Easter Sunday fell on April 3 in 1994. That night a young man walked into the Blockbuster Video store in Casa Linda Plaza, the shopping center at Buckner Boulevard and Garland Road in the White Rock area of East Dallas, and looked around. Prosecutors later said he was casing the place. He came back after midnight, as two employees were closing the store, and robbed the front cash register of $392. He then walked the two men in single file to the back office and told them to open the safe. When they could not, he shot them both. James Armstrong, the assistant manager, was 26. Brad Lindsey, who had worked at the store for a few weeks, was 20.
Much of the robbery was recorded by the store's security cameras, and within days the police had a name. A young woman told detectives that her boyfriend had admitted the shootings to her. But the detectives looked at the grainy tape, decided the boyfriend was too tall to be the gunman, and let him go. Five months later the same man shot a 51-year-old Korean woman, Hyon Suk Chon, at the convenience store she managed in Ennis, south of Dallas. Four years after that, a Dallas police cold-case squad sent the Blockbuster tape to the FBI, and the height estimate that had cleared him no longer did. His name was Leon David Dorsey IV.
Texas prison records give Dorsey's date of birth as November 17, 1975, and list Dallas County as his native county. His mother was in the U.S. Air Force, and part of his childhood was spent abroad. According to the Associated Press, when he was 12 he was sent to Waxahachie, in Ellis County south of Dallas, to live with his grandparents after he was, in the AP's words, "booted from Germany," where his mother was stationed.
The record of his youth assembled by prosecutors, and summarized in the execution notice published before his death, is a record of guns. At 14 he took a gun to school and fired it in a classroom. At 15, living on an Air Force base, he committed several property crimes, including a residential robbery, a theft from a vehicle and thefts from lockers at the base gymnasium. When police searched his home and found the stolen items, they also found 20 to 25 bullet holes in the basement wall and many spent shells. At 16 he fired a gun at a young couple in another car and threatened to kill them.
Toby Shook, the Dallas County prosecutor who later tried him, described a teenager who carried a sawed-off shotgun tied to his arm under a coat. "He'd walk down the street with a sawed-off shotgun tied to his arm and with a coat on and then just throw it open, just to see the reaction of people," Shook told the AP in 2008. On the street he called himself "Pistol Pete."
Prison records list his highest grade completed as 12 and his prior occupations as delivery driver and laborer. They also state that he had no prior criminal record at the time of the Blockbuster killings, which suggests that the incidents from his teenage years were handled as juvenile matters or never prosecuted. The records do not say which.
James Lloyd Armstrong had worked for Blockbuster for about two years and was an assistant manager at the Casa Linda store. He loved to sing, the Dallas Morning News reported. His mother, Nanci, called him "a gentle man." His parents, Gerald and Nanci Armstrong, would sit through the trial of the man who killed him and, fourteen years later, watch that man's execution.
Brad Lindsey had attended Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas until shortly before his death and had been working at the store for only a few weeks. He was not supposed to be there that night. A former employee, William V. Hall, told Dallas Morning News columnist James Ragland in 2008 that he had plans that Easter and swapped shifts with one of his two co-workers. Hall said Lindsey died in his place.
The two men were closing up when they were robbed. The store sat in a busy neighborhood shopping center, and the case became one of the highest-profile Dallas crimes of the decade, in part because part of it had been caught on tape. Shook, who would later prosecute the case, lived near the store and rented movies there.
The facts found by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, and repeated by the federal courts, are brief. Around midnight on April 4, 1994, two employees at a Blockbuster Video store in Dallas were robbed and murdered. The in-store camera recorded the crime and showed a Black man of medium build with short hair, wearing a multicolored jacket of unusual design. Lindsey was shot once in the back. Armstrong was shot twice.
Dorsey's own later accounts, and the evidence presented at trial, filled in the sequence. He took $392 from a front register. He was not satisfied with that, and walked the men to the back office to open the safe. According to the AP, he shot them when Armstrong had difficulty opening the safe at gunpoint and Lindsey tried to run. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice summary of the offense says he used a 9 mm pistol and took $392 from the business.
