On April 12, 1988, a panel of Army officers and enlisted soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, sentenced Ronald Adrin Gray to death. Five months earlier, in Cumberland County Superior Court, the same man had pleaded guilty to the second-degree murders of two other women and taken three consecutive and five concurrent life terms. One series of crimes had been divided between two sovereigns. North Carolina took the deaths of Linda Jean Coats and Tammy Wilson. The Army took the two it could claim as its own: Private Laura Lee Vickery-Clay, a soldier, and Kimberly Ann Ruggles, 23, a mother of three whose business, the military’s highest court later noted, took her onto the post.
Nearly four decades on, Gray is still held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the only man on military death row whose execution a president has approved. His case is the clearest modern example of what happens when serial murder enters the military justice system. The rules change. A panel replaces a jury, the appeals run through courts most lawyers never see, and the last word belongs to the commander in chief.
Gray is not alone. In Krasnoyarsk, a Russian army deserter was tried by the military court of the Siberian Military District for 19 murders. In Olomouc in 1927, a Czechoslovak military court sent a thief and deserter to the gallows. In northern Greece a reserve officer serving with a commando unit was tried under military jurisdiction and sentenced twice to death. Canada, by contrast, kept the murders of a serving colonel out of its military courts entirely. And in the United States, convictions handed down by courts-martial followed several men for years, into civilian sentencing hearings and parole files.
By the mid-1980s Gray was a Specialist Four and a cook with the 82nd Airborne Division. The Associated Press, reporting on the record in 2008, described four murders and eight rapes in and around Fayetteville between April 1986 and January 1987. He was arrested in Cumberland County in January 1987 on a rape charge and was soon linked to the rest.
Both systems had a claim on him. The crimes broke North Carolina law, and as a soldier he answered to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military capital charges were preferred on August 5, 1987. In November the state case closed with his pleas. The general court-martial sat at Fort Bragg from December 1987 into April 1988, with Raymond C. McRorie as military judge. Gray pleaded not guilty. The panel convicted him of the premeditated murders of Vickery-Clay and Ruggles, the attempted premeditated murder of a woman soldier who survived and testified against him, three rapes, and robbery, forcible sodomy, burglary and larceny. The vote for death was unanimous. On July 29, 1988, the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, acting as convening authority, approved the sentence.
The court-martial had its own way of choosing jurors, and that became the heart of the appeal. Six members were seated after the prosecution used a peremptory challenge to remove one of only two Black members of the panel. On May 28, 1999, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces affirmed the findings and the sentence by three votes to two. The dissenters, Judge Effron and Chief Judge Cox, concluded that the military judge had never decided whether the prosecutor’s stated reason was genuine or a pretext, as the Supreme Court’s decision in Batson v. Kentucky requires, and would have set aside both the findings and the sentence. The majority held that the judge had in effect accepted the explanation. It also upheld military jurisdiction, pointing out that Gray was a soldier, that Vickery-Clay was a soldier, that Ruggles did business on the post, and that both deaths came to light on Fort Bragg.
The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on March 19, 2001. Direct review was over.
Under Article 71 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a military death sentence cannot be carried out until the President approves it. For Gray that step took seven years. The Secretary of the Army recommended approval in late 2005, and on July 28, 2008, President George W. Bush signed. No president had approved a military execution since Dwight Eisenhower in 1957, in the case of Army Private John Bennett, who was hanged at Fort Leavenworth in 1961. The White House said the President believed "the facts of this case leave no doubt that the sentence is just and warranted."
In November 2008 the Secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, set the execution for December 10 at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, where Army personnel would carry it out under an agreement with the Bureau of Prisons. It would have been the first American military execution since 1961. On November 26, 2008, Judge Richard Rogers of the federal court in Kansas, which has jurisdiction over Fort Leavenworth, stayed it so that Gray could seek a writ of habeas corpus.
