On the night of October 9, 1992, Stephanie Gach drove home to her apartment in Birmingham, Alabama, from Eastwood Mall. She was 21, a student at Jefferson State College, and the youngest daughter of Mary Kate Gach. She never made it from her parking space to her door. The next morning her mother reported her missing, and that same day her body was found beside Grants Mill Road.
Three weeks later a 45-year-old parolee named Jack Harrison Trawick asked to talk to the lieutenant who had questioned him. He told him he knew what the police needed to finish their case. Then he confessed, and in the weeks that followed he told police and a Birmingham newspaper about other women: Aileen Pruitt, killed four months before Stephanie; Betty Jo Richards, a teenager killed twenty years earlier; and two women he said he had killed in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1970s, whom he never named.
Alabama executed Trawick on June 11, 2009. By then his case had reached the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, the Alabama Supreme Court, the federal courts and the United States Supreme Court, and his writings from death row had led to a lawsuit by Stephanie's mother and to a new state law.
Few verified details of Trawick's early life survive in the court records and news coverage. The Alabama Department of Corrections lists him as a white man born in 1947. The Associated Press described him in November 1992 as a 45-year-old man from Birmingham.
His record before 1992 is clearer. According to the AP, he had been paroled in 1990 from the St. Clair Correctional Facility after serving seven years of a sentence for burglary. When the police first spoke to him in October 1992, it was not about a murder but about something else: the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department was looking into several reports of a man trying to abduct women or lure them into his vehicle, and Trawick was brought in as a suspect in that inquiry, the Alabama Supreme Court later wrote.
His mental health history was raised at every stage of his case. At his trial he pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. The trial judge, in sentencing him, wrote of his "long history of psychiatric disturbances." The Equal Justice Initiative, the Montgomery legal organization that opposes the death penalty, gave a fuller account in a statement on the night of his execution. It said Trawick had been receiving psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia and psychotic disorders at age eleven; that over 25 years he took antipsychotic medication and underwent electric shock treatment; that he asked doctors to castrate him to help him manage what EJI called "disabling sexual dysfunction and anxiety"; and that hormone treatment led to a mastectomy in 1982. EJI also said he had stolen women's undergarments for a period before 1992. These are EJI's statements, made in advocacy against his execution; no published medical record backs them up.
The first killing Trawick was charged with took place twenty years before his arrest. According to the AP report of November 1992, Betty Jo Richards was a 17-year-old runaway from Quinton, Alabama. Trawick confessed in November 1992 to stabbing her to death in 1972, and he was charged with her murder that month, along with the murder of Aileen Pruitt. The AP also reported that he was a suspect in the attempted murder of another woman in 1972.
Whether the Richards charge ever went to trial has not been reported. The AP reports from 2004 and 2009 mention only his convictions for the murders of Stephanie Gach and Aileen Pruitt. On the public record, the Richards case therefore remains a confession and a charge, not a conviction.
Aileen Pruitt was killed in Birmingham in June 1992. The AP described her in 1992 as a 26-year-old prostitute; later AP reports, in 2004 and 2009, gave her age as 27. CBS News reported in 2004 that her body was found "just miles away" from where Stephanie Gach's would be found four months later, and that the coroner's report recorded more than 50 stab and cutting wounds.
Trawick confessed to stabbing Aileen Pruitt after his arrest in the Gach case, and he was charged with her murder in November 1992. In 1995 a Jefferson County jury convicted him of her murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole, according to the Associated Press.
Stephanie Gach was 21 and a student at Jefferson State College when she was killed. Her mother, Mary Kate Gach, later described her as her youngest daughter, and told CBS News in 2004 that after Stephanie's death she "wanted to lie down and die" until family and friends helped her through. "The other thing that kept me going is to see justice," she said.
The court records give the events of October 9 and 10, 1992, in detail, drawn from Trawick's confession and the evidence that police found to back it up. Trawick followed Stephanie from Eastwood Mall to her apartment. As she walked from her parking space toward her apartment, he pulled up beside her in a van, pointed a toy gun at her and ordered her into the van. As he pushed her in, she struck her head on the side window and her glasses fell off. He tied her hands with rope, put duct tape over her mouth and drove to a secluded area, where he beat her with a hammer, strangled her and stabbed her in the chest. He left her body on the side of Grants Mill Road, threw the contents of her wallet out of the window as he drove down Alton Road, and cleaned the blood from the van at his house.
The medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Embry, testified that she died from a three-inch knife wound to the heart and from asphyxiation caused by strangulation.