He did not need the money, by his own account. In 1998 he told the Dallas Morning News that he had $4,500 in his pocket that night from robbing a drug dealer earlier in the day, and that he robbed the store as a challenge, to satisfy his greed. "If the opportunity presents itself, that's called maximization," he said. "If I don't get it, somebody else is going to get you later on. Better me than someone else." He also told the reporter that he burned the jacket he had worn and he refused to say where the gun was.
Later that same day, Dorsey admitted the robbery and the shootings to two people: his girlfriend, Arrietta Washington, and an acquaintance, Antwan Hamilton. Washington then braided extensions into his hair, which prosecutors later described as a disguise. Later that week she went to the police and told them what he had said.
Detectives interviewed Dorsey. He denied any involvement. He was 18 years old and, compared with the man on the security tape, he seemed too tall. "At the time, police erroneously believed that [Dorsey] was too tall to be the perpetrator," the Court of Criminal Appeals later wrote, "and he was not charged with the crime, which remained unsolved until the case was reopened in 1998." Police had also suspected another man, Rodrick Finley, of committing the crime. He was never charged, and he would reappear in the case years later in an unexpected way.
Five months after the Blockbuster killings, in about September 1994, Dorsey shot and killed Hyon Suk Chon at the convenience store she managed in Ennis, in Ellis County south of Dallas. She was 51 and Korean. The Dallas Morning News reported that she was shot twice in the head. The Texas prison system's summary says the robbery involved Dorsey and one co-defendant, who entered the food store, shot her and fled with an unknown amount of money. The co-defendant's name has not been reported, and neither has anything about what became of that person.
Little has been published about Hyon Suk Chon herself beyond her age, her nationality and her work. The reports do not give the exact date of her death, the name of the store or the names of her family. The AP's reports describe her as the manager of the store; a Dallas Observer item called her the owner. One AP version spelled her first name "Kyon."
Dorsey pleaded guilty in Ellis County to murder with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to 60 years in prison. The same Ellis County record includes a conviction for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. According to the execution notice, he was arrested on that vehicle charge five months after the Blockbuster killings and at first received a probated sentence. The order in which the Ellis County cases were resolved is not clear from the published record.
Jason January, who later prosecuted the Blockbuster case with Shook, put the cost of the 1994 mistake plainly: "You hate to see that, knowing that potentially if the technology had been as good when the crime was committed, someone else would not have been killed."
By August 1998, Dorsey was in state prison serving his 60-year sentence. That year a Dallas police cold-case squad reopened the Blockbuster file. Detectives sent the store videotape to the FBI and asked for an estimate of the gunman's height. The FBI analyst put the shooter at between 5 feet 7 inches and 6 feet. The courts recorded Dorsey's height as 5 feet 10 inches. (The prison system later listed him at 5 feet 11.) With the new estimate and accurate information about his height, the reason police had cleared him in 1994 disappeared.
There was no DNA in this link, and no physical evidence of any kind. The Dallas Morning News reported in 2008 that investigators had no physical evidence connecting Dorsey to the crime. What they had was the tape, the girlfriend's account from four years earlier, and the man himself.
Dallas homicide Detective Ken Penrod went to question him. Dorsey confessed. He told Penrod he was the man in the fuzzy black-and-white surveillance images, the one who was not satisfied with $392, who walked the two men to the back office and shot them when they could not open the safe. According to the Dallas Morning News, his detailed confession included information that had never been made public. Penrod remembered the interview a decade later. "I remember him like it was just yesterday," he said. "Because I had the feeling ... I was sitting there talking to the devil himself."
"He got away with it a long time because technology hadn't caught up to him," January said.
Days after his confession to police, Dorsey agreed to talk to Jason Sickles, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. The interview lasted about two hours and was recorded; the transcript ran to 88 pages. In it Dorsey admitted the Blockbuster killings again and described many other offenses.
