Covington was born in 1962 and worked as a hospital X-ray technician in Philadelphia.
In 1998 he shot his cousin, the Reverend Thomas Lee Devlin, forty-nine. In 2005 he shot Odies Bosket, thirty-six, and Patricia McDermott, forty-eight, a hospital co-worker, killing her outside the building where they both worked.
He was arrested on July 12, 2005 and confessed. His account was that each victim had in some way threatened him, that they knew something, or intended him harm, and the psychiatric evidence described a persecutory delusional system. He was found competent and criminally responsible.
He pleaded guilty and received three life terms in March 2006.
The case is unusual in this archive for the interval and the relationships: seven years between the first killing and the next, and victims drawn from his own family and workplace rather than from strangers. What connected them was what he believed about them.