What followed showed how few people had ever walked this path. Federal judges reviewing a court-martial are bound by the Supreme Court’s 1953 decision in Burns v. Wilson: if the military courts gave a claim full and fair consideration, a civilian court may not decide it again. On September 29, 2015, Judge J. Thomas Marten applied that rule to the claims Gray had raised on direct appeal. He rejected on the merits the argument that the military had no power to try a capital case for crimes committed in the United States in peacetime, relying on Solorio v. United States and Loving v. United States, under which military jurisdiction turns on the accused’s status as a service member. Newer claims went back and forth between Kansas and the military appellate courts. On November 13, 2017, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces closed its door: "Appellant has exhausted all of his remedies in the military justice system." The Supreme Court denied review again on June 28, 2018.
Robert Dunham, then executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told Stars and Stripes that the case was complicated because "nobody knew what the process was because it hasn’t happened before." A National Institute of Military Justice blog reported on January 1, 2023, that a new habeas petition by Gray was pending in Kansas and had been stayed since March 2022. In December 2024, when President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal civilian death row, the four men on military death row were left out, CityView reported. In February 2026 the Army issued an internal plan, "Operation Resolute Justice," to prepare for executions if a president ordered them, ABC News and Task & Purpose reported in June 2026. As of those reports, Gray had no execution date.
Edward Bowman, Kimberly Ruggles’s father, sat in a Kansas courtroom with Gray in 2015 for the first time. "I want to live long enough to see him die," he told the West Orange Times & Observer.
Vadim Yershov was drafted in May 1991 and sent to serve in the Russian Far East, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported in a 2026 reconstruction of the case. Other soldiers bullied him, according to the Krasnoyarsk news site NGS24. He wounded one of them, and on April 30, 1992, he left his unit and made his way back to Krasnoyarsk. Less than two months later, on June 28, 1992, he killed a 42-year-old woman there, the first death in a series that ran until October 1995.
Most of those who died were girls and women; some were men, killed during robberies. Yershov kept a private record, a notebook page ruled into columns with one line for each victim and a code for whether the person had lived or died. He followed the newspapers and the television news to learn the outcome and then filled in the column, MK reported. He was arrested in Krasnoyarsk on October 29, 1995, after an attempted robbery.
The case never left military hands. In September 1996 a group from the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow joined the investigation, and the case went to court in September 1997. Andrei Antsiferov, who acted as state prosecutor, later described to MK how investigators took Yershov’s statements, checked them against the table and against old unsolved files, and merged dozens of cases into one. That work cleared two men. In Divnogorsk a husband who had confessed to killing his wife was serving a 10-year sentence when Yershov admitted the killing; in Krasnoyarsk a schoolboy had been charged with the murder of a classmate. Both were later rehabilitated, the Russian term for being formally cleared.
On June 9, 1998, the military court of the Siberian Military District convicted Yershov of 19 murders, with attempted murders and other charges, and sentenced him to death by shooting. Forensic psychiatrists had described a sadistic disorder, but the court held him sane and answerable. He lost consciousness while the verdict was read. On January 28, 1999, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of Russia rejected his appeal.
The sentence was never carried out. Russia had undertaken, on joining the Council of Europe, to stop executions, and on February 2, 1999, five days after the Military Collegium ruled, the Constitutional Court barred new death sentences until jury trials operated nationwide, Vedomosti recounted in 2026. Yershov’s sentence was replaced with life imprisonment. MK reported in October 2026 that he was held in the Black Dolphin colony in the Orenburg region. When NGS24 asked for the case file in 2024, the Second Eastern District Military Court, which now holds it, declined to release it.
Martin Lecián was born in 1900 near Uherský Ostroh in southeastern Moravia and was sent to a reformatory for theft at 14. He twice deserted from military service, Novinky.cz reported, and by 27 he had spent four years behind bars for theft, desertion, fraud and violence, according to Czech Radio. In 1926 he was arrested in Přerov and placed in a military hospital, where doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. He escaped from the military hospital in Olomouc and set off on a run of thefts across Moravia.
