Linwood Briley was electrocuted in Virginia on October 12, 1984, for the robbery and killing of John Harvey Gallaher, a Richmond disc jockey known on the air as Johnny G. He was 30. Five years earlier he and his brothers, James and Anthony, together with a 16-year-old neighbor named Duncan Eric Meekins, had been arrested after the killings of a man, a woman and her five-year-old son in their Richmond home. Police and prosecutors linked the group to at least 11 killings in the Richmond area in 1979, and prosecutors described Linwood as its leader.
What the courts found against him personally is narrower than that count. A Richmond jury convicted him of capital murder for Gallaher's death and fixed his punishment at death. A separate jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder, rape and robbery arising from the October 19, 1979 killings. He was also found guilty of the killings of Blanche Page and Charles Garner and of Mary Wilfong, according to The Washington Post. He denied killing Gallaher at trial and, by his lawyer's account, said he was innocent in his last words.
Between his sentence and his death came a sequence of appeals that reached the Supreme Court of Virginia, the federal district court, the Fourth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court, and one of the best-known prison escapes in American history. On May 31, 1984, he and his brother James led six condemned men out of the death row unit at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center. They were the last of the six to be caught, 19 days later, in Philadelphia.
The Briley brothers grew up in a house in North Richmond. Their parents were respected members of that community, the Richmond reporter Mark Holmberg wrote for WTVR in 2014, when the house, by then bought from the brothers' father, was briefly on the market again. He and James were the two oldest. Anthony, the youngest, was later described by one of the prosecutors as present at many of the killings without killing anyone himself.
The first death connected to Linwood came in 1971, when he was 16. According to Holmberg's account, he shot an elderly neighbor from inside the family house. He told police he had been shooting at a bird. Later, Holmberg reported, he said the woman was old and would have died anyway. Her name and the legal outcome of the case were not reported.
Prosecutors later believed that he had served time for a burglary, UPI reported in 1984, and that he had come away from it resolved never to go back behind bars and to leave no witnesses to his crimes. That was a belief, never a finding of any court, and UPI reported it as such.
By 1979 the three brothers and Meekins, who lived nearby, were robbing people across Richmond. The Washington Post, in a 1984 account of the victims, described them as a cross-section of the city: a company serviceman, a 76-year-old woman on her way home from baby-sitting, a teenager, a man at a gambling house, a disc jockey, a nurse, an elderly woman and her boarder, and a young family. Prosecutors told the courts that the brothers and their accomplice were implicated in 11 murders. One of the prosecutors, Robert Rice, told Virginia Lawyers Weekly in 2009 that the group was responsible for at least 11 and probably more.
Only some of those deaths led to charges against Linwood.
John Harvey Gallaher was a Richmond radio disc jockey and a member of a small band, the Supreme Court of Virginia wrote. The Washington Post gave his station as WXCI and his age as 62. On the evening of September 14, 1979, he was playing bass with the band at a South Richmond restaurant. During an intermission he went out by a rear door and did not come back. His body was found in Richmond two days later.
The account of what happened came almost entirely from Meekins, who testified for the Commonwealth. In the version the Supreme Court of Virginia summarized, the four had been driving around looking for someone to rob and had hidden behind the restaurant, Linwood and Meekins both armed. When Gallaher came out, Linwood ordered him to the ground and took his wallet and keys. Meekins brought Gallaher's Lincoln Continental around, the two forced Gallaher into it, and Linwood drove off with him. When they stopped, Linwood shot him. Meekins said 15 to 20 minutes passed between the moment Gallaher was seized and the shot. The group then drove the car around the city and, when its fuel ran low, stripped it for parts.
The federal district court, describing the same trial evidence in 1984, said Meekins had driven the car; the state court said Linwood drove. Both courts agreed that Meekins named Linwood as the man who fired. The federal appeals court noted that Meekins was the only witness who identified him as the shooter.
