Lesley Eugene Warren was 22 when police arrested him in High Point, North Carolina, on July 20, 1990. Within a day he had confessed to killing four women in three states: a soldier's wife in northern New York in 1987, a motorist in South Carolina in 1989, his former juvenile counselor near Asheville in May 1990, and a 21-year-old college student in High Point five days before his arrest.
Courts in two states convicted him of three of those killings. South Carolina sentenced him to life for the murder of Velma Faye Gray. North Carolina sentenced him to death twice: once after he pleaded guilty to the murder of Jayme Denise Hurley, and again after a Guilford County jury found him guilty of murdering Katherine Johnson. The New York killing, to which he confessed, does not appear among his convictions in the later court records.
His case is also a study in how close the police came. Asheville officers had questioned him about Jayme Hurley's disappearance in late May 1990 and found her pocketbook in his van. They could hold him only on minor charges, and in June he was released on bond. He killed Katherine Johnson in July.
Little is on record about his upbringing. At the time of his arrest, United Press International described him as 22 and from Candler, a community outside Asheville. Police told UPI he was a former truck driver and construction worker.
The Supreme Court of North Carolina, reviewing his first death sentence in 1997, set out some of his history. From the age of ten, the court said, he had been lying, stealing and vandalizing property. He entered the military at 19. He later graduated from truck-driving school, and his IQ was measured at between 115 and 125. Those past acts formed the basis of various diagnoses over the years, according to the court, which did not list them. At his sentencing in the Johnson case, his lawyers offered mitigating evidence that included abuse he had suffered as a child and mental and emotional disturbance, the federal appeals court later noted.
UPI reported at the time of his arrest that he had been a soldier at Fort Drum, New York.
Patsy Diane Vineyard was 20 when she moved with her husband, a soldier, from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Sackets Harbor, New York, early in 1987. She disappeared soon afterward. Her husband was away on field training at Fort Drum at the time, UPI reported, and Warren, a soldier in the same exercise, had been excused from it.
When Warren was arrested, New York State Police said in a statement that her killer was probably someone she knew, who understood her vulnerabilities and knew her husband was away. A New York murder warrant for Warren was pending, and UPI listed her among the three women he was charged with killing.
After his arrest he confessed to a murder in New York, along with the Carolina killings, and signed a statement covering all four on July 21, 1990, according to the federal district court. The court did not name the New York victim. His convictions, as later listed by the state and federal courts, were in South Carolina and North Carolina only.
Velma Faye Gray was 42 and lived in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. She was kidnapped and killed in late August 1989, and her body was found on August 27, 1989, UPI reported. Her car had been wrecked, and investigators searched for a truck driver who had been seen near it around the time she disappeared. Her friends and relatives offered a $3,000 reward for information about her death.
By the summer of 1990 Warren was a suspect in killings in Asheville and in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the federal district court wrote. South Carolina authorities obtained a warrant charging him with first-degree murder and kidnapping.
Jayme Denise Hurley was 39 and lived in Asheville. She had once been Warren's juvenile counselor. In May 1990 he came to her home asking for help, and she let him sleep there, according to the Supreme Court of North Carolina. He strangled her that night. He was 22 and a half years old.
She disappeared on May 24, 1990, and her father reported her missing, UPI said. On May 28 Asheville police questioned Warren. He admitted seeing her that day and agreed to a search of his van, where officers found her pocketbook. He waived his rights and the questioning went on. At one point he asked for a lawyer, but officers kept questioning him because they hoped she might still be alive. He eventually told them she had died of a cocaine overdose.
With no body, the police arrested him on an outstanding warrant for failing to produce a vehicle title and on a misdemeanor larceny charge for her pocketbook. At a bond hearing on June 7, the district attorney said he expected to bring more charges but did not file them. Warren was released on bond and collected his van. At the police department he gave blood, hair and urine samples and agreed to come back the next day for more questioning. He did not come back.
Her body was not found until July 18, 1990, the state supreme court said.
Katherine Johnson was 21, a college student who worked in a hotel gift shop in High Point. On July 15, 1990, Warren went to a picnic for the hotel's employees with a hotel worker he knew and her family. She introduced him to Katherine Johnson.
The federal district court, drawing on the trial record, traced the rest of that day. After the picnic the group went out to eat and then to dinner at the home of the hotel worker's sister; Katherine Johnson rode there with Warren on his motorcycle. At about 9 p.m. the group went to the hotel worker's house, where Warren and Katherine Johnson sat on the porch before leaving on a motorcycle ride. Witnesses saw them pass the house at about 11:30 p.m.
