An acquittal is the one verdict a court cannot take back. A jury in Florida decided in January 1984 that the state had not proved Samuel Little guilty of murder, and under the rule against double jeopardy no one could try him for that death again. Thirty-four years later, he told a detective that he had killed the woman. The sheriff’s office closed the case anyway. The verdict stood.
This is the pattern in these eight files. A man is tried, or charged, and the case ends in an acquittal, a dropped count, a grand jury that declines to act. Years later a different case produces a conviction, and sometimes a confession that reaches back to the first one. The law’s answer in each instance is that the first verdict is final. Where a man later admitted something, it was an admission; where a court cleared him, the clearing stands.
Little, born in Reynolds, Georgia, in 1940 and raised in Lorain, Ohio, was arrested again and again over decades in some two dozen states. His first murder charge came in Mississippi. Arrested in Pascagoula in November 1982 for shoplifting, he was linked by police to the death of Melinda LaPree and charged with murder and two aggravated assaults. A grand jury declined to indict. Pascagoula police investigator Darren Versiga said in 2018 that there had not been enough evidence to prosecute at the time.
Mississippi then sent him to Florida to face a murder charge in the death of Patricia Ann Mount, a 26-year-old Gainesville woman. A jury acquitted him in January 1984. The jury’s reasoning has never been reported.
For the next three decades he was convicted of no killing. Then, after his arrest in Louisville, Kentucky, on September 5, 2012, on a 2009 narcotics warrant, DNA tied him to three women whose deaths in Los Angeles dated from 1987 to 1989. A jury in Los Angeles County convicted him on September 2, 2014, of three counts of first-degree murder with a multiple-murder special circumstance, and on September 25, 2014, he received three consecutive terms of life without parole.
The rest came from Little himself. In 2018, while in prison, he began speaking to a Texas Ranger, James Holland, about a woman killed in Odessa, Texas, and over some 700 hours of interviews he described 93 killings between 1970 and 2005. The FBI said in October 2019 that it believed all of the confessions were credible. Investigators had verified about 60 by the end of 2021. He pleaded guilty to the Odessa murder in December 2018, and in August 2019 to four more in Ohio, two in Cuyahoga County and two in Hamilton County.
On December 20, 2018, Detective Kevin Allen of the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office, Florida, interviewed him at the Wise County jail in Decatur, Texas. Allen carried a letter from the state attorney saying Florida would not seek the death penalty for killings Little confessed to. Little admitted to killing Patricia Mount. Detectives located no relative of hers, and the sheriff’s office closed the case on the strength of his account. It could not bring a charge. The acquittal is final.
Little died in custody on December 30, 2020, aged 80. He was never prosecuted for LaPree’s death in Mississippi; the case there was reopened after he admitted it in November 2018, and no new charge has been reported.
Milat’s acquittal came first and it was small beside what followed. In 1971 two young women who were hitchhiking accused him of abducting them and, in one case, of rape. The charge was tried and in 1974 he was acquitted, the ABC and Australian Associated Press reported; his lawyer was John Marsden. The women have never been named. The acquittal means the allegation was not proved in court. It is not a finding that he committed the offense.
Milat went on working. He worked on road crews, married briefly in the 1980s and was divorced amid claims of domestic violence, the ABC reported. His former wife told AAP he was "gun crazy."
The deaths that made his name came to light in southern New South Wales between September 1992 and November 1993: seven young travelers, aged 19 to 22, two from Victoria, three from Germany and two from Britain, who had set out from Sydney between December 1989 and April 1992. A police task force under Superintendent Clive Small was formed in October 1993. The turn came from a survivor. Paul Onions, a 24-year-old British backpacker, had reported a gunman’s car in January 1990 and had given police a description that day. The ABC reported that police did not follow it up at the time. Four years later he picked Milat from 13 photographs.