When Stephanie did not come home on the night of October 9, her mother telephoned her friends trying to find her. One of them, Rebecca Henderson, went to the apartment and found a pair of glasses lying on the ground where Stephanie usually parked. They were later identified as hers. On the morning of October 10, Mary Gach filed a missing persons report, and that report led police to identify the body found that day on Grants Mill Road.
Also on October 10, a man named Jeremy Burns was walking with a friend along Alton Road, about three miles from where the body was found, when he picked up a Texaco gasoline credit card bearing the name Gach. A search of the area turned up her college identification card and a health insurance card in her name.
For more than two weeks there was no public suspect. The break came from the separate inquiry into attempted abductions. The Alabama Supreme Court's opinion sets out the sequence. Sheriff's investigators first interviewed Trawick about those reports and did not ask him about the Gach case; nothing from that first interview was used at his trial. On October 22, after he had been questioned, an evidence technician, Gary Harris, found a large brown stain in the parking lot in front of Stephanie's apartment.
Lieutenant Steven Green of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department interviewed Trawick a second time on October 26, 1992, and this time asked him directly whether he had anything to do with Stephanie Gach's abduction and murder. Trawick did not admit anything. When Green asked whether he would take a polygraph test, Trawick said that if he was being charged with or "highly suspected of a murder," he needed "to get legal assistance." The interview stopped, though an officer asked whether he or his mother would object to a search of his home. The same day, his Toyota van was towed to the police station.
On October 29, Green received a telephone call from Trawick's mother, who said her son wanted to speak to him. By then Trawick was in jail; the AP reported that he had been arrested for a parole violation. Green went to the jail, read him his rights again, and Trawick signed a waiver. In this third interview Trawick said he knew about the murder and could tell Green what he needed to finish his investigation. He said he wanted to keep publicity to a minimum for his mother's sake, but also that he wanted the case tried as a capital murder and wanted to be sentenced to death.
Green arranged a meeting with the prosecutor's office. Later that day, in a fourth interview with Green, another officer and Deputy District Attorney Roger Brown, Trawick again waived his rights and gave an audiotaped statement confessing to the abduction and murder. He repeated that he wanted a capital trial and the death penalty. Brown told him he would have to know the facts of the case before he could say whether it could be tried as capital murder. Trawick was charged with the murder that day.
Police found evidence that matched the confession. In the Toyota van they found a piece of carpet, a tarpaulin, a ball-peen hammer and a plastic bucket holding an 11-inch knife. Luminol testing showed traces of blood on the tarpaulin, the carpet, the hammer, the tailgate of the van and the knife. A Ford station wagon Trawick was known to drive was also impounded, and a toy gun was found on the passenger-side floorboard.
Steven Drexler of the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences testified that two fibers on Stephanie's sweater, recovered at the scene, were consistent with fibers from the van's carpet, and that fibers on the duct tape over her mouth were the same as the carpet fibers.
In November 1992, after confessing to the Gach murder, Trawick confessed to killing Aileen Pruitt and Betty Jo Richards, and he was charged with both murders that month. On November 25, 1992, the Birmingham Post-Herald published an interview in which he made further claims, which the Associated Press reported the next day.
He said he had killed two more women in the summer of 1977 or 1978, during a car trip from California to Vancouver, British Columbia. One, he said, was a female runaway from Seattle whom he killed aboard a ship traveling between Seattle and Alaska and dumped into the Pacific Ocean. The other, he said, was a woman in the Ashland, Oregon, area, possibly near a ski resort. He did not say how the women were killed, what their names were or exactly what he did with the bodies, only that they were dumped, and he said he would give more details later.
Police in both places responded cautiously. Lieutenant Mel Clements of the Ashland Police Department told the AP he knew of no unsolved murders in Ashland, though that did not mean one had not happened. A Seattle police spokeswoman, Vinette Tichi, said the shipboard killing did not sound familiar, and that detectives would probably contact Birmingham police and check reports of runaways and missing persons from that period. Nothing was ever reported to show that either claim was ever confirmed, that either woman was identified, or that Trawick was charged in Oregon, Washington or Alaska.
The grand jury indicted Trawick for capital murder: murder committed during a first-degree kidnapping. He pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Before trial, his lawyers asked to move the case out of Jefferson County because of publicity. The Court of Criminal Appeals later noted that they produced only one newspaper article, from the Birmingham Post-Herald of November 27, 1993, and stipulated that only two more had appeared, on January 2 and January 30, 1994, with no coverage for more than six weeks before trial. Of 58 people in the jury pool, 17 had heard nothing about the case. The jurors were questioned one by one, and only one was excused because of what he had read or heard. The judge denied the motion.
