James Dyral Briley Jr., known as J. B., was born in Richmond on June 6, 1956. He is carried here as an individual because he was tried and sentenced as one; his brothers Linwood and Anthony have their own entries and were convicted of different things.
As a boy he was sent to juvenile detention for firing a gun at a police officer during a pursuit, following his elder brother, who had been sent to reform school for a killing.
The brothers, with a younger accomplice named Duncan Eric Meekins, robbed and killed across Richmond between March 12 and October 19, 1979. Figures for the series differ widely: contemporary reporting settled on eleven, most later accounts say at least twelve, and one tally runs to twenty-one by including the 1971 killing and every death attributed to the group. What follows in the victim field is what this brother was convicted of, not the series total.
It ended on October 19, 1979 at the house of Harvey Wilkerson, a short distance from the Briley home. Wilkerson, his partner Judy Barton, who was twenty-three and pregnant, and her five-year-old son Harvey were bound and killed. The bodies were not found until October 21. Police had seen the group in the area, and arrests followed within days. Meekins, who was a minor, gave evidence against the brothers.
He was convicted of two counts of capital murder and one of first-degree murder, with attempted murder, rape, robbery and a firearms count. The two death sentences were for the robbery and murders of Judy Barton and her son Harvey, who was five. Barton was raped by three of the group within hearing of her partner and her child before they were killed.
In 1984 he and Linwood escaped from death row at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center with four other men, and all were recaptured within three weeks.
He was electrocuted at the Virginia State Penitentiary on April 18, 1985, six months after his brother, aged twenty-eight.