The newspapers made him a celebrity. Songs were written about him, and parts of the public came to see him as a Robin Hood or a Jánošík, the outlaw of Slovak legend. Czech Radio’s 2018 history of the case calls him a common thief who robbed anyone and fired without a second thought. On March 8, 1927, near Uherský Ostroh, he killed a gendarme sergeant named Stuchlý. The army joined the gendarmes and police in the hunt that followed, Blesk reported, and it lasted about two months. Lecián was arrested at Nový Bohumín on April 24, 1927.
A military court at Olomouc tried him. The hearing ran for more than four months, Czech Radio said, with hundreds of witnesses. He was convicted, Novinky.cz reported in 2018, of 75 thefts and robberies and three murders, and sentenced to hang. While his plea for clemency was pending, he and another deserter tried to break out of the divisional prison at Olomouc on the night of September 24, 1927. A 22-year-old soldier on guard duty, Ferencz Kiss, was killed. Czech Radio calls him Lecián’s last victim. Whether Lecián was ever tried separately for that death has not been reported.
The president refused clemency. Lecián was hanged at Olomouc on October 6, 1927, the last man executed by the state executioner Leopold Wohlschläger, who had held the post since 1888. One later article gives the date as October 5.
In northern Greece, from September 1981 to December 1982, a series of assaults on women in Drama, Xanthi and Thessaloniki left two women dead and others badly hurt. Survivors described a man in army uniform, and the army joined the search. According to Parapolitika, one of the search teams was put under the command of a 22-year-old reserve officer from the 5th Commando unit at Drama, Kyriakos Papachronis (Κυριάκος Παπαχρόνης).
The case turned on military paperwork. On the night of the last assault, December 8, 1982, an order for a night exercise had kept soldiers in camp, so only officers had been in town. Two officers, Christos Triantafyllidis and Tasos Kosmidis, went through the records of who had slept outside the camp. Only Papachronis had no alibi, and he had come back late, at 7:00 in the morning instead of 6:15, Athens Voice reported. The security police of Drama arrested him on the evening of December 13, 1982. He denied everything, then confessed.
Because he was a serving officer, he was tried under military justice. The trial ran from June 14 to 18, 1983, in the building of the Five-Member Court of Appeal in Thessaloniki, under the jurisdiction of the Permanent Military Court of Kavala, Athens Voice wrote; later local reports name the Permanent Military Court of Thessaloniki. Three hundred police officers guarded the hearing. Forty witnesses testified, and four psychiatrists who had examined him in detention judged him mentally sound. The court accepted no mitigating circumstances.
He was convicted of the homicides of Georgia Theocharidou, killed in September 1981, and Anastasia Alexandridou, a student, killed in Thessaloniki on August 15, 1982, with attempted homicides, attempted rapes and a series of bombings, among them one at the gate of his own camp. The published summaries of the counts differ. He was sentenced twice to death. "Send me to the firing squad," he told the court, according to Parapolitika, "because if I get out, I will do the same things again." The appeal court upheld the sentences in July 1984.
The death sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment; the date has not been reported. On December 8, 2004, after a little more than 21 years in custody, he was released from the judicial prison of Larissa under conditions that barred him from Xanthi, Drama and Thessaloniki. In March 2024 Proto Thema reported that he lived isolated with his wife, in poor health, and said he regretted what he had done.
Col. Russell Williams commanded 8 Wing at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, the country’s largest air base, from July 15, 2009. He had joined the Canadian Forces in 1987, flown prime ministers and royalty as a VIP transport pilot, and commanded Camp Mirage, a logistics base whose existence the government did not officially acknowledge. On February 7, 2010, he was arrested in Ottawa. The next day, in Belleville, he was charged with the first-degree murders of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, 38, who served with 437 Transport Squadron at his own base, and of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of the Belleville area. The Chief of the Air Staff, Lt.-Gen. André Deschamps, relieved him of command, citing "the seriousness of the charges."
