Michael D Terry was born in 1960 and lived in a rooming house in Atlanta, Georgia. He weighed around three hundred pounds, and was known locally as Big Mike.
On an evening in December 1985 Curtis Brown, twenty-one, left his home in Atlanta to buy cigarettes. His body was found about five hours later and was not identified for four days, until his girlfriend reported him missing. Detectives traced his last hours to a neighbourhood tavern, where staff remembered him leaving with another customer they knew as Big Mike. Then the trail went cold.
The old version of this entry said the pattern was recognised relatively quickly. The source says the opposite. Ten months passed. Atlanta had been named the murder capital of the United States six years earlier, on the highest homicide rate per head in the country, matters had not much improved, three separate outbreaks of serial murder had drawn national attention between 1980 and 1984, and the detectives had more ordinary killings than they could handle.
What reopened it was ballistics. In mid-October 1986 the decomposing body of a young man was found in an abandoned building, shot several times in the back of the head with his trousers pulled down. He was identified after several days as Daryl Williams, twenty-one, a drifter from Ohio last seen in a bar on October 5. Tests matched the pistol to the killing of George Willingham, a local family man who had left home on an errand the same day and was found in an alley the next morning, shot in the back of the head.
Two linked cases sent the detectives back to their files, and they assembled a list. Curtis Brown was added on the basis of the method, along with Richard Williams of South Carolina, Alvin George, thirty-one, from Columbus, Ohio, and Jason McColley, eighteen, from Atlanta. The last three were known as street hustlers or male prostitutes, and all had been killed execution style with a pistol or a knife within the previous year.
The pattern was in the detail. Five of the six were found with their trousers down, apparently killed after sex. George and McColley died a month apart in the same alley, each stabbed in the neck with a similar knife. The two unrelated men named Williams, the first and the last, were both killed in abandoned buildings a short distance apart. Richard Williams and Curtis Brown had been shot with one pistol, and Daryl Williams and Willingham with another, and both Richard Williams and Brown had wounds inflicted after death with a short, sharp blade.
A witness then remembered seeing Jason McColley on the night he died with a very large man answering the description of Big Mike. That took detectives to the rooming house where Terry had been living for a year, collecting guns and pawning them when he was short of money. He was arrested at work in a tyre-capping shop, with a .357 magnum hidden on him.
He confessed. His account was that he had met the men in bars, gone elsewhere with them for sex, and that the smaller men had then threatened to rob him or worse, so the killings were self-defence. He said he had not wanted to hurt anyone but that they had taken advantage of him.
The jury rejected it, and on February 22, 1987 he was convicted of murdering Richard Williams and Curtis Brown and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The other four cases were not tried. They were held in reserve, so that they could be used if his sentence were ever shortened on appeal.
So the count is two convictions out of six attributed, and the four were left deliberately unresolved. The reference work that carries this account is Michael Newton's encyclopaedia, which records the disposition as life without parole on two counts.