On the evening of January 11, 1959, Carroll Vernon Jackson Jr., his wife Mildred and their two small daughters left her parents' home in Louisa County, Virginia, to drive about fifteen miles home. They did not arrive. Their car was found the next morning, empty, partly on the shoulder of the road, with the skid marks of another vehicle nearby. In early March the bodies of Carroll Jackson and the baby, Janet, were found in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Mildred Jackson and five-year-old Susan were found later that month across the state line, near Gambrills, Maryland.
The man convicted for the crime was Melvin Davis Rees Jr., who was arrested by the FBI in June 1960. A federal jury in Maryland found him guilty of kidnapping Mildred and Susan Jackson, and he received two life sentences. A jury in Spotsylvania County then convicted him of the first-degree murder of Carroll Jackson and fixed his punishment at death. He was never put to death. In the mid-1960s, when he tried to drop his last appeal, psychiatrists found him mentally ill, and a federal judge ruled that he could not make a rational choice about his own case. The U.S. Supreme Court then set his petition aside, and it stayed there for about twenty-eight years, until Rees died in prison in 1995. The Court cited the case for decades afterward, and in 2013 it finally explained what the Rees orders did and did not mean.
Little is known of Rees's early life, and his date and place of birth are not on record. His parents lived in Hyattsville, Maryland, outside Washington, and he sometimes slept at their house; the Fourth Circuit described him as an occasional visitor there rather than a resident. A psychologist who examined him in the 1960s called him "a highly intelligent man, well educated," according to the federal court papers quoted by the legal scholar Phyllis L. Crocker. His parents paid for the lawyer who handled his appeals.
He was a working musician. The Virginia trial evidence showed that he played in an orchestra in Alexandria in late December 1958, that he had been booked to play the vibraphone at a Washington restaurant on January 11, 1959, and that he gave music lessons at a music school in Washington. In January 1959 he was living in a beach house in Norfolk, Virginia, with a friend and a woman.
Carroll Vernon Jackson Jr. and Mildred Ann Jackson lived in Louisa County, in central Virginia, with their daughters, Susan Ann, who was five, and Janet, who was about one year old. Little else of their lives is on record, not even Carroll Jackson's age and work or Mildred Jackson's age. On January 11, 1959, the family spent the evening at her parents' home in the same county and set out for home after dark.
The Jacksons' car was found the next morning partly on the shoulder of the road, with no one in it. According to the federal trial court's summary of the evidence, as quoted by Crocker, Rees forced the Jacksons' car off the road in Louisa County that night. Near Fredericksburg he shot Carroll Jackson. The infant, Janet, was injured and died. Rees then drove Mildred and Susan to Maryland, where, the court found, he beat both of them to death.
On March 4, 1959, the bodies of Carroll Jackson and Janet were found in Spotsylvania County. The Virginia medical examiner, Dr. Geoffrey T. Mann, testified that Jackson had been shot with a .38 caliber bullet. At the scene, investigators found his broken eyeglasses and a pair of plastic pistol grips. On March 21, the bodies of Mildred and Susan Jackson were found near Gambrills, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
The court opinions give different accounts of how the baby died. Rees was never prosecuted for her death.
How the investigation of 1959 unfolded is largely unrecorded. The story resumes on June 24, 1960, when FBI agents arrested Rees on a federal warrant charging unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for another murder in Maryland. The victim of that Maryland case has never been named on the record, and how it ended is unknown. The place of arrest is also given two ways. The Supreme Court of Virginia and the federal district court in Maryland both said he was arrested in Memphis, Tennessee. The Fourth Circuit, in 1965, placed the arrest in West Memphis, Arkansas.
The same day, FBI agents went to his parents' house in Hyattsville. They were looking for a pistol that they believed matched the grips found beside Carroll Jackson's body, and for other evidence. His father signed a written consent to a search, and his mother agreed aloud. In a crawl space in the attic the agents found a locked accordion case with a tag bearing another person's name, address and telephone number. His father did not recognize it and agreed that it should be forced open.
Inside were a .38 caliber Colt Cobra revolver with a holster, obscene drawings, newspaper pictures of the Jackson family, and a handwritten account of the crime in Rees's handwriting. The appellate courts describe these items in the same terms, though the Virginia opinion gives the date of the search once as June 24, 1960, and once as January 24, 1960.
The prosecution traced the revolver. It had been sold new to a man who replaced its plastic grips with simulated-horn grips, bought a holster, and in 1957 sold the gun, the holster and the spare plastic grips to Rees. At the Virginia trial, two FBI specialists testified about the gun. Allison C. Simms found minute traces of human blood on it, though he could not type the blood. George A. Berley concluded, from marks on the inside of the right grip found at the scene, that it had been fitted to the revolver.
