The woman hanging laundry in her back yard in January 1971 was thought to have died of heart trouble. It was only at the viewing, when relatives noticed a small bloody mark under her arm, that the funeral director looked again and found a small-caliber bullet wound.
A detective stood in her yard with a sheet of plywood cut with a hole to represent the wound, worked out the angle the shot had come from, and traced it to a bedroom window in the house behind. The gun was in there. So was a sixteen-year-old named Linwood Briley.
Her name was Orline Christian. She was fifty-seven, and she was his neighbor.
Briley admitted the shooting. Of the woman he had killed he said he had heard she had heart problems and would have died soon anyway. His lawyer persuaded the court it had been an accident, and he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sent to reform school for a year.
Eight years later he and his two brothers killed their way across Richmond for seven months, and the Commonwealth of Virginia needed four separate trials in nine months to establish what he had done.
Linwood Earl Briley was born in Richmond on March 26, 1954, the eldest of three, in the house at 3117 Fourth Avenue in Highland Park that the whole case runs back to. His brother James followed him into juvenile detention at a similar age for firing a gun at a police officer during a pursuit. The youngest, Anthony, came along later.
By 1979 the three of them had a sixteen-year-old accomplice named Duncan Eric Meekins, and between March 12 and October 19 they robbed and killed across the city. Estimates of the total run from eleven in contemporary reporting to twenty-one in the widest later tally. What Linwood was actually convicted of is a more precise thing, and it came in four pieces.
It began on March 12 at the home of William and Virginia Bucher in Henrico County. Linwood knocked, said he had car trouble and needed a telephone, forced his way inside and held the couple at gunpoint before waving his youngest brother in. They tied the Buchers up, stripped the house, poured kerosene through the rooms and threw a lit match into it as they left. The Buchers got free because Meekins had not pulled the bindings tight, and got out before the house went up. They are the only people known to have survived the Brileys. Their cat did not.
John Harvey Gallaher was a country-music disc jockey who went by Johnny G. On September 14 he stepped outside a South Richmond nightclub between sets. The group had been driving around all evening looking for somebody and had settled on waiting for whoever came out of that door. Linwood assaulted him and forced him into the trunk of his own Lincoln Continental, and they drove him to the ruins of a paper mill on Mayo Island in the James River. There they took him out and shot him in the head at point-blank range. His body went into the river and surfaced two days later. They took six dollars from his wallet and split it.
Two weeks after that, on September 30, a sixty-two-year-old nurse named Mary Wilfong was beaten to death with a baseball bat outside her own apartment door. On October 5, two blocks from the Briley house, an elderly woman named Blanche Page and her boarder Charles Garner, fifty-nine, were stabbed to death.
The series ended on Barton Avenue on the night of October 19. The four men gathered at Fourth Avenue, drank and smoked marijuana, and planned to rob Harvey W. Wilkerson, who lived nearby and had known them for years. Linwood drove. James carried a shotgun and Linwood a .22 pistol. They waited in a shed across the street until the people standing outside the house had gone, and then the two older brothers went in first.
Wilkerson, his common-law wife Judy Diane Barton, twenty-three and eight months pregnant, and her five-year-old son Harvey Wayne Barton were bound with electrical tape. Barton was raped. All three were shot dead.
The police were not merely nearby that night. The four men were under active surveillance, and officers watched them and recorded their dress, their size and their movements without any idea that three people were being killed inside the house. The Brileys had a police scanner in the car and heard that they were being followed. They stopped on Hazelhurst Avenue, where Meekins tried to hide a .22 rifle taken from the Wilkersons and Linwood threw the shotgun over a fence.
The bodies were not found for two or three days. The brothers were arrested on October 22.
Then the charges came in, one after another, and the size of the case became clear. On October 23 Linwood was charged with murdering Gallaher. On October 26, with the capital murders of Blanche Page and Charles Garner. On November 1, all three brothers were charged with killing Mary Wilfong.