One of the dead was a corporal under his command. Yet the case went nowhere near a court-martial. Canada’s National Defence Act, as it then stood, provided that "a service tribunal shall not try any person charged with" murder or manslaughter committed in Canada. The Ontario Provincial Police investigated, the Crown prosecuted, and the colonel answered to the Ontario Superior Court like any civilian.
On October 18, 2010, Williams pleaded guilty to all 88 counts: the two murders, two sexual assaults and two forcible confinements of women in Tweed in September 2009, and 82 counts of breaking and entering or attempting to. On October 21 Justice Robert F. Scott sentenced him to two concurrent life terms with no eligibility for parole for 25 years, and called him "Canada’s bright shining lie."
What the military could do, it did. On October 22, on the recommendation of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, Governor General David Johnston revoked Williams’s commission. "His actions have constituted a fundamental breach of trust, duty and valour, upon which the commission is based," Natynczyk said, calling the decision extraordinary and possibly the first of its kind in Canadian history. The forces released him under "service misconduct," the most serious category. They recovered his South-West Asia Service Medal and his Canadian Forces' Decoration, and they burned the uniforms he had kept, each one marked with his name. Cmdr. Hubert Genest told CTV that in 25 years he had never known returned uniforms to be burned. On December 10, 2010, the Department of National Defence announced that his release was complete.
In American cases a court-martial often surfaces not as the trial that matters but as the earlier record that shapes the later one.
Thomas Warren Whisenhant, born in Prichard, Alabama, was convicted by an Air Force general court-martial of assault with intent to murder a woman, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals recorded in 1979. A federal sentence of 20 years for assault with intent to murder was imposed on March 14, 1966, the court noted in a later opinion, and he spent about seven years in a penitentiary. In October 1976 he was a shipyard worker on federal parole. He was arrested on October 18, 1976, two days after the death of Cheryl Lynn Payton, 24, in Theodore, Mobile County.
At his first sentencing hearing, in 1977, the court-martial conviction went before the jury as part of his record. He was sentenced to death. That judgment was reversed in 1979, and at a retrial in August 1981 he was convicted again of the capital murder of Cheryl Payton. The same year he pleaded guilty to the first-degree murders of Patricia Hitt, killed in 1975, and Venora Hyatt, killed in 1976, and received life without parole for each. His case passed through two trials and three sentencing hearings. The Eleventh Circuit denied his federal habeas appeal on February 3, 2009, and the Supreme Court declined review that November. Alabama executed him at Holman Prison in Atmore on May 27, 2010.
Mark Alan Smith’s Army record sits in a parole file. The Illinois Prisoner Review Board’s 2014 file records that he was court-martialed in 1967 for an assault on four fellow soldiers who were Black; the same file dates his enlistment to 1969 and does not explain the conflict. Smith served in West Germany, and in a book, Legally Sane, written with his defense lawyer, Harold McKenney, he said he had killed young women there, eight by the Daily Herald’s account. No German court ever tried him. The board’s file recorded suspicions of three to eight such killings, and Smith himself told the board there were two. None of these claims has been tested in court.
What is proven is American. Smith pleaded guilty in Illinois in 1971 to the murders of Jean Bianchi, 27, and Janice Bolyard, and to the murder, with other charges, of Jean Ann Lingenfelter, 17, all in 1970, and was convicted at a stipulated bench trial in Arkansas of the murder of Obie Faye Ash, 20, in Baxter County in December 1969. His Illinois terms add up to 448 to 500 years, with an Arkansas life sentence waiting. On August 29, 2024, the board denied him parole unanimously and set his next hearing five years away.
Cleophus Prince Jr. was tried in a San Diego courtroom, but the military record traveled with him there too. When the California Supreme Court reviewed his request to move the trial out of San Diego County, it listed what the local press had reported before jury selection, and among those items was his Navy court-martial for theft. A jury convicted Prince of six counts of first degree murder, for the deaths of six women in San Diego in 1990, with other charges, and fixed the penalty at death on November 5, 1993. The court affirmed the judgment on April 30, 2007, holding that the publicity had not denied him a fair trial. As of June 1, 2026, he was listed as under sentence of death in California, with state habeas counsel appointed and no petition pending.