Rees was tried first in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, before Chief Judge Thomsen, on two counts under the federal kidnapping statute: carrying Mildred Jackson and her daughter Susan from Virginia into Maryland. The jury found him guilty on both counts but did not recommend death, and he received two life sentences. He did not appeal. In that trial, testimony about an earlier roadside incident in Maryland, in which Rees was accused of attacking a woman after forcing her car off the road, was allowed into evidence.
About six months after the federal trial, Virginia tried him in the Circuit Court of Spotsylvania County for the murder of Carroll Jackson. Judge John D. Butzner Jr. presided. The prosecutor was T. Stokeley Coleman, the Commonwealth's Attorney. Rees was defended by two appointed Fredericksburg lawyers, A. W. Garnett and Joseph L. Savage Jr.
The prosecution's case was circumstantial. The friend who shared the Norfolk house testified that Rees told him he had arranged for someone else to fill his Washington engagement on January 11; the restaurant's manager and the orchestra leader could not say whether Rees had played that night. Rees's parents testified that he arrived at their house at 10:30 on the morning of January 12, seemed normal, and helped gather firewood. From 3:30 to 9 that evening he taught at the music school. One of his students testified that he looked sloppy and unshaven, in clothes that looked slept in, perhaps with mud on his trousers.
The housemate also testified that after the bodies were found he accused Rees of the killings, and that Rees made no denial and drove his car into another car. A witness placed Rees and his car in Gordonsville, Virginia, about twenty-nine miles from where the Jackson car was found, about two weeks before the family disappeared. The revolver, the grips and the FBI testimony came in. So did evidence about the deaths of Mildred and Susan in Maryland, which the judge admitted to show motive and a connected course of events.
Judge Butzner kept a great deal from the jury. He excluded the handwritten account and the clippings from the accordion case. He reasoned that although Rees's father could consent to a search of his own house for the gun, he could not give up his son's privilege against self-incrimination; in the court's words, "His privilege against self-incrimination could not be waived by his father." He also excluded photographs of Mrs. Jackson's body; testimony that a man resembling Rees tried to stop another couple's car on a highway on the night the Jacksons disappeared; testimony about two earlier incidents in Maryland, in June 1957 and August 1958, in which Rees was accused of holding people at gunpoint; and statements Rees made to FBI agents after being told he could remain silent.
The defense argued that someone else, possibly the housemate, had committed the crime. It said the Commonwealth had not shown that Rees knew the Jacksons or had any reason to harm them, and it attacked the grip evidence, noting that Berley sometimes used the words "grip" and "butt" as if they meant the same thing. It also complained of his confinement far from his lawyers, the pretrial publicity and the shortness of the jury's deliberation. The trial lasted nine days. The jury deliberated for about fifty-six minutes, found Rees guilty of first-degree murder, and fixed his punishment at death.
The Supreme Court of Virginia refused his petition for a writ of error on October 8, 1962, adopting Judge Butzner's written opinion as its own. It held that Rees had not been harmed by being held in the state penitentiary in Richmond, far from his lawyers, during the trial, since the trial court had arranged private meetings with counsel in Spotsylvania and the defense never asked for a continuance; that the publicity did not require moving the trial; that the gun search was valid because his parents had consented and he was only a guest in their home; and that the evidence was enough. A short deliberation, it said, was not proof that the jury was biased. "Proof of motive is not required to sustain a conviction of murder," the court said, and it called the judgment "plainly right." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case in 1963.
Rees then sought a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Judge Oren R. Lewis rejected his claims in 1964. On February 1, 1965, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed, in an opinion by Judge Albert V. Bryan. "Without doubt, there was publicity aplenty about the crime," the court wrote, but it found that the trial had come more than two and a half years after the crime, that attendance was sparse, and that the judge had questioned the jurors with care. It added that Rees, as a federal prisoner, had been held in Richmond because the federal marshal required that prison for security, and that he had reasonable access to his lawyers. It upheld the search, finding that the case in the attic appeared to belong to someone else and that the pistol was a specific, suspected instrument of the crime. It also held that the Virginia judge had wrongly excluded testimony from a juror's neighbor about a conversation before the trial, but that the error was not substantial. His appellate lawyer was S. White Rhyne Jr. of Washington; the Commonwealth was represented by Assistant Attorney General Reno S. Harp III.
With Rees's consent, Rhyne filed a petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1965. On July 18, 1965, Rees wrote to him that his "mature & considered decision" was to withdraw the petition and give up all further proceedings, which would have cleared the way for Virginia to set an execution date. Rhyne would not do so without a psychiatric evaluation. In September 1965 a psychiatrist he retained, Dr. Oscar Legault, examined Rees at the state penitentiary in Richmond and found him "psychotic, suffering from a schizophrenic disorder of a mixed type," and not competent to assist in his defense. Psychiatrists chosen by the state could not complete their examinations because Rees would not cooperate, though they doubted he was insane.