Mary S. Wilfong was 62 and worked as a private nurse. She was killed outside her Richmond home on September 30, 1979, The Washington Post reported. Linwood was later found guilty of her murder and sentenced to life in prison plus 50 years.
On October 5, 1979, Blanche Page and Charles Garner, 59, who boarded in her house, were killed in her Richmond home, about two blocks from the Briley house. The Washington Post gave her age as 79; UPI gave it as 75. Linwood received a sentence of life plus 71 years for the two killings, the Post reported.
Harvey W. Wilkerson, 26, lived in Richmond with Judy Diane Barton, 23, whom the courts called his common-law wife, and her five-year-old son, Harvey Wayne Barton. Judy Barton was eight months pregnant, the Post reported.
On the evening of October 19, 1979, according to the Supreme Court of Virginia's account in James Briley's appeal, the four men planned a robbery of Wilkerson's home at the Briley house, drinking and smoking marijuana as they did. Linwood drove the car and was one of the first two men to go into the house. Anthony went in with Meekins and carried out a shopping bag. Wilkerson, Judy Barton and her son were all killed. Meekins admitted killing Wilkerson. Judy Barton was raped. James Briley was convicted of the capital murders of Judy Barton and her son, of Wilkerson's first-degree murder, and of rape and robbery, and was sentenced to death. Linwood was tried separately.
The four men were under police surveillance that night. The officers did not know a crime was under way, but their notes on the men's clothing, size and movements later corroborated Meekins's testimony, the state supreme court said. The men had a police scanner in their car and learned from it that they were being followed. They abandoned the car after they saw officers watching them through a scope.
The bodies were found two days later, on October 21.
Linwood Briley and Meekins were arrested at about 7:30 p.m. on October 22, 1979, in connection with the Wilkerson investigation. Meekins gave the police full information once his parents had arrived at the station, the Fourth Circuit wrote, and on October 25 he gave a detailed confession. When they were arrested, Holmberg later reported, the men were wearing clothing and jewelry that belonged to some of the victims. Linwood had Gallaher's ring on his finger; Gallaher's watch was found in his home. At the time of his arrest he told police he had bought the ring and watch from a man known as "A.C."
Meekins was the Commonwealth's principal witness against all three brothers. The Fourth Circuit described his plea agreement in three parts. In one of the October 19 killings, in which Meekins had been the one who fired, the Commonwealth would not seek the death penalty against him. In the other cases involving the brothers, including Gallaher's, he would receive no more than the other defendants. In return he would testify truthfully in all the cases involving the group. He was sentenced to life.
Robert Rice, one of the prosecutors, later explained how investigators tested his account. They gave Meekins only enough to focus him on a particular incident and let him supply small details that could be checked; Rice recalled a detail as small as a train whistle that Meekins said he had heard during one of the killings. "He described small things that corroborated big things," Rice told Virginia Lawyers Weekly in 2009. Meekins admitted killing two of the victims himself, the paper reported.
The brothers and their accomplice were tried in the Richmond area on rape, robbery and murder charges through the first months of 1980, and the coverage was heavy enough that Linwood's lawyers asked for his capital trial to be moved. The trial court refused, and both the Supreme Court of Virginia and the federal district court later held that the coverage, though extensive, had been factual and that the jurors had shown they could judge the case on the evidence.
The first judgment against him came on January 12, 1980. A jury had convicted him on every count of an indictment charging rape, robbery, three counts of first-degree murder and five counts of using a firearm, and the court fixed his punishment at five life sentences and five one-year terms, the Supreme Court of Virginia recorded. The judge in that case was James M. Lumpkin of the Richmond Circuit Court. On appeal, his only complaint was that two prospective jurors who had followed the news should have been excused for cause. Neither sat on his jury, because both were removed by peremptory challenge, and on June 12, 1981, the state supreme court held that the trial judge had not erred in finding them able to set aside what they had read.
