On the witness stand in a Shelby County courtroom in August 2024, on trial for killing his pregnant former girlfriend, Joshua Dotson called himself a serial killer. He compared himself to Michael Myers, the masked killer of the Halloween films. He described the dead woman, Jamesha Covson, nineteen, as a sex worker, and told the jury that she had known about the other people he had killed, which he offered as the reason she had to die. It was an extraordinary way to defend a murder charge, and it did not work. It also handed prosecutors three more.
Those three had died in Memphis over the previous year without anyone connecting them to him. Divieon Parker was shot and killed on November 19, 2019. On May 24, 2020, near Jesse Turner Park on South Bellevue, Renita Bennett and Reginald Anderson were shot dead in a single attack that also put three other people in danger. Little about the lives of any of the three has been published beyond their names.
Three weeks later, on June 12, 2020, police answering a shooting call at a house in the 1200 block of Quinn Avenue, near Bellevue Boulevard and South Parkway East, found Covson with gunshot wounds. She was taken to a hospital, where she and the child she was carrying died. Accounts of the shooting differ in the telling. Police said the two had argued and that he fired at the house as he was leaving; one report says he shot through her closed door, another that she was found shot several times. Investigators said he had been angry about a Facebook post and about her pregnancy. Afterward he posted the words fly high in her memory.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation put him on its most-wanted list, and the U.S. Marshals said he was being sought for four deadly shootings, including the one near Jesse Turner Park. He was captured in the Nashville area six days after Covson died. He was twenty.
The case over Covson's death took four years to reach a jury. On August 22, 2024 he was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, one for Covson and one for her unborn child, whom Tennessee law treats as a separate victim. At sentencing in October his lawyer asked for the two fifty-one-year terms to run at the same time. Judge Carlyn Addison ordered them served one after the other, 102 years, and the court remarked on his lack of remorse. The district attorney's office said the sentence brought a measure of justice for Covson and her child.
His testimony had been, in effect, a confession, and the rest followed. On February 14, 2025 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for Parker, to two counts of first-degree murder for Bennett and Anderson, and to three counts of reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon for the others caught in the May 2020 shooting. He was sentenced to a further 159 years, consecutive, bringing the total to 261. He was twenty-five. "After five years, we are pleased to finally have justice for Dotson's multiple victims," the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Regina Lucreziano, said, adding that he would never be a threat to the community again.
The five murders on his record are four people and one unborn child. Parker, Bennett, Anderson and Covson are the four; the fifth count is recorded as Tennessee law records it. No other death has been attributed to him, whatever he said about himself on the stand.