He spoke about the victims' families without regret. He compared what he had taken from them to losing money in a game of craps. "They're dead. That's over and done with," he said. "Why are you going to sit there and worry yourself about that? Move on." He said he could have pretended to be sorry. "I could have came in here and been, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I'm so bad.' But I don't feel like that. That's not being honest with myself."
"I've done cut folks; I've done stabbed folks; I've killed folks," he told the paper. "But it don't bother me." According to the execution notice summarizing the state's case, he also told the reporter he had "possibly" killed as many as nine people, "more or less." That claim is his alone. No report identifies any killing beyond the three described here, and he was never charged with any other.
Shook later said what set Dorsey apart was candor. "He is a fairly full-blown psychopath, but he's an honest psychopath," he told the Dallas Morning News.
Dorsey was charged in Dallas County with the capital murder of James Lloyd Armstrong in the course of a robbery. While he waited for trial he kept talking, and kept acting. A week before trial he admitted the killings to a fellow inmate, Raymond Carriere. He also wrote to another inmate, Rodrick Finley, the man police had once suspected of the Blockbuster robbery, and offered him $5,000 to take the blame for the murders. According to the execution notice, while he was in prison Dorsey also tried to stab another inmate.
The case was tried in Criminal District Court No. 5 of Dallas County in 2000. Shook and January prosecuted. Doug Parks represented Dorsey. The appeals court docket lists the trial court judge as Manny Alvarez.
The defense was the same question that had cleared Dorsey in 1994: height. "Leon is a fairly tall fellow," Parks told the AP years later. "The question is whether he was too tall to be the person in that video. That basically was the defense. The physical evidence showed it was not him regardless of what he said."
The state's answer was a stack of confessions and the testimony of the people who knew him. Washington and Hamilton both told the jury that the distinctive multicolored jacket worn by the man on the tape looked just like one Dorsey often wore before the robbery, and that they never saw him wear it afterward. Washington testified that he wore his hair like the gunman's at the time and that she changed it afterward by adding the braids. The FBI analyst testified to the height range. The jury heard evidence of Dorsey's confession to police and a redacted recording of the Sickles interview, admitted as Exhibit 110, with his admissions of other crimes removed. The full 88-page transcript, Exhibit 123, was admitted for the record only and was not supposed to reach the jury.
It did. During deliberations on guilt, the jurors asked for "all the evidence," and the full transcript was sent in with the other exhibits by mistake. One juror, Karen Quinton, began skimming it and stopped at page 11 when she saw references to other offenses. She told the foreman, Mark Pennington, who sent the judge a note with the exhibit: "Should we have this? It appears to have evidence not brought out on the witness stand." The judge questioned each juror individually. Two others knew the full transcript existed but had not read it; the rest knew nothing about it. All four who knew agreed to set it aside and said they could stay impartial. The judge let deliberations continue and denied the defense motion for a mistrial.
The jury convicted Dorsey of capital murder. At the punishment phase, prosecutors used the newspaper interview to help persuade the jury that he would be a continuing threat to society, one of the findings Texas law requires before a death sentence. Based on the jury's answers to the special issues, the court sentenced him to death in May 2000.
Nanci Armstrong spoke to him in court after the sentence. "Our son was a gentle man," she said. "I believe you're an evil, vile creature. You didn't kill for survival. You killed for pleasure." She told him she would be watching for whatever gestures he made "when you get the needle you fear."
Dorsey arrived on death row on June 12, 2000, at age 24.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence on October 2, 2002, in an unpublished opinion by Judge Johnson, with Presiding Judge Keller concurring in the result. The court noted that Dorsey had confessed to five different people: his girlfriend, an acquaintance, the police, a news reporter and a fellow inmate. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review that decision in 2003.
Dorsey's state habeas application, filed in May 2002, was denied by the Court of Criminal Appeals on February 18, 2004, which adopted the trial court's findings. He filed a federal habeas petition in the Northern District of Texas on December 17, 2004. The district court denied it on July 31, 2006, and in September 2006 granted him permission to appeal on two issues.