David Edward Maust was a soldier stationed in Germany in 1974 when he killed a teenage boy. He was convicted in that death while in the Army and served more than three years in the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth, the Associated Press reported in 2003. The boy’s name was never reported.
In 1981 Maust was convicted of the murder of a 15-year-old boy near Elgin, Illinois. He was released from an Illinois prison in 1999. In 2003 three young people from his neighborhood in Hammond, Indiana, were killed: Nicholas James, 19, James Raganyi, 16, and Michael Dennis, 13. Their deaths came to light in Hammond in December 2003, and Maust was charged with James Raganyi’s murder on December 11. Lake County prosecutors sought the death penalty and withdrew it in exchange for his pleas. In the fall of 2005 he pleaded guilty to all three murders, with other charges, and in December he received three consecutive life terms without parole. On January 20, 2006, he died after hanging himself in the Lake County Jail, United Press International reported, leaving a note in which he admitted five killings.
Paul Durousseau enlisted in the Army in October 1992 and served in Germany, his appeal lawyers told the Florida Supreme Court, describing about six years of service that ended in a bad conduct discharge. WJXT News4Jax in Jacksonville reported in June 2003 that he had been court-martialed in 1997 while stationed near Columbus, Georgia, and acquitted of every charge, including rape and kidnapping, except receiving stolen property. The station described the discharge as dishonorable. The two accounts differ.
The acquittal did not end the military chapter. In 2003, after Durousseau was charged with five murders in Jacksonville, Georgia charged him in the 1997 death of Tracy Habersham, 27, in Columbus, where he had been stationed. No Georgia trial or verdict has been reported. Investigators said in 2003 that they were reviewing unsolved deaths in every place he had lived in the previous ten years, Germany among them, and News4Jax reported in 2017 that German authorities suspected him in killings there in the early 1990s. He was never charged with any of them.
In Florida he was tried only once. On June 8, 2007, a Duval County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Tyresa Mack, 24, a mother of three, who died in Jacksonville on July 26, 1999. At sentencing the trial judge weighed his roughly six years in the Army as mitigation and gave it little or moderate weight, along with the rest of his history. Prosecutors dropped the five other murder charges, for the deaths of Nichole Williams, Nikia Kilpatrick, Shawanda McCallister, Jovanna Jefferson and Surita Cohen, fearing that an acquittal in any of them could put the Mack conviction at risk, News4Jax reported. He was never tried for those deaths. His death sentence fell in 2017 under Hurst v. Florida, and when a second penalty jury split 10 to 2, he was resentenced on December 10, 2021, to life without parole.
The military courts in these cases did not try soldiers for soldiers' crimes. Gray, Yershov, Lecián and Papachronis were tried by military tribunals for murders of civilians and soldiers alike, committed far from any battlefield, because of who they were rather than what they had done. Desertion put Yershov and Lecián in front of military judges. A reserve commission did the same for Papachronis, and a soldier’s status, upheld under Solorio, kept Gray before a panel at Fort Bragg.
Those tribunals did not move faster or end more cleanly than civilian courts. Lecián’s case, in 1927, ended at the gallows within six months of his arrest. Yershov’s and Papachronis’s death sentences dissolved into life terms as their countries turned away from capital punishment. Gray’s, approved by a president, has been held up in the federal courts in Kansas since 2008.
Elsewhere the military’s part was smaller and stranger. Canada’s law took Russell Williams’s murders out of military hands, and the forces were left with the one sanction that was theirs alone: his commission, his medals and the uniforms that bore his name. In Alabama, Illinois and California, a court-martial record from years earlier reappeared in a sentencing hearing, a parole file or a list of pretrial newspaper stories. Maust served his Army sentence at Fort Leavenworth and went on to kill again. Durousseau walked out of a court-martial acquitted of all but one charge and was convicted of murder in Jacksonville eight years after Tyresa Mack’s death.