On May 31, 1966, the Supreme Court, in a brief unsigned opinion, kept the case and sent it back to the district court to decide whether Rees had the "capacity to appreciate his position and make a rational choice" about going on with or giving up his case. Judge Lewis sent him to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for examination; Crocker writes that he had to be "forcibly put on the airplane." The staff there reported that he was consistently delusional about receiving divine revelation and that his choices about the litigation rested on that thinking. Doctors at Central State Hospital in Virginia later found that he was not fully competent to make a rational choice, though they did not consider him psychotic.
After hearings in July and October 1966, Judge Lewis reported in January 1967 that Rees had a major mental disorder, "schizophrenic reaction, chronic undifferentiated type," and that he "cannot at this time make a rational choice with respect to continuing or abandoning further litigation in his behalf." By then he had been moved to the state hospital to serve his concurrent state and federal sentences. Virginia told the Court that it did not want to execute an insane defendant, and that he would not be executed while he remained in the hospital for the criminally insane.
On April 10, 1967, the Supreme Court issued a one-sentence order: the petition was to be "held without action" until further order of the Court. It gave no reason. Crocker, whose 2004 study in the Wayne Law Review drew on the Justices' papers, writes that the Court decided to keep the stay in 1971 and looked at the case again in 1988, and that through three Chief Justices and large changes in its membership it treated the case the same way, holding it in abeyance. She links the 1967 and 1971 decisions in part to the Justices' wider concerns about the death penalty in those years.
Rees died of natural causes in prison in 1995. In October 1995 the Court dismissed the case, by then titled Rees v. Superintendent of Virginia State Penitentiary. The exact date of his death has not been established.
The 1966 opinion outlived Rees. Lawyers for death-row prisoners later relied on it to argue that a federal habeas case must be paused until a mentally incompetent prisoner recovers. On January 8, 2013, in Ryan v. Gonzales, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected that reading in an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas. The Court said the 1966 decision dealt only with whether an incompetent prisoner could withdraw a petition, "and it provides no clear answer even to that question," and that the 1967 order "offered no rationale" for holding the petition. As the Court summed it up, Rees "offers no support for federal habeas petitioners seeking to stay district court proceedings." The legal journalist Lyle Denniston wrote that day that the Rees rulings had sat in the records for more than forty-six years with little explanation until the Court clarified them.
Several matters remain open. The other Maryland murder for which Rees was wanted in 1960 has never been named on the record, and whether he was tried for it is unknown. The two Maryland roadside incidents of 1957 and 1958 described at the Virginia trial were offered as evidence of his conduct, not as separate convictions; the opinions record no verdicts on them. The death of Janet Jackson was not prosecuted.
1957: Rees buys a .38 Colt Cobra revolver, a holster and a spare set of plastic grips from its previous owner.
June 1957 and August 1958: two roadside incidents in Maryland later offered as evidence against him.
December 27, 1958: plays with an orchestra in Alexandria, Virginia.
January 11, 1959: the Jackson family disappears on the drive home in Louisa County, Virginia.
January 12, 1959: the Jacksons' empty car is found; Rees arrives at his parents' house in Hyattsville that morning.
March 4, 1959: the bodies of Carroll Jackson and Janet Jackson are found in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
March 21, 1959: the bodies of Mildred and Susan Jackson are found near Gambrills, Maryland.
June 24, 1960: arrested by the FBI on a fugitive warrant for another Maryland murder; agents search his parents' house and find the revolver.
1961: convicted in the U.S. District Court for Maryland on two kidnapping counts; two life sentences.
About six months later: tried in Spotsylvania County; convicted of first-degree murder after nine days of trial; sentenced to death.
October 8, 1962: the Supreme Court of Virginia upholds the conviction.
1963: the U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
1964: federal habeas petition denied in the Eastern District of Virginia.
February 1, 1965: the Fourth Circuit affirms.
June 1965: certiorari petition filed in the U.S. Supreme Court.
July 18, 1965: Rees writes that he wants to withdraw it.
May 31, 1966: Rees v. Peyton; the Supreme Court orders a competency determination.
January 1967: Judge Lewis reports that Rees cannot make a rational choice.
April 10, 1967: the Supreme Court holds the petition without action.
1971 and 1988: the Court keeps the case on hold.
1995: Rees dies in prison of natural causes; the Court dismisses the case in October.
January 8, 2013: Ryan v. Gonzales clarifies the meaning of the Rees orders.