The four trials ran through 1980. On January 12 he was found guilty in the Barton Avenue killings, and the jury recommended five life sentences. On January 18 a Richmond Circuit Court jury convicted him over Page and Garner, and he received life plus seventy-one years. On February 21 he was found guilty of Gallaher's murder, and on March 10 Circuit Judge William Spain sentenced him to die on June 13, a date cancelled when the appeal was filed. On September 5 he was found guilty over Mary Wilfong and received life plus fifty years.
Seven killings, four courtrooms, nine months. Six counts of first-degree murder, Wilkerson, Judy Barton and her son from the first trial, Page and Garner from the second, Wilfong from the fourth, plus the manslaughter conviction from 1971 and one capital count.
The capital count was Gallaher, under the Virginia statute covering a willful, deliberate and premeditated killing in the commission of robbery while armed. The evidence was physical and it was overwhelming. His fingerprints were in Gallaher's car. He was wearing Gallaher's ring when he was arrested. Gallaher's watch was in his house. He testified in his own defense and admitted that he and Meekins had stripped the car for parts, but said he had bought the ring and the watch from Meekins.
During the appeals, letters arrived suggesting a third party had killed Gallaher. A federal judge who examined the claim thought the likelier explanation was that a friend of the family had got them up to save Linwood, and observed that a genuine third party would have been perfectly content to let the Brileys take the blame.
One thing in the record does not reconcile. The Washington Post's chronology describes the September 1980 verdict over Mary Wilfong as capital murder carrying life plus fifty years, while the standard summary of his convictions records one capital murder and six counts of first-degree. Either the Wilfong conviction was capital with a jury that declined to impose death, or it was returned as first-degree and reported loosely.
By the end, more than seventy judges had considered some part of his case.
On May 31, 1984, Linwood and James Briley led six men off Virginia's death row at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center, the largest death row escape in American history. During the takeover Linwood tried to rape a nurse and was stopped by another condemned prisoner, Wilbert Lee Evans. Both brothers wanted to kill the captured guards by dousing them in rubbing alcohol and setting them alight, and a third condemned man, Willie Lloyd Turner, physically blocked James from doing it.
Virginia executed Evans in 1990 anyway, after the Mecklenburg guards said publicly that they owed him their lives.
The escapers meant to reach Canada, and two of them got as far as Vermont. The Brileys split off in Philadelphia and went to their uncle Johnny Lee Council in the north of the city. The FBI tapped his telephone and took them on June 19, three weeks out. They were the last of the six caught. The Richmond prosecutor who had tried them said afterward that dangerous men who escape have only one reliable way of staying out, which is to kill again.
In the days before the execution, Jack Gravely of the Virginia NAACP met him for about half an hour at the State Penitentiary. Briley went on saying he had not done it.
His last meal was grilled tenderloin steak, a baked potato, green peas, salad with French dressing, rolls and butter, cake, peaches, punch and milk. He was electrocuted on October 12, 1984 and pronounced dead at five past eleven at night, after two bursts of current of fifty-five seconds each. Eight witnesses attended and no reporters. He was thirty. His last words were that he was innocent.
Two people who were in the building that night have given opposite accounts of how he went. His defense attorney, Deborah Wyatt, told reporters her client had made it easier by being exceedingly brave, and noted that he was the first person executed involuntarily in Virginia since 1962. Decades later Stuart Cook, who had headed homicide for the Richmond police, said on television that Linwood Briley was a coward who had to be sedated, and that they picked him up by his belt and walked him to the chair.
He was survived by a son, Norman Laquan Ampy, who went to prison for bank robbery and died in 2015 leaving a daughter. Briley is buried with James in the Council family plot at Bethel, North Carolina.
Warren Von Schuch, who prosecuted them, called the brothers killing machines and said what infuriated them was weakness in other people. Prosecutors also believed, without ever proving it, that after his year in reform school Linwood had decided he was never going back, and that the way to manage that was to leave nobody alive to say what he had done.