On May 22, 1994, police arrested Milat in Eagle Vale, in Sydney’s southwest, after about two months of surveillance. He was charged first with the armed robbery of Onions and, at the end of the month, with seven murders. The prosecutor, Mark Tedeschi QC, told the jury in 1996 that up to 40 features of Milat matched what Onions had described. Police said they seized property belonging to the dead travelers during searches. AAP reported that both sides told the jury the killer was a member of the Milat family, and the Crown later pointed out that his counsel had conceded as much. Whether the 1974 acquittal was put to the jury has not been reported.
On July 27, 1996, Justice David Hunt sentenced him to life imprisonment on each murder count. He told the court the seven "were at the threshold of their lives, with everything to look forward to." His appeal was dismissed on February 26, 1998, and a High Court application failed in 2004. Milat denied everything until his death from cancer in the hospital at Long Bay on October 27, 2019. Families are still asking about other cases. A 2026 New South Wales parliamentary inquiry is hearing from relatives who believe he was responsible for deaths he was never charged with, and no charge has been laid.
Coleman, of Waukegan, Illinois, had a criminal record from 1973. UPI reported in 1984 that in 1973 he was charged with the rape and kidnapping of a Waukegan woman, was convicted of a lesser robbery charge and served two years at Stateville prison. Over the following years, UPI added, he was acquitted twice on rape charges. The complainants in those cases have never been named, and the reasons for the verdicts have not been reported.
In 1984 he and a companion, Debra Denise Brown, moved through Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky over about seven weeks, from late May to July. Prosecutors later charged him with eight deaths in that period, four of them children. On July 11, 1984, the FBI added him to its Ten Most Wanted list as fugitive number 388. He was arrested in Evanston, Illinois, on July 20.
He was tried in three states and convicted of four murders: Marlene Walters, 44, and Tonnie Storey, 15, in Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1985; Tamika Turks, 7, in Lake County, Indiana, in 1986; and Vernita Wheat, 9, in Lake County, Illinois, in 1987. Walters’s case was aggravated murder with aggravated robbery and other counts. In each of the three states he was sentenced to death. UPI reported by February 1987 that he was the first man in the United States to receive four death sentences in three states. He had also pleaded guilty to federal kidnapping in Dayton in 1984 and received 20 years in January 1985.
Ohio charged him over the deaths of Virginia Temple and her daughter Rachelle in Toledo, but prosecutors did not try him on those counts, UPI reported in 1987, because he already faced death sentences elsewhere. Those two deaths, and two others investigators attributed to him, were never tried.
The Sixth Circuit upheld the Walters conviction and sentence in March 2001. In October 2001 it upheld the Storey conviction but ordered the Storey death sentence vacated unless Ohio held a new penalty hearing. Coleman was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility at Lucasville at 10:13 a.m. on April 26, 2002, for the murder of Marlene Walters. He was 46, and at that point the only man under sentence of death in three states at once.
Kelly was a laborer from Rathdowney, County Laois, who had come to London in 1953 and ended up sleeping rough in the parks of the south of the city. In 1984 he was convicted at the Old Bailey of the murder of Hector Fisher and the manslaughter of William Boyd, two men who lived as he did. Boyd had died in 1983 in a Clapham police cell that Kelly was sharing, after Kelly’s arrest on Clapham Common. He received life imprisonment and died at HM Prison Frankland in Durham in 2001.
His earlier record is reported in two versions. The journalist Robert Mulhern, who wrote a book and made radio and television documentaries about the case, said his research showed Kelly had been acquitted of another London murder in 1977 and that two charges of attempted murder against him were dropped in 1982. The retired detective Geoff Platt, whose 2015 book claimed Kelly could be responsible for as many as 31 deaths, said in The Irish Post’s summary that records released under the 30-year rule in 2013 showed Kelly had been charged with eight murders before Platt became involved and acquitted of all of them, one of them after a trial at the Old Bailey over a death on the Underground early in 1983, acquitted for lack of motive. The Irish Post noted that Mulhern’s published findings do not match every part of that account, and the difference has not been settled. What both versions share is that Kelly faced murder charges before 1984 and was not convicted.