The capital case for Gallaher's death was tried before Judge William E. Spain in the Richmond Circuit Court. The trial had two stages, as Virginia law required. In the first, the jury heard Meekins, the physical evidence and Linwood himself. He was his own only witness. He testified that he had given Meekins a ride, that his own car had broken down, and that Meekins had later driven up in a Lincoln and given him a ride home. He admitted helping Meekins strip the Lincoln for parts, but denied any part in the robbery or the killing, and said he had bought the ring and watch from Meekins. His fingerprints were found in Gallaher's car.
The jury convicted him of capital murder, defined in the statute as a willful, deliberate and premeditated killing in the commission of armed robbery, and of using a firearm in the commission of murder. In the penalty stage the Commonwealth had to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, either that he would probably commit further violent crimes and be a continuing serious threat to society, or that his conduct was outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman. The jury unanimously found both, and fixed his punishment at death. After a probation report, the trial court imposed that sentence.
The other two cases ended in prison terms. He was found guilty of the murders of Blanche Page and Charles Garner and sentenced to life plus 71 years, and of the murder of Mary Wilfong and sentenced to life plus 50 years, according to The Washington Post. The appellate opinions do not give the dates of those trials.
On November 26, 1980, the Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed the conviction and the death sentence in an opinion by Justice Carrico. The court rejected his challenges to Virginia's death penalty law and to the refusal to move the trial. It held that the trial judge had been right to warn the defense that cross-examining Meekins about the other crimes would let the prosecution go into Linwood's own part in them, and it adopted a federal appeals rule that a party who opens one part of a transaction allows the other side to explore the rest.
It also rejected his argument that the jury should have been allowed to consider first-degree murder instead of capital murder. Unlike the defendant in the federal case he relied on, he had denied any involvement at all, and Virginia allowed such an instruction only where the evidence supported it. The robbery, the court held, had continued as a matter of law from the moment Gallaher was seized until his death 15 to 20 minutes later, so the killing was part of the same criminal enterprise. Stripping and abandoning the car, it said, was conclusive evidence that the robbers meant to keep it. On the sentence, the court found no sign of passion, prejudice or arbitrariness, and compared the case with James Briley's, decided the same day.
A state habeas petition failed in the Richmond Circuit Court, and the Supreme Court of Virginia refused an appeal in October 1982. Linwood then filed a federal habeas petition. Judge Dortch Warriner of the Eastern District of Virginia denied it on April 19, 1984, after an evidentiary hearing. Among the claims he rejected were complaints about the selection of the jury, the instructions on aggravating circumstances, the defense's lack of access to Meekins before trial, and the withholding of Meekins's juvenile record, which the judge examined privately and found brief and insignificant. The petition also raised new claims about tape transcripts and about letters threatening Meekins's family.
The Fourth Circuit affirmed on August 23, 1984, in an opinion by Judge Donald Russell. It called the claim that the true terms of Meekins's plea agreement had been hidden "manifestly frivolous": the prosecution had never misstated the terms, and any misimpression the jury had came from the defense's own choice to limit its questions. A defendant who made that choice "cannot complain now," the court wrote. It held that one valid aggravating finding was enough to support the death sentence, and extended the stay of execution for 21 days so that he could apply to the United States Supreme Court.
A second federal petition, filed that September, argued that jurors opposed to the death penalty had been wrongly excluded and that Virginia's death penalty fell more heavily on those who killed white victims. The district court dismissed it, and on October 9, 1984, the Fourth Circuit agreed that both claims could have been raised before and were barred. It also rejected them on their merits, calling the Virginia statistics "wholly inconclusive." By the week of the execution, UPI reported, the Supreme Court had refused four of his appeals.
Linwood and James Briley were held on Virginia's death row at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center in Boydton. On May 31, 1984, they led four other condemned men in an escape that UPI called the largest from death row in the nation's history. WRIC, in a 2019 account that quoted an officer who was there, described Linwood as the mastermind.