Trial began on March 21, 1994. The panel from which the trial jury was struck numbered 42, of whom 19 were women. The prosecutor, a woman, used eleven of her fourteen peremptory strikes to remove women, including the first seven. Trawick's lawyers objected on racial grounds under Batson v. Kentucky. The judge required race-neutral reasons, rejected the reasons given for striking three black jurors and put them back on the jury. The final jury was seven men and five women. The defense did not object on grounds of sex discrimination, an issue the U.S. Supreme Court took up in J.E.B. v. Alabama several weeks after the verdict.
The trial turned on the insanity defense. Under Alabama law the defendant had to prove it by clear and convincing evidence, and the judge told the jury that a severe mental disease or defect "does not include an abnormality of the mind which is manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct." Several experts testified. The trial judge's sentencing order, quoted by the Alabama Supreme Court, refers to the findings of a Dr. Rosencrans, who found that Trawick had "serious characterologic and personality defects and paraphilia or sexual sadism to an extreme degree," and to a 28-page report by a Dr. Ronan. The jury convicted Trawick of capital murder on March 23, 1994.
At the penalty phase the state presented evidence of the effect of Stephanie's death on her family, which the appeals court later held was allowed under Payne v. Tennessee. The jury voted 10 to 2 for death. The judge found one aggravating circumstance, that the murder took place during a kidnapping. He found that none of the statutory mitigating circumstances applied, and rejected the argument that Trawick could not appreciate that what he did was wrong. But he did find a nonstatutory mitigating circumstance: that Trawick's "long history of psychiatric disturbances," though not enough to meet the statutory tests, formed "such a significant feature of the defendant's profile that his characterological defects do mitigate his blame worthiness." Weighing them, he sentenced Trawick to death by electrocution. The Department of Corrections records his arrival on death row on May 11, 1994.
On November 9, 1995, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in Trawick v. State. It rejected his claim that the confession was involuntary because it was given on conditions, namely that the case be capital and that publicity be kept down. Lieutenant Green testified that no threats or promises had been made, and Trawick himself testified at the suppression hearing that officers had not promised him his conditions would be met. The court also upheld the denial of a change of venue, the prosecutor's race-neutral reasons for striking four black jurors, and the judge's instruction on the insanity standard. In that last ruling it overruled part of an earlier decision, Bass v. State, to the extent it suggested a lower standard of proof.
On February 28, 1997, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed in Ex parte Trawick. It found that the number of women struck from the jury did not, without more, make out a prima facie case of sex discrimination. It held that because Trawick himself had restarted contact with police through his mother after asking about a lawyer, the confession did not violate Edwards v. Arizona, and that a prosecutor's promise to listen and then apply the law was "merely a promise that he would do his job." It also rejected claims about jurors who doubted the insanity defense, the exclusion of a juror who said he could never vote for death, the penalty-phase instructions and the absence of an instruction on noncapital murder. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case later that year.
Trawick then sought post-conviction relief in state court under Alabama Rule 32. The petition was denied, and the denial was affirmed in 2002. He filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the Northern District of Alabama, which was denied.
The Eleventh Circuit heard a single issue: the strikes against women. On March 18, 2008, a panel of Chief Judge Edmondson and Judges Black and Barkett affirmed. The court rejected the state's argument that a female prosecutor and a female victim meant there was no motive to strike women, calling that rationale one it rejected "altogether." But it held that the Alabama Supreme Court's decision was not an unreasonable application of federal law. The women struck had shared other traits, the court noted: five had been victims of violent crime, seven had been witnesses or jurors before, three had dealt with mental health professionals, and three did not want to be sequestered. And the share of women on the final jury, 42 percent, was close to their share of the jury pool, 45 percent.
On November 18, 2008, Alabama Attorney General Troy King asked the Alabama Supreme Court to set an execution date, saying Trawick had exhausted his state and federal appeals and had no challenges pending.
On death row at Holman Prison, Trawick wrote letters and made drawings that were later posted on the internet by a former pen pal and admirer, the AP reported. In them he described how he had killed Stephanie Gach and other women. He also addressed her mother by name. CBS News quoted one letter to Mary Kate Gach, signed "the psychotic killer of your useless daughter." In a 2004 AP report, Trawick, then 56, was quoted as writing from Holman: "I would do the whole thing again knowing death row was waiting for me."
Mary Kate Gach and other relatives of victims met with the state prison commissioner in 2003 to protest inmate websites. The Department of Corrections said Trawick's mail was screened more closely for a time, but new postings appeared. In January 2004 she sued Trawick, the Alabama Department of Corrections and a New Jersey web designer. The AP put the claim at $40 million; CBS News, which named the web designer as Neil O'Connor and her lawyer as George Jones, put it at $45 million. "I'm mad as hell," she told the AP. "Those people don't even have a right to speak my name or my child's name." The corrections spokesman, Brian Corbett, told CBS: "We don't like this information being posted on the Internet. We support Miss Gach." An ACLU lawyer, Amy Fettig, told the AP that prisons could block outgoing mail only for security risks or crimes in progress. What became of the lawsuit has not been reported.
