Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace was convicted in March 1996 of the murders of four women in Atlanta, killed between August 1988 and March 1989. Three of them were 78, 79 and 86 years old; the fourth was 42. A Fulton County jury found him guilty of four counts of malice murder, four of felony murder, four of rape and two of aggravated sodomy, and recommended a death sentence for each murder. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the verdicts and the sentences in December 1999.
For more than three years the killings were unsolved. Laboratory tests had shown that the same man was responsible for all four, but the police did not know who he was. In the fall of 1992 two break-ins at the homes of older women in the Vine City neighborhood left fingerprints, and the prints matched ones already on file for Pace, then 28. Blood and hair samples taken after his arrest matched the evidence from the four killings.
His case has since become better known in the courts for what happened at the end of his trial than for the investigation. In the sentencing phase the prosecutor showed the jury a cartoon, compared Pace with other serial killers, asked jurors to imagine themselves as the victims and pretended to tear the death penalty out of a law book. Two justices of the Georgia Supreme Court would have set aside the death sentences over that argument. The federal courts left them in place, and in May 2024 the Supreme Court of the United States declined to take the case. In June 2026 the Georgia Department of Corrections listed him among the 33 people under a death sentence in its custody.
Little is known of Pace's early life. The Georgia Department of Corrections gives his date of birth as July 1964. The Supreme Court of Georgia recorded that he was 28 years old when he agreed to give hair and blood samples in October 1992.
His lawyers have described his criminal history before 1992 as mainly petty and drug related, and in a 2024 filing to the Supreme Court of the United States they said he was homeless when he was arrested. Before his arrest the police already had his fingerprints on file, and the Supreme Court of Georgia noted that at his sentencing hearing the state put in evidence of several earlier burglaries and other offenses, without listing them one by one.
At the sentencing hearing his family testified that they did not believe he had committed the crimes, according to the petition his lawyers filed in 2023. Neighbors described him as a nice boy raised by a hardworking single mother, a former girlfriend spoke of his good character, and a local minister testified, in words the Supreme Court of Georgia quoted, that "Pace's community is a poor, African-American community" whose people knew how the death penalty had been used.
Lula Bell McAfee was 86. She was found dead in Atlanta on August 28, 1988.
Mattie Mae McLendon was 78. She was found dead in Atlanta on September 10, 1988. The Georgia court's majority opinion spells her surname McLendon; the dissent in the same case, the state's 2023 brief and the Eleventh Circuit's 2026 ruling spell it McClendon.
Johnnie Mae Martin was 79. She was found dead in Atlanta on February 4, 1989.
Annie Kate Britt was 42. Her brother-in-law found her dead in Atlanta on March 4, 1989.
All four women had been strangled. The state's brief to the Supreme Court of the United States, summarizing the Eleventh Circuit's account, places the McLendon and Martin deaths in Vine City, an Atlanta neighborhood, and the other two elsewhere in Atlanta. Beyond their names, ages and the dates they were found, little is on record about who these women were.
The Supreme Court of Georgia found that the four killings followed the same pattern. The evidence showed rape in each case and aggravated sodomy in two. Sperm samples from the four cases went to the FBI laboratory, and the same DNA profile was found in all of them. The police therefore knew, before they had a suspect, that a single man had committed the four killings.
The investigation stalled. The court's opinion mentions a psychological profile prepared during the inquiry and information from a neighbor of Annie Kate Britt, both of which the defense later said should have been disclosed; the court found that both had been available to the defense at trial. The police had no name to put to the DNA profile until 1992.
The break that led to Pace came from two burglaries in September 1992, both at the homes of older women in Vine City, according to the state's brief.
At 3 a.m. on September 24, 1992, a 69-year-old woman found an intruder in her kitchen. She fired her gun and he ran. A technician lifted fingerprints from the kitchen.
Six days later, at 2 a.m. on September 30, an elderly woman who lived alone found an armed man taking money from her purse. She fought him and got away to a neighbor's home. Fingerprints were lifted at her home.