About an hour later Warren came back alone for her car. He said she could not drive and that the two of them were going to get a motel room. The next morning he was found asleep on the hotel worker's couch, and he said Katherine Johnson had spent the night at the hotel and then driven to a morning class.
He had killed her that night in High Point. A pathologist found that she died of asphyxia due to strangulation. She was identified through dental records. Warren's fingerprints and a palm print were found on her car.
On July 20, 1990, High Point police served the South Carolina warrant and arrested Warren at the hotel worker's house. UPI reported that the arrest came about two hours after a national bulletin for his detention, and that he surrendered at the front door without resistance. In his pocket officers found Katherine Johnson's car keys.
High Point officers took him to Asheville that night. There he waived his rights and was questioned about the Asheville and South Carolina killings and a murder in New York. He confessed to the Hurley murder, to the South Carolina and New York killings, and then to the murder of Katherine Johnson, telling police where her car could be found. On July 21 he signed a statement confessing to all four.
"He confessed to these three homicides," an Asheville police spokesman, Alan Hyder, told UPI, adding that Warren had also confessed to killing a woman in High Point. Hyder said Warren faced a fugitive charge tied to the South Carolina murder and charges of kidnapping and murdering Jayme Hurley, and that a New York murder warrant was pending. He said investigators would try to connect Warren to unsolved killings elsewhere on the East Coast and that he would not be surprised by more charges. The court records of his later cases show no further convictions.
In 1993 Warren was convicted there of the first-degree murder of Velma Gray, the federal district court wrote, and he was sentenced to life in prison. Under that sentence he would have been eligible for parole after twenty years, the Supreme Court of North Carolina noted in 1997.
In February 1995 Warren pleaded guilty in Buncombe County Superior Court to the first-degree murder of Jayme Hurley and to larceny of her property. A jury then heard the sentencing proceeding. He stipulated that he had been convicted in South Carolina of the first-degree murder of Velma Gray. The jury found as an aggravating circumstance that he had a prior conviction for a felony involving violence to the person, and it recommended death.
On appeal, the Supreme Court of North Carolina rejected each of his claims in an opinion by Justice Whichard, filed November 7, 1997, in case No. 562A96. Anthony Lynch of Marion represented Warren; Special Deputy Attorney General William P. Hart represented the state.
The court held that the trial judge was right to let the jury see photographs of the South Carolina victim and a videotape shown at the hearing, and right to allow prosecutors to cross-examine the defense expert about Warren's past bad acts, since those acts formed the basis of the expert's diagnoses. It held that the jury did not need to hear about parole under the South Carolina sentence, because Warren would have been eligible for parole there after twenty years.
Two questions drew more attention. The first was whether the South Carolina murder counted as a "prior" conviction even though Warren killed Jayme Hurley before the South Carolina court convicted him. The court held that it did, so long as the earlier crime came first and the conviction came before the capital sentencing hearing, and it disavowed contrary language in one of its own earlier opinions.
The second was his age. Warren asked the trial judge to tell the jury that his age at the time of the crime was a mitigating circumstance as a matter of law. The court held that the judge did not have to. Although he had been only twenty-two and a half when he killed Jayme Hurley, the court wrote, age means more than years; it pointed to his military service from 19, his truck-driving training, his IQ and a record of misconduct going back to age ten. The trial judge had erred, the court found, in refusing a similar instruction on his completion of truck-driving school, which the state had conceded, but the error was harmless.
The court also found the death sentence proportionate, comparing the case to others in which it had upheld death. Its decision was "no error."
Warren had been indicted for the murder of Katherine Johnson in September 1990. His trial in Guilford County ended in March 1996, when the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. John Bryson and Randall May represented him at trial.
The defense centered on his state of mind. His lawyers argued that he had been drinking and that intoxication and gaps in his memory meant the killing was not premeditated, which would have made it second-degree murder. A witness, the brother of the hotel worker, testified that Warren drank only beer and water that evening. The state pointed to his own conduct afterward: hiding her body and car, the false story he told the next morning, and a false name he gave at a hotel.
At the sentencing hearing the state relied on a single aggravating factor, that he had previously been convicted of another capital felony. It used the 1993 South Carolina conviction and the 1995 Buncombe County conviction. His lawyers asked the judge to tell the jury that, because of the Hurley death sentence, he could never be paroled from a life term. The judge refused.
