Joshua Dotson was twenty when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation put him on its most-wanted list in 2020 and twenty-four when the last of his sentences was passed in February 2025. He was from Memphis. Nothing else about his life before the killings has been published, and this entry does not guess.
Between 2019 and 2020 he shot and killed three people in Memphis: Divieon Parker, and Renita Bennett and Reginald Anderson, the last two in a single incident that also produced three counts of reckless endangerment for the others present. None of these deaths was connected to him at the time.
In 2020 he killed Jamesha Covson, nineteen, his former girlfriend, who was pregnant. Afterwards he posted fly high in her memory on social media. It was for her death that he was arrested and, in August 2024, tried. He gave evidence in his own defence, and what he said made the case: he called himself a serial killer, compared himself to Michael Myers, the killer in the Halloween films, described Covson as a sex worker, and told the court that she had known about his earlier murders, which he offered as his reason for killing her. The jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, one for Covson and one for the child she was carrying, which Tennessee law treats as a separate victim. In October 2024 the judge, remarking on his lack of remorse, sentenced him to two consecutive fifty-one-year terms, 102 years.
His testimony had also been a confession to the other three. On February 14, 2025 he pleaded guilty in Shelby County to first-degree murder for Divieon Parker, to two counts of first-degree murder for Renita Bennett and Reginald Anderson, and to three counts of reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon. He was sentenced to a further 159 years, to run consecutively. Assistant District Attorney Regina Lucreziano said that after five years the office was pleased to finally have justice for his multiple victims, and that he would never be a threat to the community again.
The count needs stating carefully. Dotson was convicted of five murders. Four of the dead were people: Parker, Bennett, Anderson and Covson. The fifth count is Covson’s unborn child, which is a murder under Tennessee law and is recorded here as the state recorded it. No other death has been attributed to him.