The prints from both homes matched prints of Pace's that the police already held. He was arrested on October 2, 1992, for the September 30 break-in. The two burglaries were not part of the murder indictment, but at trial they were admitted as similar transactions.
When Pace was arrested, the police were also investigating the murder of another woman, killed on September 17, 1992. Because of similarities between the September 30 break-in and that case, officers asked Pace for samples of his hair and blood.
He signed a consent form. It named the September 1992 victim as the subject of the investigation and said nothing about the four killings of 1988 and 1989. It also stated that he understood the samples were "to be used against me in a court of law."
The FBI laboratory and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime laboratory could not link Pace to the evidence in that case. They did link him to the four earlier killings. Hair comparisons were consistent with hair evidence from the Britt and Martin cases. His DNA profile matched the sperm samples from all four cases. The FBI expert told the jury that the chance of a coincidental match was one in 500 million for the McAfee, Martin and Britt samples and one in 150 million for the McLendon sample.
Pace was indicted only for the four 1988 and 1989 killings. No charge in the September 1992 death appears in the court record.
A Fulton County grand jury indicted Pace on June 22, 1993, on four counts of malice murder, four counts of felony murder, four counts of rape and two counts of aggravated sodomy. On August 13, 1993, the state filed notice that it would seek the death penalty.
Georgia enacted a sentence of life without parole in the same year Pace was indicted, but according to his lawyers the new sentence did not apply to crimes committed before the law took effect unless the state agreed, and the state did not agree. The Supreme Court of Georgia later confirmed that life without parole was not a sentencing option at his trial. The jury's choice in each murder was between death and life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.
Before trial Pace asked the court to suppress the hair and blood evidence. He argued that he had consented only to tests in the September 1992 inquiry, and that the police had obtained his consent by deceit when they used the samples to investigate the other four killings. The trial court found that his consent was voluntary and allowed the evidence. He also asked the court to try the four murders separately; the court refused.
One of his trial lawyers was Bruce Harvey, whom the Supreme Court of Georgia described as a well-known attorney.
The Supreme Court of Georgia gives the dates of the trial in Fulton County Superior Court as January 22 to March 7, 1996. The guilt phase lasted from February 20 to March 5, according to his lawyers' 2023 petition.
Jury selection produced a string of disputes that the Georgia court later took up one by one. Pace argued that some jurors were biased toward a death sentence and that others had been influenced by pretrial publicity; the court found the jurors able to set their opinions aside. He objected to the excusal of jurors who opposed the death penalty on religious grounds and to the state's strikes of women jurors; the court accepted the state's explanation that those jurors had reservations about the death penalty. During questioning, one prospective juror began to say something about the clients of Bruce Harvey, and the judge stopped her. The defense asked for the whole panel to be dismissed. The trial court refused, and the appeals court found no harm because she had been stopped before she said anything damaging.
The state's case rested on the fingerprints, the hair comparisons and the DNA. An FBI DNA analyst testified, and the defense challenged both the analyst's qualifications and the reliability of the hair comparison; the trial court allowed the evidence and the Georgia court upheld it. The two September 1992 burglaries were admitted to show identity, scheme and course of conduct. The defense was limited in its questions about other possible suspects, because, the appeals court said, it never offered evidence linking any other person to the killings.
In its closing argument at the guilt phase the prosecution called Pace a "misogynistic, woman hating demon of the devil" and "Satan's lap dog." The Supreme Court of Georgia later called those remarks unprofessional, but held that they did not require a new trial given the strength of the evidence.
On March 5, 1996, the jury convicted Pace on every count.
The sentencing phase began immediately. The state put in evidence of Pace's earlier burglaries and other offenses. The defense relied, according to his later lawyers, on residual doubt and on mercy, calling relatives, neighbors, a former girlfriend and a minister.