• 1927, March 8: Martin Lecián kills the gendarme sergeant Stuchlý near Uherský Ostroh, Moravia.
• 1927, April 24: Lecián is arrested at Nový Bohumín.
• 1927, September 24 to 25: during a breakout attempt at the divisional prison in Olomouc, the guard Ferencz Kiss, 22, is killed.
• 1927, October 6: Lecián is hanged at Olomouc after conviction by a military court.
• 1966, March 14: Thomas Whisenhant receives a federal sentence of 20 years for assault with intent to murder.
• 1967: Mark Alan Smith is court-martialed for an assault on four fellow soldiers (Prisoner Review Board file).
• 1971: Smith pleads guilty in Illinois to three murders; on March 18 an Arkansas life sentence is imposed.
• 1974: David Edward Maust, serving in the Army in Germany, kills a teenage boy; he serves more than three years at Fort Leavenworth.
• 1976, October 18: Whisenhant is arrested in Mobile County, Alabama.
• 1979, February 20: Whisenhant’s first death sentence is reversed.
• 1981, August 6: Whisenhant is convicted again of capital murder; the same year he pleads guilty to two more murders.
• 1982, December 13: Kyriakos Papachronis is arrested in Drama.
• 1983, June 14 to 18: Papachronis is tried under military jurisdiction in Thessaloniki and sentenced twice to death.
• 1984, July: the appeal court upholds the Papachronis sentences.
• 1987, January: Ronald Gray is arrested in Cumberland County, North Carolina.
• 1987, November: Gray pleads guilty in state court to two second-degree murders and other felonies.
• 1988, April 12: a general court-martial at Fort Bragg sentences Gray to death.
• 1992, April 30: Vadim Yershov deserts his unit and returns to Krasnoyarsk.
• 1993, November 5: Cleophus Prince Jr. is sentenced to death in San Diego.
• 1995, October 29: Yershov is arrested in Krasnoyarsk.
• 1997: Paul Durousseau is court-martialed near Columbus, Georgia, and acquitted of all charges but receiving stolen property (News4Jax).
• 1998, June 9: the military court of the Siberian Military District sentences Yershov to death for 19 murders.
• 1999, January 28: the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of Russia rejects Yershov’s appeal.
• 1999, May 28: the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces affirms Gray’s death sentence, 3 to 2.
• 2001, March 19: the U.S. Supreme Court declines to review Gray’s case.
• 2003, February 6: Durousseau is arrested in Jacksonville on a probation violation; murder charges follow in June.
• 2003, December 11: Maust is charged with murder in Lake County, Indiana.
• 2004, December 8: Papachronis is released from prison in Larissa under conditions.
• 2005, December: Maust is sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole.
• 2006, January 20: Maust dies after hanging himself in the Lake County Jail.
• 2007, April 30: the California Supreme Court affirms the Prince judgment.
• 2007, June 8: Durousseau is convicted of the first-degree murder of Tyresa Mack.
• 2008, July 28: President George W. Bush approves Gray’s death sentence.
• 2008, November 26: a federal judge in Kansas stays Gray’s execution, set for December 10.
• 2010, February 8: Col. Russell Williams is charged in Belleville, Ontario, and relieved of command.
• 2010, May 27: Alabama executes Whisenhant.
• 2010, October 18 and 21: Williams pleads guilty to 88 counts and is sentenced to two life terms.
• 2010, October 22: Williams’s commission is revoked.
• 2010, December 10: Williams’s release from the Canadian Forces is complete.
• 2015, September 29: a federal judge in Kansas denies most of Gray’s habeas claims under Burns v. Wilson.
• 2017, November 13: the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces rules that Gray has exhausted his military remedies.
• 2018, June 28: the Supreme Court again declines Gray’s case.
• 2021, December 10: Durousseau is resentenced to life without parole.
• 2024, August 29: the Illinois Prisoner Review Board denies Smith parole.
• 2024, December: military death row is left out of President Biden’s commutations.
• 2026, February: the Army issues its "Operation Resolute Justice" execution plan.