On the night of May 24, 1990, Jayme Denise Hurley let a young man sleep at her house. She was thirty-nine and a counselor at the Juvenile Evaluation Center at Swannanoa, near Asheville. The court record describes him as a former charge of hers who turned up saying he needed help; another account says they had met at Christmas 1989 and had been dating since. Late that night he strangled her.
Her body went into a shallow grave in a rocky and remote part of the Pisgah National Forest, two hundred and ten feet from a paved road, under rocks and an engine part. One account says his brother, Laron, helped him bury her.
Lesley Eugene Warren was born at Candler, North Carolina on October 15, 1967, the elder of two sons of Douglas Eugene Warren and Phyllis West. His brother Laron Ray was born in 1970. As the family's money ran out his father turned violent, and in 1971 he set fire to their trailer, nearly killing his wife and one of the boys. Phyllis divorced him, won full custody and got a restraining order after he went on stalking her.
At Emma Elementary School he fought with classmates and was sent again and again to the school psychologist. By 1981 he was at Erwin High School, fighting with his mother, running with petty criminals, burglarizing, using drugs and threatening other boys. In January 1982 he was arrested for vandalism, expelled, and sent to Broughton Hospital, where he was diagnosed with conduct disorder and schizoid personality disorder. He enrolled at Enka High School that September and was expelled thirty-three days later for missing twenty of them.
In early October 1982 his mother found marijuana in his room and put him out for the night. The next day, while she was away, he seized her next-door neighbor, Betty Pressley, dragged her into the basement and tied her up. A friend who came looking for Pressley found them, and Warren shot him with a revolver and ran. The friend survived and freed her. Warren was arrested on October 4, admitted it, and a month later tried to hang himself in the Buncombe County Detention Center. As a juvenile he was convicted of kidnapping and attempted murder and sent to the Juvenile Evaluation Center, where he stayed until October 1985. One account also places him with an uncle and aunt in South Carolina during these years.
He enlisted in the Army on April 4, 1986, trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, made specialist, and married Tracy Bradshaw; they had two sons. Late in 1986 he was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum in northern New York.
Patsy Diane Vineyard was twenty and the wife of a soldier in his unit, Michael Vineyard. In May 1987, while her husband was away on field exercises, Warren began an affair with her. On May 15, on a night out together using drugs, he raped and strangled her and put her in the Black River near Sackets Harbor. Her body was found floating in Lake Ontario a month later. He was one of about a hundred and fifty soldiers questioned, and he was not a suspect.
The Army lost him quickly after that. On February 25, 1988 he was picked up for going absent without leave, jailed for seventy-five days and reduced to private first class. Ordered to Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana in April, he went to New York City instead, lived in homeless shelters and became addicted to drugs. On June 17, 1988 he was dishonorably discharged as a deserter. He was jailed for vagrancy in Philadelphia, moved his wife and child to Spartanburg, South Carolina that fall, left them, went back to Candler, worked as a store cashier, and trained as a truck driver. On March 10, 1989 he started driving for Am-Can, a trucking company in Anderson, South Carolina.
Velma Faye Gray was forty-two and lived at Travelers Rest, South Carolina. On August 26, 1989 she wrecked her car on a road about five miles from home. Warren came past in his tractor-trailer and stopped, as if to help. He took her to a wooded area, beat and strangled her, and put her body in Lake Bowen, where two fishermen found it. Her car turned up in Greenville County, stolen by someone who had nothing to do with her death.
Hurley's father reported her missing two days after she died and named Warren as the last person to see her. On May 28 or 29 detectives picked him up, questioned him about her and about some unrelated misdemeanors, and found her purse in his car. He asked for a lawyer and denied everything. With no body, they could charge him only with misdemeanor larceny and failing to produce a vehicle title. On June 6 his grandfather paid his thousand-dollar bail. While he was out he told his wife that he had killed Hurley and told his mother that he had killed Vineyard, and his mother went to the police. His larceny trial opened on July 10, 1990. The next day he stole a Kawasaki motorcycle and left.
In High Point he looked up Teri Quinby, a cocktail waitress whose brother he had played amateur softball with. On July 15 he went with Quinby and her family to an employees' picnic for the Radisson Hotel at Cedrow Park. There he met her friend Katherine Noel Johnson, twenty-one, a part-time student at the University of North Carolina. They drank together and left on his motorcycle. In the middle of a soccer field he raped her and choked her to death; one account says with her own bra, and dates the killing to the afternoon of July 16. He put her body in the trunk of her car, left the car in the hotel parking garage and went back to sleep at the house where he was staying.
What produced the arrest was South Carolina. A detective gathering background from his family in Spartanburg learned that authorities there suspected him of a homicide. They put a trap and trace device on his wife's telephone, located him in High Point, and issued a warrant for first-degree murder and kidnapping in the death of Velma Gray. High Point police were notified on July 20, 1990 and arrested him without incident at Quinby's house at 2:44 in the afternoon.
He then confessed to Gray, to Hurley, and to Johnson, whose body had not been found. The court record says he directed officers to Hurley's grave; another account credits his brother, who admitted helping to bury her. Of Hurley he insisted he had not meant to kill her and that she had died of an accidental overdose. He also claimed four more killings no one had connected to him: a Hispanic girl called Mary, buried in a peach orchard at Campobello, South Carolina in August 1988; a hitchhiker called Ronald, buried in Tennessee in the summer of 1989; and two men in Asheville the same year, over drugs.
The admissibility of those confessions was fought all the way up. He argued that once he had asked for a lawyer on May 29 the right attached and he could not later waive it. The North Carolina Supreme Court held otherwise: the police had released him after he invoked, and the Johnson murder had not yet been committed when he did so.
Prosecutors from three states met late in 1990 and agreed that South Carolina would go first. He was extradited there on August 23, 1991, found sane in April 1992, and on April 13, 1993 pleaded guilty to the murder of Velma Gray and received life, with parole consideration possible after twenty years.
In February 1995 he pleaded guilty in Buncombe County to the first-degree murder of Jayme Hurley; one account describes a guilty verdict instead. A jury heard the capital sentencing proceeding and recommended death, and he was sentenced on October 6, 1995. He had been twenty-two and a half when he killed her, and his lawyers argued his age in mitigation; the trial court declined to instruct the jury that it was mitigating, and the supreme court upheld that, holding that age means maturity and experience and prior record as well as years. The conviction and sentence were affirmed on November 7, 1997. After the verdict a New York prosecutor said he remained the prime suspect in Vineyard's death but would not be tried for it.
The Johnson case went to trial in 1996. He had been indicted for it on September 17, 1990, and in late March the jury convicted him of first-degree murder on premeditation and deliberation. It deliberated seventy-five minutes and recommended death again. He showed no emotion. The supreme court affirmed on May 8, 1998.
He was never charged with the murder of Patsy Vineyard, or with any of the killings he claimed after his arrest. One of the deaths he was questioned about, that of forty-two-year-old Daisy Snider in South Carolina in 1988, was later linked by DNA to a different man.
In 2009 he was among the death row prisoners who filed under North Carolina's new Racial Justice Act, arguing that the race of his white victims had made a death sentence more likely. The claim was denied. His federal petition was denied in the Middle District of North Carolina and the Fourth Circuit affirmed. As of February 2025 he remained on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, his appeals exhausted. North Carolina has carried out no execution since 2006.