Judy D Kirby

Victims

7 MURDER CONVICTIONS, returned by a jury, together with four counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury and one of aggravated battery. Three of the seven killed were her own children and a fourth was her nephew

Years active

March 25, 2000

Location

Martinsville, Morgan County, Indiana, USA

Method

Intentionally head-on crash

Status

Drove the wrong way for nearly two miles along State Road 67 near Martinsville on March 25, 2000 and collided head-on with a minivan. Four children in her car, three of them her own, and a man and his two teenage children in the other vehicle were killed. The only survivors were Kirby herself and a teenage friend of the children in the minivan. Authorities said she had been bent on suicide. A Morgan County jury convicted her in 2001 of SEVEN COUNTS OF MURDER, four counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury as Class B felonies, and one count of aggravated battery as a Class B felony, and Judge Jane Craney sentenced her on June 13, 2001 to two hundred and fifteen years. The Court of Appeals of Indiana affirmed the convictions and sentence in 2002 and the Indiana Supreme Court denied transfer. She later sought a new trial on the ground that her trial lawyers had failed to object to evidence of past conduct admitted while prosecutors were trying to establish a motive. Judge Craney, who had presided over the trial, refused that petition on February 18, 2015, calling the claim of poor representation ludicrous, and the Court of Appeals affirmed the denial in December 2015, rejecting claims of ineffective assistance by both trial and appellate counsel.

Kirby was born in 1968 and lived in Morgan County, Indiana. On March 25, 2000 she drove her car onto State Road 67 near Martinsville travelling the wrong way in the passing lane for about a mile and struck an oncoming car head-on.

Seven people died. In her own car: her children Jacob, five, Joney, nine, and Jordan, twelve, and her nephew Jeremy Young, ten. In the other: Thomas Reel, forty, his son Bradley, thirteen, and a third passenger. Kirby survived, as did one child in her car.

The prosecution's case was that the crash was deliberate. She had driven past the wrong-way signs, had made no attempt to brake or swerve, and there was evidence of her state of mind in the days before, including a custody dispute and a relationship with a man who was the brother of one of the people killed in the other car. Her defence was that it was an accident and that she had been confused; she has always denied intent.

She was convicted of murder in 2001 and sentenced to 215 years on June 13, 2001. The conviction was upheld on appeal.

The case is in this archive as a single-incident killing, not a serial one. It is also, on the accessible record, a case in which the finding of intent rests on circumstance and inference rather than on any admission, and that should be read alongside the count of seven.