-year-old Opal Inez Cooper to death during a burglary of her home. He was convicted not of murder but of voluntary manslaughter, sentenced to twenty-one years, and released on parole in January 1985.
Twenty-eight months later, on May 18, 1987, he beat eighty-seven-year-old Laverne Hale in her own house. She died nine days later in hospital. He received eighty-eight years for that. In June 1987 he burgled the home of an elderly man and burned the house down.
Allen was born on February 10, 1949, one of eight children raised by a single mother in poverty, and sometimes stole food for the family. He was placed in special education classes and was still reading at a second grade level when he left elementary school. A special education director later said he had difficulty processing language, that his thinking and decision-making were very concrete, and that he could have difficulty understanding the consequences of what he did and could be easily led. Against that, he had scored 104 on an IQ test and his mother described him as an average student. None of his relatives, and none of the eighteen people who wrote letters on his behalf before sentencing, described him as anything other than of normal intelligence. Those two accounts of his capacity are the whole of his later legal history.
A jury convicted him in 1988 and recommended death, and on June 11, 1988 he was sentenced to die for Griffin's murder, with fifty years concurrent for robbery with serious bodily injury and thirty-eight consecutive for theft. He went onto death row on August 30, 1988.
The Indiana Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence in 1997 and affirmed the denial of post-conviction relief in 2001. A federal district court denied his habeas petition in September 2006.
He kept arguing that he was intellectually disabled and therefore could not lawfully be executed, and for a long time he did not get anywhere. Then he did. A federal court held that he qualified, his death sentence was vacated, and he was resentenced to sixty years for the murder, in 2012 by the most specific account, though some reports place the ruling in 2013. The Indiana Department of Correction afterwards listed his earliest possible release date as April 23, 2035.
So he was not under sentence of death when he died, and had not been for the last seven or eight years of his life. He died at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility on June 5, 2020, aged seventy-one.