What followed Boyd’s death is a confession. Kelly told detectives in recorded interviews that he had killed men over about 30 years, starting in 1953. Counts differ widely: upwards of 10 (The Irish Post, 2019), 16 (Platt, 2015), 18 (Scripps News summarizing the book) and 31 at the top. Ian Brown, the retired Metropolitan Police detective superintendent who worked on the case in the 1980s, estimated five or six. Kelly’s former solicitor, John Slater, told a 2023 RTÉ series that he had "grave doubts about whether he did it" and thought Kelly "a bit of a fantasist." Mulhern concluded that the higher figures do not stand up. None of the deaths beyond the two for which he was convicted was proved in court, and the earlier acquittal means the law holds him innocent of that charge whatever he said afterward.
In Kerala, K. P. Jayanandan, a man from Poyya in Thrissur district, collected both outcomes. Police accused him of a series of deaths during night-time burglaries in the border areas of Thrissur and Ernakulam districts between 2003 and 2008. The courts did not agree with the police on every case. Open magazine wrote in October 2013, and Kerala Kaumudi repeated in 2024, that he was convicted in two murder cases and acquitted in three.
The press counts differ from each other: six murders and 27 burglary cases (Open, 2013), seven murder cases and 14 theft cases (Kerala Kaumudi, 2021), eight deaths in six cases between 2003 and 2008 (Press Trust of India, 2021). Those are police and press tallies. They mix cases that ended in acquittal, cases that ended in conviction and cases never tried, and which of the double murders police listed produced which result has not been reported, nor why the three acquittals came. They stand.
A March 17, 2023, order of the High Court of Kerala records that he is serving three sentences of life imprisonment under Sessions Case Nos. 490 of 2007, 27 of 2008 and 172 of 2011, and that in No. 27 of 2008 a death sentence had been "modified in appeal to imprisonment for life without remission for 20 years." The Press Trust of India said the High Court commuted the death sentence in 2016; Kerala Kaumudi in 2024 attributed it to the Supreme Court. Three life sentences against two reported murder convictions is a gap that has not been explained. The order lists the cases without saying what offense each covered.
He has also been convicted twice of escaping from prison, in 2010 and 2013. In December 2021 police in Kochi recorded his arrest in a further case, the double murder of V Nanikutty Ammal, 73 or 74, and T V Narayana Iyer, 60, at Ponekkara in May 2004. Police said he confessed after a fellow prisoner reported what he had been told. No verdict has been reported. In that case he is an accused, and nothing has been tested at trial.
Franklin, born James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in Mobile, Alabama, in 1950, belonged for years to white supremacist groups before he began a run of shootings between 1977 and 1980 aimed at Black men and boys, interracial couples and Jewish worshippers. A federal court and a Utah court convicted him in 1981 of the August 1980 killings of Ted Fields and David Martin in Salt Lake City, and he received two consecutive federal life terms and two Utah life terms.
In between came the case he later admitted. The civil rights leader Vernon Jordan was shot in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on May 29, 1980. Franklin was tried in federal court in 1982 on a civil rights charge. The Christian Science Monitor reported on August 19, 1982, that he was acquitted. In 1996 the Associated Press carried a headline that stood the verdict on its head: "I shot Vernon Jordan, Franklin says." The jury’s reasoning has not been reported.
After the acquittal, other prosecutors took their turn. Franklin confessed in February 1984, on tape, to the 1977 Madison, Wisconsin, murders of Alphonce Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn. Dane County prosecutors charged him a month later, and a jury convicted him in February 1986. He received two more consecutive life terms. In 1984 he was convicted in federal court of bombing a synagogue in Chattanooga in 1977, with no one hurt, and sentenced to 31 years. A St. Louis County jury convicted him in 1997 of capital murder in the October 1977 shooting of Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in Richmond Heights, Missouri, after Franklin, by then serving life in federal prison, described it to an FBI agent in 1994. He asked the jury for the death sentence and received it. In 1998 he pleaded guilty in Tennessee to a 1978 murder and was convicted in Ohio of two aggravated murders in Cincinnati from 1980.
