On the afternoon of April 23, 1986, Virginia Kearns telephoned the Lexington police. Two women were in her apartment, they were drunk, and they would not leave. Officers came. Nothing came of it. Within hours Virginia Kearns was dead, and so were her husband and three other people.
The two women were LaFonda Fay Foster, twenty-two, and Tina Hickey Powell, twenty-seven. Both had prison records. The five people who died had spent that day drinking and taking drugs with them.
Carlos Kearns was seventy-three and Virginia Kearns was forty-five. Trudy Harrell was fifty-nine. Jimmy Roger Keene was forty-seven. Theodore Sweet was fifty-two. They were shot with a .22 revolver, stabbed, run over with a car and set alight, in several places around the city over the course of one night.
Two details from the Kentucky Supreme Court's account of the evidence say most of what can be said about how it happened.
The first is a nail. The cylinder rod of the revolver had been lost in a field at Mount Tabor. The two women drove to the trailer where Foster's father lived and he gave them a nail and showed them how to use it in place of the rod. The state firearms examiner told the court this would have made the pistol harder to fire, not easier.
The second is what Powell said she did while Foster was inside that trailer. Three of the men were still alive in the car. They begged her to help them. She said she could not, because Foster had taken the keys, and that she thought the best help she could give them was to stay.
From the trailer they drove on to the home of Lester Luttrell, where an argument broke out between Luttrell and the two women; the night went on from there.
The two women were arrested the next day at a hospital, where they had gone to wash.
They were tried together in Fayette County. The trial ran four weeks and in February 1987 the jury convicted both of them on all five counts of intentional murder. At the penalty stage the same jury recommended life imprisonment for Powell on one count and life without probation or parole for twenty-five years on the other four, and recommended death for Foster on every one of her five convictions. The trial court entered both recommendations as judgments. Foster had pleaded not guilty; one account says Powell's low intelligence was weighed in her favor.
In 1991 the Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed the findings of guilt against both women, affirmed Powell's sentence, and reversed all five of Foster's death sentences, remanding her convictions for a new penalty hearing. Chief Justice Robert Stephens and four other justices joined the majority. Justice Donald Wintersheimer dissented from that part of the decision, holding that the sentence had been properly entered after a fundamentally fair joint trial.
Rather than face a second capital jury, Foster pleaded guilty at the new hearing and was resentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Her Kentucky corrections record lists the term in the state's formal notation for that sentence, ninety-nine years, ninety-nine months and ninety-nine days.
Powell became eligible to be considered for parole and appeared before the full Kentucky Parole Board in 2011. The board deferred her case for ten years, citing the seriousness and violence of the crime, that a life had been taken, and the part drink and drugs had played. That put her next hearing in 2021, and no decision from it has been reported.
No settled motive emerged at trial. Drink, drugs and a dispute over money were all in evidence, and one account of the case has the group being held in the hope of cashing a social security check. The sentencing findings described killings that were prolonged and without purpose.
This was one episode, not a series. It lasted a night, and the people who died were the people the two women had spent the day with.
Foster was held at the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women at Pewee Valley, near Louisville; one account says she was moved for a time, while under sentence of death, to a higher-security women's prison in Oklahoma. No release or death has been reported.