The prosecutor's closing argument at this phase became the center of every later appeal. The Supreme Court of Georgia, the state's brief and the defense petition describe the same set of remarks:
He showed the jury a cartoon from a magazine depicting a verdict of not guilty "by virtue of insanity, ethnic rage, sexual abuse" and other excuses, and told jurors that the defense was blaming society rather than Pace. The defense said it had made no such argument.
He told jurors to set aside the testimony of Pace's family, because Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy also had families who spoke well of them. The trial court told jurors not to concern themselves with those cases.
He asked jurors to imagine waking up as one of the victims, and did so again for a second victim. The defense did not object to the first passage.
He said a life sentence would give Pace free room and board and a color television, and, after an objection, made a crude remark about life in prison.
He compared Pace with the thief crucified beside Jesus who did not repent, and said Pace had never said he was sorry. The defense moved for a mistrial on the ground that this was a comment on his right to stay silent. The trial court called the remark very close to the line but denied the motion.
He told jurors that they were the conscience of the community, that innocent blood was crying out for justice, and that a life sentence would mean the victims' lives did not matter.
He held up a book of Georgia criminal law, said that a verdict other than death would amount to tearing out the death penalty section, mimed tearing out a page and then mimed throwing the book away.
During deliberations the jury sent the judge a note asking whether it was possible to give a life sentence that ruled out any possibility of parole. The judge answered in writing that jurors were not to consider parole and should assume that any sentence they imposed would be carried out, according to the defense petition. The Supreme Court of Georgia held that the answer was correct.
On March 7, 1996, the jury recommended a death sentence for each of the four murders. It found 19 statutory aggravating circumstances in all. Pace was not sentenced on the felony murder counts. The court added six consecutive life sentences for the four rapes and two counts of aggravated sodomy.
Pace filed his notice of appeal on August 7, 1998, and the case was docketed in the Supreme Court of Georgia on February 2, 1999. Because he had been sentenced to death, the court considered both the trial and the sentences. Justice Hines wrote the opinion, decided December 3, 1999, which worked through 36 separate issues.
On the consent question, the court held that the form Pace signed did not limit the use of his blood and hair to the September 1992 investigation. The police did not have to tell him every other way the samples might be used, the court said, and they did not need fresh consent each time they compared his DNA profile with evidence from another case. His consent had been voluntary.
The court rejected his other challenges to the guilt phase. The four murders had been properly tried together because the evidence of each would have been admissible at a trial of the others to prove identity. Convictions for both malice murder and felony murder were not error, since he was sentenced only on the malice murder counts. The hair comparison met Georgia's test for scientific reliability, the FBI analyst was qualified, and the photographs and physical evidence had been properly admitted. The psychological profile and the information from Annie Kate Britt's neighbor had been available to the defense, so there was no violation of the duty to disclose evidence.
On the sentencing argument, the court went through each remark. It found no error in the use of the cartoon, the comparison with Dahmer, Bundy and Gacy, the "send a message" theme, the questions about remorse or the law-book gesture. It called one comment about prison unprofessional but harmless, and held that the religious references had not changed the outcome. The argument inviting jurors to put themselves in the victims' place was improper, the court said, but the defense had not objected, and the court held that it had not changed the result.
The court then carried out the proportionality review that Georgia law requires in death cases. It found that the sentences were not imposed under the influence of passion, prejudice or any other arbitrary factor, that the evidence supported the 19 aggravating circumstances, and that the sentences were not excessive or disproportionate to those imposed in similar cases, which it listed in an appendix of multiple-murder cases and murders committed during a rape or burglary. The judgment was affirmed. A motion for reconsideration was denied on December 20, 1999.
The justices did not all agree on the sentences. Chief Justice Benham concurred in the judgment except for one division, concerning evidence about electrocution. Justice Hunstein, joined by Presiding Justice Fletcher, concurred in the convictions but dissented from the affirmance of the death sentences. Justice Sears also wrote separately, agreeing with the convictions and proposing to withhold a ruling on the constitutionality of electrocution, then Georgia's method of execution, until the Supreme Court of the United States gave guidance.