The prisoners had studied the guards' routines. One slipped into a bathroom next to the control room; another asked for the control room door to be opened so he could retrieve a paperback book, and the officer inside was overpowered. The prisoners put on guards' uniforms, lured other officers into the building and took them hostage, using weapons made from lawn equipment. A corrections officer told WRIC that Linwood held a blade wrapped in a rag and warned him that if he thought the officer was lying he would kill him. To get the last doors opened, the prisoners pretended that a bomb had been found and wheeled it out under a blanket on a gurney. It was a television set. They drove away in a prison van. Six men got out: the two Brileys, Lem Tuggle, Earl Clanton, Derick Peterson and Willie Jones, according to WRIC.
Nurses were among the hostages. A state police report later quoted a nurse as saying that two prisoners attacked her and that another condemned man, Wilbert Lee Evans, ordered them to stop, according to an American Lawyer account of Evans's case. Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting when the Supreme Court refused to stop Evans's execution in 1990, wrote that guards credited Evans with calming the uprising, saving the lives of several hostages and protecting a nurse from one of the escaping inmates. Neither source names the inmates who attacked the nurse. The American Lawyer account also reported a guard's statement that James Briley said he would kill all the guards and that Evans and another condemned man, Willie Lloyd Turner, talked him out of it. Evans was executed on October 17, 1990.
Clanton and Peterson were caught within hours just across the state line in North Carolina. Tuggle and Jones were arrested in Vermont about a week later, heading for the Canadian border. The Brileys were the last. They were taken in Philadelphia on June 19, 1984, cornered in a garage not far from their uncle's home, 19 days after the escape, according to UPI, WRIC and WTVR (WRIC counted 20 days). The Richmond prosecutor Aubrey Davis said after the breakout that "somebody hasn't done their job," and warned that dangerous inmates might kill again to stay free.
By then the escape had changed nothing in Linwood's case. The federal district court had denied his petition in April, before the breakout, and the appeals continued through the summer.
Linwood Briley's lawyer, Deborah Wyatt, the NAACP and a group of ministers representing 300 Black churches asked Governor Charles Robb to grant clemency. His aides said he saw nothing to warrant stopping the execution. Wyatt needed a federal court order from Judge Warriner to visit her client in his last days; the visit was limited to 30 minutes, required her to be searched and him to be handcuffed, and ended after 20 because, she said, he was manacled in a way that caused him pain.
He spent his last hours with his mother, his 10-year-old son and Wyatt, UPI reported, and received telephone calls from Anthony, who was serving life, and from James, who was on death row elsewhere. He had planned to skip a final meal but was served steak and a baked potato. He declined to have a clergyman walk with him the 30 paces from his cell to the chair, though a chaplain was present.
He was pronounced dead at 11:05 p.m. on October 12, 1984, in the electric chair at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. Eight citizens witnessed the execution, among them Wyatt; no reporters were present. The corrections director, Robert Landon, also watched, and said Briley told him he was innocent. Wyatt said his last words maintained his innocence and called him "exceedingly brave." Outside, about 500 people gathered, divided between supporters and opponents of capital punishment. He was the 26th person executed in the United States since 1976, UPI reported.
Warren Von Schuch, an assistant commonwealth's attorney in Richmond who had prosecuted the brothers, described them that day as "killing machines" who were "opposed to having weaknesses of any sort." Four years earlier, UPI recalled, he had said that something in the Brileys was infuriated by weakness in other people.
James Briley was executed in Virginia's electric chair in April 1985. Anthony Briley, who was never sentenced to death, was serving life plus 139 years in 2009, Virginia Lawyers Weekly reported. Duncan Meekins was given a new name and moved to another state's prison system. Under the parole practice of the time his plea agreement had been expected to lead to release after about 15 years, but he was refused parole in 2008, and in 2009 Rice and Von Schuch said they would speak for him at his next hearing. "He kept his part of the bargain," Rice said; the Commonwealth, in his view, had not kept its part.