The first was the transcript that reached the jury. The second was a claim under Batson v. Kentucky that prosecutors had improperly used a peremptory strike to remove an African American man, Jerry Riley, from the jury. Dorsey also asked to appeal a third issue: that the trial judge had wrongly refused to remove four prospective jurors, named in the opinion as Merrifield, O'Keefe, Brunson and Staten, who he said leaned toward death or would not consider youth as mitigating.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected all three on July 30, 2007, in an opinion by Judge W. Eugene Davis, revised on August 23, 2007. On the transcript, the court agreed with the district court that any error was harmless: one juror saw some of the material, one more knew only that it concerned prior bad acts, the rest knew nothing, all were questioned, and "the evidence against Dorsey was overwhelming." On the Batson claim, the court held that Dorsey had forfeited it by not raising it on direct appeal. On the four prospective jurors, it noted that Dorsey had used his own peremptory challenges to remove all four, so none sat on his jury, and he did not claim the jury that heard the case was biased. According to the AP, the U.S. Supreme Court let the conviction and sentence stand earlier in 2008. No late appeals were filed before his execution.
Dorsey's time on death row matched the reputation he had built outside. Prison records showed at least 95 disciplinary cases in a little more than eight years. The Dallas Morning News published a sample drawn from Texas Department of Criminal Justice and Dallas County district attorney's records:
June 13, 2000, one day after his arrival: found in possession of tobacco.
October 17, 2002: while being returned to his cell from the shower, assaulted an officer with a broken toothbrush, cutting the officer's hand.
November 14, 2003: admitted starting a fire outside his cell.
June 12, 2004: stabbed an officer 14 times in the back with a shank about eight inches long, made from a typewriter rod filed to a point and wrapped in a sock. The officer's protective vest prevented serious injury.
July 2008: found with a weapon made from a metal object, and vowed to assault staff before his execution.
He was held at the most restrictive level on death row, which prison spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said was "reserved for the inmates who are most combative or assaultive," with fewer visits, less recreation and tighter limits on what he could keep in his cell. In the months before his execution, the Dallas Morning News later reported, officers found 25 bottles of homemade alcohol in one search of his cell. On June 25, 2008, he told a sergeant he would cut the next officer who gave him a razor. Asked for a statement, he said, according to prison records, "That's what's up, and it's on."
He also wrote. The Dallas Observer reported shortly before his execution that he had written an essay about death row, which opened: "Enter the mind of a man, murderer, living just to die!"
In the summer of 2008 Dorsey agreed to meet again with the reporter who had recorded his 1998 confession. Prison officials canceled the interview, citing a specific threat. "He's not being brought out of his cell unless necessary," Lyons said. "He's vowed that he's going to assault staff prior to his execution." Less than two weeks before the execution date, officers found another shank in his cell.
The execution was set for Tuesday, August 12, 2008, at the Huntsville Unit. Security was increased for his transfer. He arrived about five hours before the scheduled time and was kept in restraints in a holding cell a few steps from the death chamber. Relatives of both men he had killed declined interview requests before the execution.
He did not resist. "He was executed without incident," Lyons said afterward. "He was escorted to the execution chamber and did not have to be forcibly taken." Strapped to the gurney, he acknowledged his sister as the witnesses came in. He did not speak to the victims' relatives. The AP quoted his final words as "I love all y'all. I forgive all y'all. See y'all when you get there," followed by "Do what you're going to do." The prison system's official record reads: "Yeah, I love all ya'll. I forgive all ya'll. See you when you get there. Do what your are going to do."
He was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m., nine minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow. He was 32. He was the seventh person executed in Texas in 2008 and the 412th since the state resumed executions in 1982, and the 19th in the United States that year.
James Armstrong's parents, Gerald and Nanci Armstrong, were among the witnesses. "Losing James has been, and will always be, painful," they said in a statement. "It doesn't get any easier, but we've gotten stronger. God, therapy, medication, support groups, family and friends have helped."