The prosecutor's closing argument was long. As the Fourth Circuit later summarized it, he told the jury that Warren "could have chosen life" but had chosen death "in all three instances." Drawing on a social history prepared by the defense psychologist, he described a habit of killing women and asked, "What will stop him?" He acknowledged that the Bible calls for second chances, then argued that Warren had already had his chances and "chose not to use" them. "How many more chances do we have to give him?" he asked, and he told the jurors that Warren "is addicted to killing women." He called Warren a coward without remorse and "not your average killer." He ended by showing the jury a photograph of Katherine Johnson and asking for death as a way to restore the victims' dignity and to do justice.
The jury recommended death.
The Supreme Court of North Carolina affirmed the conviction and death sentence on May 8, 1998, in State v. Warren, 348 N.C. 80. Bryson, joined by Stanley Hammer, handled the appeal.
The court rejected his argument that his statements in Asheville in July 1990 should have been suppressed because he had asked for a lawyer on May 29. His release from custody had broken the chain, it held, and the larceny charge on which he had a lawyer was a different offense from murder. It held that the evidence of premeditation and deliberation was sufficient, citing the lack of provocation, the manner of the killing, his concealment of the body and the story he made up. It held that the prior-conviction aggravating factor applied even though both earlier convictions came after Katherine Johnson's death, so long as they came before the sentencing hearing. It found the prosecutor's remarks in the guilt phase to be fair inferences from the evidence.
On parole, it rejected his claim under Simmons v. South Carolina, a United States Supreme Court decision that gives a defendant facing death the right to tell the jury he is ineligible for parole, but only when the prosecution argues that he will be dangerous in the future. "In our view the prosecutor did not argue future dangerousness," the state court wrote. It read the closing as a case that Warren was a "serial killer deserving of the death penalty" because of the three murders he had already committed.
Warren then turned to the state courts' post-conviction process. In the Johnson case he filed a motion for appropriate relief in Guilford County on July 12, 1999. It was denied on July 3, 2002, and the Supreme Court of North Carolina declined to review that denial on February 3, 2005.
In the Hurley case he filed a motion for appropriate relief in Buncombe County, with a request for discovery, on April 1, 1999. The state did not respond until July 3, 2003, after the court directed it to. The motion was denied on November 7, 2003, without a ruling on discovery, and his motions to reconsider and for discovery were still pending in January 2017.
On August 5, 2010, he filed a further motion in Guilford County under North Carolina's Racial Justice Act. As of January 2017 that motion remained pending, according to the federal district court.
Warren filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina on April 29, 2005. It raised 18 claims. On November 17, 2005, the court stayed the case while he challenged in the state courts the two convictions used as aggravating factors. The stay was lifted on May 15, 2015.
On January 20, 2017, Judge Catherine C. Eagles denied the petition, finding no constitutional violation. Among her rulings:
She declined to rule on the Buncombe County and South Carolina convictions themselves, which had not been set aside, but left him free to return if either one later was.
She found the state court's reasoning on his confession reasonable. A break in custody of about six weeks ended the protection of his May 29 request for a lawyer, and the right to counsel attached to the larceny charge did not extend to the murders.
She rejected his claim that applying the prior-conviction aggravating factor to convictions that came after the killing was an unforeseeable change in the law.
She found that a State Bureau of Investigation report on the witness who described his drinking, which had not been turned over, would not have changed the outcome, since Warren's own confession had described mixed drinks and his lawyers made that point at trial.
She held that a rational jury could find premeditation, and that the prosecutor's arguments, photographs and jury instructions did not deny him a fair trial.
On the parole question, the district court found that the remarks Warren pointed to were "a few words and phrases in an extensive closing argument," directed at what he had already done.
The Fourth Circuit allowed an appeal on the Simmons claim alone. The case, Warren v. Thomas, was argued on May 10, 2018. Kristin Davis Parks argued for Warren, with lawyers from North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services on the brief; Jess D. Mekeel of the North Carolina Department of Justice argued for the state.
On July 10, 2018, a unanimous panel of Judges Niemeyer, Keenan and Harris affirmed. Writing for the court, Judge Harris noted the demanding standard that federal law sets for overturning a state court ruling: the decision has to be "objectively unreasonable, not merely wrong; even clear error will not suffice." The panel held that the prosecutor's argument could reasonably be read as backward-looking. The questions "What will stop him?" and "How many more chances do we have to give him?" could be understood as condemning Warren's past crimes and his moral culpability for them, rather than as a prediction of danger after some future release. "Because the Supreme Court of North Carolina reasonably applied Simmons to Warren's sentencing, we affirm," the court wrote. It did not decide the state's other arguments, on whether Warren was in fact parole-ineligible and on harmless error.
The ruling left his death sentence for the murder of Katherine Johnson in place.
