On the morning of October 19, 1979, James Briley stood in front of a judge and promised to stay out of trouble. He was on parole. That night he led his brothers out looking for someone to rob.
By the following morning three people were dead in a house on Barton Avenue, and he came back to it while their bodies were still there and took the television.
The Supreme Court of Virginia, affirming his death sentences, called him depraved. He was twenty-three.
Harvey Wilkerson had known the Brileys for years. He was twenty-seven and lived a short walk from their house on Fourth Avenue with his common-law wife, Judy Diane Barton, twenty-three and eight months pregnant, and her five-year-old son Harvey Wayne Barton. When he saw the group coming down the street he shut his door and locked it, and they saw him do it. He let them in anyway.
The two adults were overpowered, bound and gagged with duct tape. Judy Barton was raped. The three of them were covered with sheets, and then Briley told the sixteen-year-old with them, Duncan Eric Meekins, that he had to take one. Meekins shot Harvey Wilkerson in the head. Briley shot Judy Barton four times in the head, and then he shot her son.
Police were in the neighborhood and saw men running hard down the street without knowing what had happened. Nobody found the bodies for two or three days, and prosecutors later established that Briley had gone back the next morning and stepped past all three of them to take a television set.
He was born in Richmond on June 6, 1956, the middle brother, in the house at 3117 Fourth Avenue in Highland Park. As a boy he was sent to juvenile detention for firing a gun at a police officer during a pursuit, following Linwood, who had gone to reform school at sixteen for shooting a neighbor, Orline Christian, fifty-seven, dead from his bedroom window in January 1971.
Meekins took a plea agreement and gave evidence against all three brothers. He was eventually sentenced to life for the murder of Harvey Wilkerson, the killing he had physically committed on Briley's instruction.
The trial ran in the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond in January 1980, in two stages, and the convictions were more precisely drawn than most summaries of this case suggest. Briley was convicted of the capital murder of Harvey Wayne Barton during the commission of an armed robbery; of the capital murder of Judy Diane Barton during the commission of or following rape; of the first-degree murder of Harvey W. Wilkerson; of the robbery of Wilkerson; of the rape of Judy Barton; and of using a firearm in the commission of each.
Two capital counts, two different predicates, and a third death that was not capital at all. Wilkerson's killing carried first-degree murder because Meekins fired that shot.
That is also the reason the three brothers ended in three different places. Virginia's triggerman rule made capital murder available only against the person who had actually done the killing. James Briley had personally shot the two people he was condemned for. Linwood was condemned separately for the abduction and murder of the disc jockey John Gallaher. Anthony, against whom no personal killing could be proven, was convicted as an accomplice and is still alive.
At the penalty stage the jury recommended death on both capital counts, and after a probation officer's report the court confirmed them.
The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed on November 26, 1980, in an opinion by Justice Harrison. His counsel was Halford I. Hayes of Richmond, and he did not petition the United States Supreme Court. Federal habeas followed in March 1981 and was dismissed, though later that month, with his execution set for a Wednesday night, the Fourth Circuit granted an eleventh-hour stay in a single paragraph so it could hear an expedited appeal. Hayes said afterward that his client was relieved but not overly excited, and understood it was temporary.
The litigation ran until December 1984. By then he had done the thing he is remembered for outside Richmond.
On May 31, 1984 six men walked off Virginia's death row at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center, and the Briley brothers organized it. The inmates took over the unit and captured the guards, and in the first minutes both brothers wanted to kill them, douse them in rubbing alcohol and set them alight. Another condemned man, Willie Lloyd Turner, physically put himself in James Briley's way and stopped him.
A second condemned prisoner, Wilbert Lee Evans, stopped Linwood raping a nurse. Virginia electrocuted Evans on October 17, 1990, after the Mecklenburg guards said publicly that they owed him their lives and the prosecutor who had convicted him opposed clemency. The governor refused it anyway.
The escapers meant to reach Canada. Two got as far as Vermont. The Brileys split off in Philadelphia and went to their uncle, Johnny Lee Council, in the north of the city, and the FBI took them on June 19 after tapping his telephone. They were the last of the six caught.
Three weeks before his execution, on March 28, 1985, James Briley married a writer in a prison ceremony. His father attended.
Shirley Barton Hayes, whose daughter and grandson he had shot, asked him to admit what he had done. She told him she did not believe in capital punishment and that she wanted him to confess so his soul would be right with God. He did not.
On the day, other inmates attacked guards with homemade knives in an attempt to delay the execution. Nine guards and one prisoner were hurt.
His last meal was fried shrimp with cocktail sauce and a lemon-lime soft drink. He was electrocuted at the Virginia State Penitentiary on April 18, 1985, six months after Linwood, and in his last moments he smiled at the witnesses and asked them twice whether they were happy. He was twenty-eight.
He is survived by three daughters, who live in Richmond, and is buried with his brother in the Council family plot at Bethel, North Carolina.