Justice Hunstein's dissent focused on the argument asking jurors to imagine themselves as the victims. It was deliberate and extensive, she wrote, and it was repeated for a second victim. She noted that Georgia law clearly forbids prosecutors from urging jurors to put themselves in the victim's place. A sentencing jury, she wrote, has "moved beyond weighing evidence into weighing imponderables," and is deciding questions of mercy that cannot be measured as easily as proof of guilt. The jury's note about life without parole showed that it had still been open to a sentence short of death. In her view there was a reasonable probability that the improper argument had changed the outcome, and the death sentences should have been vacated. She concurred in the affirmance of the convictions.
Pace asked the Supreme Court of the United States to review the Georgia decision. On October 2, 2000, the Court declined, in Pace v. Georgia, 531 U.S. 839.
Pace then challenged his sentences in a state habeas corpus case in the Superior Court of Butts County. After an evidentiary hearing, that court denied relief on July 30, 2007. On January 12, 2009, the Supreme Court of Georgia refused to grant a certificate of probable cause to appeal, ending the state review.
On February 20, 2009, Pace filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, in Atlanta. On August 24, 2015, the district court denied relief without an evidentiary hearing. It deferred to the state court's ruling, as federal law requires unless a state decision is unreasonable, and treated the argument asking jurors to imagine themselves as the victims as the only remark the state court had found improper. The court granted a certificate of appealability on five issues, including the prosecutor's sentencing argument.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed on May 11, 2023, in an unpublished opinion. According to the state's brief, the court rested its decision on two grounds. First, because the Supreme Court of the United States had never held that even a widely condemned closing argument violated due process, the law was not clear enough for the federal courts to say that the Georgia court's ruling was beyond fair-minded disagreement. Second, even if the 1986 case of Darden v. Wainwright supplied a clear rule, the Georgia court's decision was still reasonable in light of what the Eleventh Circuit called the "enormous" aggravating evidence and the 19 aggravating circumstances. It also held that the Georgia court had considered the remarks together.
One member of the panel, Judge Rosenbaum, concurred only in the judgment, according to the defense petition. She called the prosecutor's remarks "squarely and obviously improper" and wrote that she concurred because the law required it. The Eleventh Circuit denied rehearing, both by the panel and by the full court, on July 11, 2023.
Pace's lawyers at the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta filed a petition for certiorari on November 8, 2023, in Pace v. Emmons, No. 23-5996, naming the warden of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. They asked the Court to decide whether the federal appeals courts are bound by Darden v. Wainwright as clearly established law in reviewing a prosecutor's argument, and whether the prosecutor's argument at Pace's sentencing, taken as a whole and set against the jury's question about parole, had denied him due process.
The Georgia Attorney General's office opposed the petition in a brief filed on December 22, 2023. It argued that the Eleventh Circuit had correctly held that the state court's ruling was a reasonable application of federal law. Pace's lawyers filed a reply on January 10, 2024.
The petition was set for the justices' private conference and then rescheduled several times between February and May 2024. On May 13, 2024, the Court denied it. Pace's lawyers asked for rehearing on June 7, 2024, pointing to conflicting Eleventh Circuit decisions on the same question; the Court denied rehearing on July 22, 2024.
Pace's appeals ended at a time when Georgia's executions had been on hold for several years. In April 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state agreed with lawyers for death row prisoners that it would not seek execution warrants until three conditions were met: the Supreme Court of Georgia's judicial emergency order had expired, the Department of Corrections had restored normal visitation, and a vaccine was readily available to the public. Six months after that, the state would ask for the longest warrant period allowed and space executions at least 30 days apart.
The agreement covered only prisoners whose federal rehearing petitions had been denied while the emergency order was in force. That order expired on June 30, 2021. Pace's rehearing petition was denied in 2023, so the agreement did not cover him. The same was true of two other men on Georgia's death row, Jerry Heidler and Warren King, and of Willie James Pye, who was executed in March 2024.