All six men who left Mecklenburg in 1984 were later executed; Lem Tuggle, executed in 1996, was the last, WRIC reported. Thirty-five years after the escape, WTVR recalled it as the first successful breakout from death row in the country.
The house where the brothers grew up stayed linked to them. In 2014 a developer who had bought it from their father a year earlier told WTVR he wanted to sell after learning its history.
The following deaths were linked to the Briley group by police or prosecutors, according to The Washington Post and UPI. None is among Linwood's reported convictions.
Michael W. McDuffie, a company serviceman, was killed during an apparent robbery in Henrico County, outside Richmond, on March 21, 1979. Mary W. Gowen, 76, was killed on Richmond's North Side on April 9, 1979, on her way home from baby-sitting. Christopher M. Phillips, 17, was killed in Richmond on July 4, 1979; prosecutors said Linwood was responsible, after the teenager was caught breaking into his car, but no conviction for that death is on record. Thomas E. Saunders was killed in September 1979 during a disturbance at a gambling house; the Post named Meekins as responsible.
The number of victims. Prosecutors and police spoke of at least 11 killings; WRIC in 2019 said the group was believed to have left 11 people dead; Holmberg wrote in 2014 of as many as 10. Only the seven deaths covered by Linwood's own convictions, Gallaher, Wilfong, Page, Garner, Wilkerson, Judy Barton and Harvey Barton, are killings the courts found him guilty of.
The shooter. At the Gallaher trial only Meekins identified Linwood as the man who fired, and Meekins testified under a plea agreement that spared him the death penalty. The physical evidence placed Linwood in Gallaher's car and Gallaher's ring and watch in his possession, which he explained as purchases. The courts that reviewed the case found the evidence sufficient and the trial fair.
Who said what in the escape. Accounts of the hostage-taking disagree about which prisoners did what, and the reports do not name the men who attacked the nurse.
The date of the death sentence. Two UPI reports from 1984 say he was sentenced to death in September 1979, the month of Gallaher's killing; the court records show he was not tried until 1980. The exact date of the sentence was not reported.
His innocence claim. He denied the Gallaher killing on the stand and, by the accounts of his lawyer and the corrections director, maintained his innocence to the end. No court accepted that claim.
1971: At 16, shoots an elderly neighbor from inside the family home in North Richmond (WTVR).
March 21 to September 1979: killings of Michael McDuffie, Mary Gowen, Christopher Phillips and Thomas Saunders, later attributed to the group.
September 14, 1979: John Harvey Gallaher abducted, robbed and shot in Richmond; his body is found two days later.
September 30, 1979: Mary Wilfong killed in Richmond.
October 5, 1979: Blanche Page and Charles Garner killed in Richmond.
October 19, 1979: Harvey Wilkerson, Judy Barton and Harvey Barton killed in Richmond while the four men are under police surveillance.
October 21, 1979: the three bodies are found.
October 22, 1979: Linwood Briley and Duncan Meekins arrested.
October 25, 1979: Meekins gives a detailed confession.
January 12, 1980: judgment of five life terms for three first-degree murders, rape and robbery.
1980: convicted of capital murder for Gallaher's death and sentenced to death; found guilty in the Page and Garner and the Wilfong killings.
November 26, 1980: Supreme Court of Virginia affirms the death sentence.
June 12, 1981: Supreme Court of Virginia affirms the January 1980 convictions.
October 1982: state habeas appeal refused.
April 19, 1984: federal district court denies habeas relief.
May 31, 1984: leads the escape of six condemned men from the Mecklenburg Correctional Center.
June 19, 1984: recaptured with James in Philadelphia.
August 23, 1984: Fourth Circuit affirms the denial of habeas relief.
October 9, 1984: Fourth Circuit rejects a second petition.
October 12, 1984: executed in the electric chair at the Virginia State Penitentiary, Richmond.
April 1985: James Briley executed.