The postings led to a change in Alabama law. In May 2009 the Legislature passed a bill by state Senator Zeb Little of Cullman, worked on for several years with Representative Cam Ward of Alabaster, requiring inmates convicted of capital murder or first-degree rape who sell artwork or writings about their crimes to give the proceeds to their victims or the victims' families. The AP reported that the bill was inspired by Trawick's postings, though he had not sold his work. An earlier version that would have barred inmates from producing such material was dropped because of First Amendment concerns, Ward said. Governor Bob Riley's office said he planned to sign it.
Attorney General King said he had promised Mary Gach "to try to stop the desecration of Stephanie's memory." Mary Gach said she was pleased and hoped for national legislation aimed at the operators of the websites. "He wanted the attention and publicity," she said.
On February 26, 2009, the Alabama Supreme Court set Trawick's execution for June 11, 2009. As of the day before, he had filed nothing in court to stop it, Assistant Attorney General Clay Crenshaw said. On June 10 he was moved to a holding cell beside the execution chamber at Holman Prison in Atmore.
Trawick was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 6:17 p.m. on June 11, 2009. He was 62. In his last words, the AP reported, he apologized to the people he had hurt and asked their forgiveness. EJI recorded it as the fifth execution in Alabama that year. The Department of Corrections execution list records the execution under Governor Riley.
That night EJI issued a statement calling his execution "a misguided and unjust way to manage someone who is severely mentally ill," and said that in the controlled setting of prison he had functioned "with less paranoia and fewer psychotic episodes." The state's position, upheld at every level, was that whatever his illness, he understood that what he did was wrong.
Proven in court: the capital murder of Stephanie Gach (convicted 1994, death sentence, executed 2009) and the murder of Aileen Pruitt (convicted 1995, life without parole).
Charged but not shown to have been tried: the 1972 murder of Betty Jo Richards, to which Trawick confessed. No trial or other resolution has been reported.
Suspected: an attempted murder of a woman in 1972, as reported by the AP in 1992.
Claimed only: two killings in the summer of 1977 or 1978, one aboard a ship between Seattle and Alaska and one near Ashland, Oregon. Trawick gave no names and no details that police could check, and police in Ashland and Seattle knew of no matching cases when asked. Neither claim has been confirmed in any report.
Trawick also wrote from death row about killing other women. His writings are not evidence that those killings happened, and no charge is known to have resulted from them.
Jack Harrison Trawick was executed on June 11, 2009, which the Alabama Department of Corrections list confirms. Nothing further has been reported on the Richards charge or on his Pacific Northwest claims.
1947: Jack Harrison Trawick born (birth year per the Alabama Department of Corrections).
1972: Betty Jo Richards, 17, of Quinton, stabbed to death; Trawick confessed in 1992.
1977 or 1978: Period of the two Pacific Northwest killings Trawick later claimed; unconfirmed.
1990: Paroled from St. Clair Correctional Facility after serving seven years of a burglary sentence.
June 1992: Aileen Pruitt killed in Birmingham.
October 9, 1992: Stephanie Gach, 21, abducted outside her Birmingham apartment.
October 10, 1992: Her body is found on Grants Mill Road; her cards are found along Alton Road.
October 22, 1992: Stain found in the parking lot outside her apartment.
October 26, 1992: Second interview; Trawick's van is towed.
October 29, 1992: Trawick asks to talk, confesses on audiotape, and is charged.
November 1992: Charged with the murders of Aileen Pruitt and Betty Jo Richards; tells the Birmingham Post-Herald of two more killings in the Northwest.
March 21 to 23, 1994: Gach trial; convicted of capital murder; jury votes 10 to 2 for death.
May 11, 1994: Arrives on death row.
1995: Convicted of the Pruitt murder; life without parole.
November 9, 1995: Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
February 28, 1997: Alabama Supreme Court affirms; U.S. Supreme Court declines review later in 1997.
2002: Denial of state post-conviction petition affirmed.
January 2004: Mary Kate Gach sues over his writings posted online.
March 18, 2008: Eleventh Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas relief.
November 18, 2008: Attorney General asks for an execution date.
February 26, 2009: Execution set for June 11.
May 2009: Legislature passes a bill on inmate profits from crime writings and art.
June 11, 2009: Executed by lethal injection at Holman Prison, Atmore, at 6:17 p.m.