In April 2024, about a month after Pye's execution, Pace, Heidler and King sued state officials in federal court in Atlanta. They argued that leaving them out of the agreement violated their rights to equal protection and due process, because the prisoners it covered would have normal visiting conditions and a predictable warrant schedule while they faced pandemic-era visiting limits and a backlog in preparing for clemency. In 2024 the district court dismissed the suit for lack of standing, reasoning that only district attorneys could seek execution warrants, so any harm was not imminent.
On June 26, 2026, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit (Judges Rosenbaum, Grant and Luck) reversed that ruling and sent the case back. The panel held that the three men faced a substantial risk that the state would seek their executions soon, pointing to the state's defense of its right to execute them, its failure to disavow seeking warrants and its execution of Pye, the only other prisoner in the same position. The court stressed that it was not deciding whether the men would win. Its opinion described Pace as having "raped and strangled to death four women," three of whom were more than 78 years old. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the ruling on June 30, 2026; it said the state Attorney General's office declined to comment and that the men were represented by a federal defender.
The Georgia Department of Corrections' list of people under a death sentence, as of June 30, 2026, includes Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace, sentenced in March 1996 in Fulton County. The list counted 33 people under a death sentence in its custody at that date. In the 2026 ruling, the Eleventh Circuit did not report that any execution warrant had been sought for him.
No admission by Pace appears in the court rulings. At his sentencing his relatives told the jury they did not believe he had committed the crimes, and his trial lawyers relied in part on residual doubt. The appeals that followed did not challenge the DNA results as such; they turned on the consent to the samples, jury selection and, most of all, the prosecutor's sentencing argument.
The September 1992 killing led the police to ask for his samples, but the FBI and state crime laboratories could not link him to the evidence in her case, and no charge against him in her death appears in the court record.
The spelling of one victim's surname differs between rulings: McLendon in the Georgia court's 1999 majority opinion, McClendon in its dissent and in later federal filings.
July 1964: Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace is born (month and year per the Georgia Department of Corrections).
August 28, 1988: Lula Bell McAfee, 86, is found dead in Atlanta.
September 10, 1988: Mattie Mae McLendon, 78, is found dead in Atlanta.
February 4, 1989: Johnnie Mae Martin, 79, is found dead in Atlanta.
March 4, 1989: Annie Kate Britt, 42, is found dead in Atlanta. DNA tests later show that one man was responsible for all four deaths.
September 17, 1992: Another woman is killed in Atlanta; laboratories later find no link to Pace.
September 24, 1992: A 69-year-old woman fires at an intruder in her home; fingerprints are lifted.
September 30, 1992: An elderly woman fights off an armed intruder; fingerprints are lifted.
October 2, 1992: Pace, 28, is arrested for the September 30 break-in and consents to hair and blood samples.
June 22, 1993: A Fulton County grand jury indicts him on four counts each of malice murder, felony murder and rape and two counts of aggravated sodomy.
August 13, 1993: The state files notice that it will seek the death penalty.
January 22, 1996: The trial begins.
March 5, 1996: The jury convicts him on all counts.
March 7, 1996: The jury recommends four death sentences; six consecutive life terms are added.
December 3, 1999: The Supreme Court of Georgia affirms, with two justices dissenting on the sentences.
October 2, 2000: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari.
July 30, 2007: The Butts County Superior Court denies state habeas relief.
January 12, 2009: The Supreme Court of Georgia denies a certificate of probable cause to appeal.
February 20, 2009: Pace files a federal habeas petition.
August 24, 2015: The federal district court in Atlanta denies relief.
May 11, 2023: The Eleventh Circuit affirms; rehearing is denied July 11, 2023.
April 2024: Pace, Heidler and King sue over their exclusion from the 2021 execution agreement.
May 13, 2024: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari; rehearing is denied July 22, 2024.
June 26, 2026: The Eleventh Circuit revives their suit.
June 30, 2026: The Department of Corrections lists Pace under a death sentence.