In the early hours of September 30, 1992, Susie Sublett, eighty-three, woke in her house in Vine City, the Atlanta neighborhood west of downtown, to find a man going through her handbag. He had found the .22 pistol she kept under her pillow and told her he would blow her brains out. She fought him, got out of the house and reached a neighbor, who called the police. Six days earlier, at three in the morning, sixty-nine-year-old Sarah Grogan had found an intruder in her kitchen, got hold of her own gun and fired a shot, and he ran. Both times he had come in through a window, and at both houses a crime scene technician lifted fingerprints. They belonged to Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace, twenty-eight, whose prints the police already had.
Pace was born in Atlanta in July 1964. He had convictions for drug possession and burglary; the best known of the burglaries was a break-in on December 28, 1990, at the Vine City home of Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., from which he took a radio. He pleaded guilty on February 15, 1991, served a few months as what officials called a model inmate, and was released on July 11, 1991, because the prisons were overcrowded. He was arrested for the Sublett attack on October 2, 1992.
The police had been looking for a strangler in Vine City and the streets around it for four years. Lula Bell McAfee, eighty-six, was found by a boarder at her house on Simon Street on August 28, 1988, kneeling naked on her bed, sexually assaulted and strangled with her bra and a rag. Mattie Mae McClendon, seventy-eight, whose name also appears as McLendon, was found dead in her apartment near the Atlanta University Center on September 10; there was no ligature and at first no sign of foul play, but a window had been broken, and the death was ruled asphyxiation. Johnnie Mae Martin, seventy-nine, a retired practical nurse known in the neighborhood as John-John, was strangled with a shoelace in her bed on February 4, 1989, after someone forced a back window; her younger sister, Ruth Lindsey, called the police when she stopped answering the phone. On March 4 Annie Kate Britt, forty-two, was found strangled with a sock still knotted around her neck. Accounts differ on who found her, her sister or her brother-in-law. All four women lived alone, all four homes had been broken into and searched, and all four women had been raped; two had also been sodomized. The medical examiner sent the semen samples to the FBI laboratory, which found the same DNA profile in each. The police knew one man had killed all four without knowing who he was.
At the time of his arrest the police were also investigating the killing of Mary Hudson, seventy-seven, known as Miz Mary, who had been beaten and strangled in her duplex near the Georgia Dome on September 18, 1992. It was for the Hudson inquiry that they asked Pace to give hair and blood, and the consent form he signed named her as the victim and said nothing of the four earlier murders. The laboratories could not connect him to Mary Hudson, who unlike the others was found fully clothed and had not been sexually assaulted; she had been frightened of the drug trade in the neighborhood, and he was never charged with her death. They could connect him to the other four. His pubic hair was consistent with hairs on the sweatpants Annie Kate Britt had worn and on a sheet beside Johnnie Mae Martin's body, and his DNA matched the semen from all four killings. A DNA expert put the chance of a coincidental match at one in five hundred million for McAfee, Martin and Britt and one in a hundred and fifty million for McClendon. On November 25, 1992, Police Chief Eldrin Bell named him as the prime suspect in the Vine City killings.
A Fulton County grand jury indicted him on June 22, 1993, and the state gave notice that it would seek death. The trial ran before Judge Long in the winter of 1996. The prosecutor, Herman Sloan, told the jury that blood and hair from the accused matched the murder scenes; the defense lawyer, Nancy Mau, said the science meant nothing and that the state was prosecuting a convenient man. On March 5, 1996, the jury convicted him of four counts of malice murder, four of felony murder, four of rape and two of aggravated sodomy, together with burglaries that included the break-in at the King home and the attempted rape of a twelve-year-old girl in 1987. It found nineteen statutory aggravating circumstances, and on March 7 he was sentenced to death on each murder count, over his family's pleas. He showed no emotion.
On appeal he argued that the police had gone beyond the consent he gave for the Hudson inquiry and had obtained it by deceit. The trial court had found the consent voluntary, and the Supreme Court of Georgia agreed and affirmed the convictions on December 3, 1999. Federal habeas relief was denied by the Northern District of Georgia on August 24, 2015; the Eleventh Circuit affirmed on May 11, 2023, and the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case on May 13, 2024. He is held on death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, and in 2026 he was one of three Georgia death-row prisoners appealing together in a civil rights case against the state's corrections department. In 2005 Coretta Scott King left the Vine City house for a condominium in Buckhead after repeated burglaries; the reports of her move recalled her encounter with Pace.