Charges that never reached a verdict are a separate group. He was indicted in the 1978 shooting of Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler, and Flynt’s lawyer Gene Reeves, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and the Georgia charges were dismissed. He confessed to other killings that were never tried. AP reported that he claimed as many as 20.
Missouri executed him by lethal injection at the state prison in Bonne Terre on November 20, 2013; he was pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m. He was 63. Of the Jordan case, the only formal result was the acquittal.
Kirkland, born in 1968 and living in Cincinnati, was 18 in May 1987 when Leola Douglas, 27, was killed. Charged with murder, he pleaded guilty under a plea agreement to reduced charges, which police and FOX19 identified as voluntary manslaughter and aggravated arson. The Associated Press reported the sentence as 7 to 25 years. He served 16 years.
The Ohio Parole Board turned him down on February 4, 1999, citing the violent crime and his poor adjustment in prison. Then a court ruling in a suit by Ohio prisoners required parole guidelines to be applied according to the offense of conviction, not the offense believed to have been committed. For Kirkland that meant voluntary manslaughter, which, the board’s chair told FOX19 in 2009, called for "a lesser range" of time than murder. He was reheard in 2003 and released. FOX19 reported that of about 2,500 cases the board reheard, about 1,400 prisoners were freed, Kirkland among them.
After his release came a run of arrests that ended in mixed results. WCPO’s I-Team reported in 2017 that about two years after he came out he was arrested on charges that included burglary, and that a jury acquitted him of the most serious charge, which involved a neighbor. The Associated Press reported in 2009 that he had been acquitted of several charges since 2005 and convicted in 2007 of two counts of unlawful restraint. In March 2008 he was convicted of importuning, with other charges, and served about a year.
On March 15, 2007, Cincinnati Detective Keith Witherell had interviewed him about two 2006 deaths, Casonya Crawford, 14, and Mary Jo Newton, 45. Police had no forensic evidence and no admissions, the Supreme Court of Ohio wrote, and could not charge him. He remained free, apart from time in custody on other charges, for almost two more years.
The case turned on March 7, 2009, when police searching for a missing 13-year-old girl, Esme Kenney, in Winton Hills questioned him, and he was arrested on March 8. After a confession lasting hours, videotaped and played to both juries, he was indicted on March 17, 2009. In March 2010 he pleaded guilty to the murder of Newton and of Kimya Rolison, and a Hamilton County jury convicted him on March 12, 2010, of the aggravated murders, with other charges, of Casonya Crawford and Esme Kenney. Judge Charles Kubicki Jr. imposed death for those two on March 31, 2010; the Supreme Court of Ohio upheld the sentence in 2014 and set it aside in 2016. A second jury recommended death again, Judge Patrick Dinkelacker reimposed it on August 28, 2018, and the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed on August 18, 2020. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction listed him at the Ohio State Penitentiary on October 25, 2026. He has been given seventy years to life for the Newton and Rolison murders.
Robert Joe Long, known as Bobby Joe, was born in Kenova, West Virginia, in 1953 and grew up in Miami. In 1982 he was charged in Kenova with misdemeanor assault and destruction of property, acquitted of the assault and ordered to pay 68 dollars for a broken car mirror, the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington reported in 2019. By the time he was arrested in the Tampa Bay area in November 1984 he was on three years' probation for an aggravated assault on a woman.
His convictions were out of county and in sequence. In Pasco County he was convicted on April 17, 1985, of burglary, kidnapping, robbery and sexual battery in a March 1984 case involving a woman who survived. In Pinellas County on July 12, 1985, he pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual battery, kidnapping, five counts of armed robbery and armed burglary, and received a life sentence. Those two judgments became the prior violent felony convictions that prosecutors later used to ask for death.