The New York killing. Warren confessed in July 1990 to a murder in New York, and UPI reported that a New York warrant charged him in the death of Patsy Diane Vineyard. His convictions, as the later courts list them, are only in South Carolina and North Carolina.
Other killings. After his arrest, Asheville police said they would try to link him to unsolved killings elsewhere on the East Coast. No further charge appears in the court records of his cases.
The overdose story. Warren first told Asheville police that Jayme Hurley died of a cocaine overdose. He later pleaded guilty to her first-degree murder, and the state supreme court described her death as a strangling.
Early reporting. The UPI report of his arrest contains an evident error, saying at one point that the body found in High Point was identified as Jayme Hurley's; the courts identify that victim as Katherine Johnson.
Early 1987: Patsy Diane Vineyard, 20, moves to Sackets Harbor, New York, and disappears soon afterward; Warren later confesses to a New York murder.
Late August 1989: Velma Faye Gray, 42, of Travelers Rest, South Carolina, is kidnapped and killed.
May 24, 1990: Jayme Denise Hurley, 39, disappears in Asheville.
May 28 and 29, 1990: Asheville police question Warren and find her pocketbook in his van; he asks for a lawyer and is arrested on minor charges.
June 7, 1990: Bond hearing; he is released and does not return for questioning.
July 15, 1990: He meets Katherine Johnson, 21, at a hotel employees' picnic in High Point and kills her that night.
July 18, 1990: Jayme Hurley's body is found.
July 20, 1990: Arrested in High Point on a South Carolina warrant; questioned in Asheville.
July 21, 1990: Signs a statement confessing to four killings.
September 1990: Indicted in Guilford County for the Johnson murder.
1993: Convicted in South Carolina of the murder of Velma Gray; life sentence.
February 1995: Pleads guilty in Buncombe County to the murder of Jayme Hurley; a jury recommends death.
March 1996: A Guilford County jury convicts him of the murder of Katherine Johnson and recommends death.
November 7, 1997: The Supreme Court of North Carolina affirms the Hurley death sentence.
May 8, 1998: The Supreme Court of North Carolina affirms the Johnson conviction and death sentence.
July 12, 1999: Motion for appropriate relief filed in the Johnson case; denied July 3, 2002.
November 7, 2003: Motion for appropriate relief in the Hurley case denied.
February 3, 2005: The state supreme court declines to review the Johnson ruling.
April 29, 2005: Federal habeas petition filed; stayed November 17, 2005.
August 5, 2010: Racial Justice Act motion filed in Guilford County.
May 15, 2015: Federal stay lifted.
January 20, 2017: Federal district court denies the petition; the Racial Justice Act motion is still pending.
July 10, 2018: The Fourth Circuit affirms in Warren v. Thomas.
Written by Patsy Vineyard's niece, the daughter of Patsy's older sister, Robin Swingle, and sent to Serial Killer Magazine in October 2026. It appears in her own words, unedited. It is her family's memory of the days after Patsy disappeared. Lesley Eugene Warren was never charged with or tried for Patsy's death; a New York prosecutor called him the prime suspect. The telephone calls and the details of her death described here come from the family and are not part of the court record set out in the Case File above.
First thing first. Everyone always gets my moms name wrong. Its Robin Swingle. My mom was the oldest Luther is the baby.
Theres a lot of things no one knows. Pasty didn’t leave ever with out her purse and make-up. That stuff was left at home. On the table was the bills that were to be paid that day. My grandpa was an abusive alcoholic. My Grandma left him and took the kids to get away from the abuse. My aunt and mom never drank or did any drugs because of the way my grandpa was.
Patsy and Mike were in love and they moved away. He was stationed at Ft Drum. In New York. We always had the feeling she would never come back to Tennessee. She would call every day. Then one day the calls stopped. She was missing. Mike filed a missing persons report in New York. My parents went to the news here in Knoxville, TN. Over the next few days our phone would ring and my grandma’s phone as well. It was Patsy’s killer. Leslie Eugene Warren. He would call and stalk my mom and grandma. Tell them what they wore that day. Tell them how he was on his way to Tennessee to kill them. I answered the phone once. I heard his voice. Every day he would call until my dad had the phone turned off.
One day we got a knock on the door. The detectives said they found her. Raped strangled decapitated and threw into the lake. Mike and Leslie were stationed together. How did they know each other if they did at all? We were left with more questions than answers. The funeral was closed casket. The damage done was overwhelming for us all. The last time we ever seen Mike Vineyard was the day we buried her. The day they caught Leslie was a relief. No more worrying about if he was going to show up and hurt anyone.