The prosecutors who had tried Dorsey spoke about him in unusual terms. "I did 21 death penalty cases either as the lead or on a team," Shook told the AP before the execution. "Upon reflection, Leon Dorsey is probably No. 1 as the meanest criminal I prosecuted." To the Dallas Morning News he said, "I would honestly say Leon might be the meanest man I prosecuted for the death penalty." And to the AP after the execution: "He's very smart, very organized. ... He just was always headed in this direction. Every day he was looking to hurt someone. It was the only satisfaction he got in life."
The week after the execution, Ragland's column in the Dallas Morning News returned to the people the case had touched, including William Hall, who had traded shifts that Easter weekend. The Lake Highlands Advocate pointed readers to it and to Hall's letter, in which he wrote that he had been supposed to be on duty the night Dorsey came in.
The case also carried a lesson that January named directly: a technical misjudgment about height in April 1994 left a man free who killed again five months later. The fix in 1998 was not new science in the sense the phrase usually carries today. It was an FBI analysis of an existing videotape, followed by a confession from a man who had been telling people what he did since the morning after.
Nine victims. Dorsey's statement to the Dallas Morning News that he had "possibly" killed as many as nine people, "more or less," is a boast in an interview. Nothing in the record ties him to any killing beyond Armstrong, Lindsey and Chon.
Lindsey's killing. Dorsey confessed to both Blockbuster killings and the jury heard evidence of both, but the capital murder conviction named James Armstrong. No separate conviction for Brad Lindsey's death has been reported. The AP called Dorsey "twice-convicted"; a photo caption in the NBC News version of the same report said he "was convicted of three murders."
A DNA link. DNA appears nowhere in the reporting. The 1998 break came from an FBI height analysis of the store videotape, a confession to police and the earlier accounts of his girlfriend and an acquaintance. The Dallas Morning News reported that investigators had no physical evidence linking him to the crime.
Acting alone. The Blockbuster robbery had no co-defendant, according to the prison system. Its summary of the Ennis case, however, says Dorsey and one co-defendant entered the store. The second person has not been named.
Too tall. The 1994 belief that Dorsey was too tall to be the gunman rested on a mistaken height estimate and inaccurate information about his height, according to the Court of Criminal Appeals. Defense counsel argued at trial that he was too tall to be the man in the video and that the physical evidence showed it was not him.
Teenage history. The accounts of a shooting at school, bullet holes at an Air Force base home and a shot fired at a couple come from the state's summary and the AP, not from any juvenile court record found.
Leon David Dorsey IV was executed on August 12, 2008, the date recorded by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Nothing remains pending in his case.
November 17, 1975: Leon David Dorsey IV born (TDCJ).
About 1988: at 12, sent to live with grandparents in Waxahachie (AP).
About 1990 to 1992: gun fired at school at 14; property crimes on an Air Force base at 15; shot fired at a couple at 16 (state's summary).
April 3, 1994 (Easter Sunday): Dorsey looks around the Casa Linda Plaza Blockbuster store.
April 4, 1994, around midnight: James Armstrong, 26, and Brad Lindsey, 20, shot during a $392 robbery.
April 4, 1994: Dorsey admits the killings to Arrietta Washington and Antwan Hamilton.
April 1994: Washington reports his admissions; police question Dorsey and release him, believing him too tall.
About September 1994: Hyon Suk Chon, 51, shot and killed at the Ennis store she managed; Dorsey later pleads guilty to murder and receives 60 years.
1998: Dallas police cold-case squad reopens the Blockbuster case; FBI estimates the gunman's height.
August 1998: Dorsey confesses to Detective Ken Penrod, then to Dallas Morning News reporter Jason Sickles.
2000: trial in Criminal District Court No. 5, Dallas County; conviction for capital murder.
May 2000: sentenced to death.
June 12, 2000: received on death row.
October 2, 2002: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
2003: U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
February 18, 2004: state habeas relief denied.
June 12, 2004: stabs a death row officer 14 times; the officer's vest prevents serious injury.
July 31, 2006: federal district court denies habeas relief.
July 30, 2007: Fifth Circuit affirms (revised August 23, 2007).
2008: U.S. Supreme Court leaves the conviction and sentence in place, according to the AP.
August 12, 2008: executed at the Huntsville Unit; pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m.