On September 23, 1985, in Hillsborough County, he pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of eight women, aged 18 to 28, in 1984. He received life sentences on every count except the murder of Michelle Simms, for which a jury recommended death on July 25, 1986, by 11 to 1. That sentence was vacated in 1988, imposed again on July 21, 1989, by a vote of 12 to 0, and affirmed in 1992.
The one acquittal that mattered came in Pasco County. Long was charged with the first-degree murder of Virginia Johnson. He was convicted three times, and each conviction was reversed; in 1997 the Supreme Court of Florida ordered an acquittal. Long was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on May 23, 2019, pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m., aged 65. Investigators and news reports have attributed a ninth killing, in March 1984, to him; he was never charged.
These verdicts do not form a pattern of failure, and the reasons for most of them have never been reported. Little’s came after a Mississippi grand jury declined to act. Milat’s 1971 complainants were two hitchhikers whose accusation produced no conviction. Coleman’s two rape acquittals appear in a single sentence in a 1984 wire report. Jayanandan’s three acquittals were set against two convictions the same courts reached. Franklin’s was followed by his own words, in a newspaper headline, saying he had done it.
What the later convictions rested on was seldom the first case. Little’s rested on DNA in Los Angeles and a stream of confessions that investigators spent years verifying. Milat’s rested on a survivor who had walked away from a car four years earlier and who picked a photograph. Coleman’s rested on a seven-week search across several states and trials in three. Kirkland’s rested on a search for a missing girl. In none of these did a court revisit the earlier verdict, and in none could it. The acquittals remain on the record beside the convictions, each as final as the other.
• 1971: Two hitchhikers accuse Ivan Milat in New South Wales; he is acquitted in 1974.
• 1973: Alton Coleman is charged in Waukegan with rape and kidnapping and convicted of a lesser robbery charge; he is later acquitted twice on rape charges.
• 1977: Kieran Kelly is acquitted of a London murder charge (as reported by Mulhern).
• 1980: Joseph Paul Franklin shoots Vernon Jordan, May 29, 1980.
• 1981: Franklin is convicted in Utah and in federal court of the Salt Lake City killings.
• 1982: Franklin is acquitted in the Jordan case, August 1982; Bobby Joe Long is acquitted of a misdemeanor assault; Samuel Little is arrested in Pascagoula in November 1982 and a Mississippi grand jury declines to indict.
• 1984: Little is acquitted in Florida, January 1984; Coleman is arrested July 20, 1984; Kelly is convicted at the Old Bailey.
• 1985: Long pleads guilty to eight murders, September 23, 1985; Coleman receives death sentences in Ohio.
• 1986: Franklin is convicted in Wisconsin, February 1986.
• 1987: Coleman is sentenced to death in Illinois; Anthony Kirkland pleads guilty to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated arson.
• 1996: Milat is sentenced on July 27, 1996.
• 1997: Franklin is convicted in Missouri; the Supreme Court of Florida orders an acquittal in the Johnson case.
• 2002: Coleman is executed April 26, 2002.
• 2003: Kirkland is released on parole.
• 2009: Kirkland is arrested March 8, 2009.
• 2010: Kirkland convicted March 12, 2010.
• 2012: Little is arrested in Louisville, September 5, 2012.
• 2013: Franklin executed November 20, 2013.
• 2014: Little convicted in Los Angeles, September 2, 2014.
• 2018: Little confesses to Florida detective, December 20, 2018; Kirkland’s death sentence reimposed, August 28, 2018.
• 2019: Long is executed May 23, 2019; Milat dies October 27, 2019.
• 2020: Little dies December 30, 2020; Ohio Supreme Court affirms Kirkland’s sentence August 18, 2020.
• 2023: High Court of Kerala order on Jayanandan, March 17, 2023.