In September 1991 Michael Dale St. Clair was in the jail at Durant, Oklahoma, awaiting sentence. A jury had just convicted him of two murders, one of them of his uncle, and he faced the rest of his life in prison. He escaped with another inmate, Dennis Reese, and within weeks the two men killed two strangers for their pickup trucks.
What followed is set out in the opinions of the Kentucky Supreme Court, largely as Reese described it. The two men got to Texas in a stolen truck and hid in Dallas for a few days, then boarded a Greyhound bus bound for the Pacific Northwest and got off in Denver. There St. Clair kidnapped a man named Timothy Keeling and made him drive them back toward Texas in his own pickup. In the New Mexico desert near the state line, St. Clair shot Keeling dead.
They drove Keeling's truck to New Orleans, then north through Arkansas and Tennessee, and on October 6, 1991, they stopped at a rest area off Interstate 65 near Sonora, in southern Hardin County, Kentucky. Frank Brady was there with his newer pickup. He was a distillery worker from Bardstown, in Nelson County, and his name appears in the court record as Frances C. Brady. They kidnapped him, took the truck and drove him into Bullitt County, and in an isolated, wooded spot near Lebanon Junction St. Clair handcuffed him and shot him several times. They went back to Hardin County and set fire to Keeling's truck to destroy the evidence.
Witnesses to the fire described Brady's truck to the Kentucky State Police, and on October 7 Trooper Herbert "Butch" Bennett stopped it in Hardin County. St. Clair fired two shots at him; one went through the radiator of the cruiser, which broke down in the chase that followed, and the two men got away. They split up. Reese was arrested in Las Vegas two weeks later and waived extradition. St. Clair was arrested about two months after the murder in Hugo, Oklahoma. On December 20, 1991, he was indicted in Hardin County for receiving stolen property, attempted murder and arson, and in January 1992 a Hardin County grand jury indicted him for capital kidnapping. A Bullitt County grand jury indicted him for Brady's murder the next month.
The two indictments ran on separate tracks for a quarter of a century. A Bullitt County jury convicted him of the murder in August 1998 and he was sentenced to death that September. The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the conviction but reversed the death sentence and ordered a new penalty hearing. He was sentenced to death again in 2005, and the court reversed that sentence too, holding that the jury had been given evidence of capital convictions, some of which could not lawfully count as an aggravating circumstance because they came after the Brady murder, so that it was impossible to tell whether its finding rested on a qualifying conviction. A third Bullitt County jury was seated in October 2011, under Special Judge Geoffrey Morris and prosecutors from the attorney general's office. After a week of testimony it deliberated for about three hours and on October 28 returned a unanimous verdict of death. The attorney general's office said the jurors had also heard testimony about four killings committed before his escape; he had been convicted of two. In 2015 the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed that sentence.
The kidnapping case went the same way. A Hardin County jury convicted him in February 2001 of the capital kidnapping of Brady and he was sentenced to death for it, but the Kentucky Supreme Court reversed because the jury had heard evidence of the Keeling murder, a killing in another state that was not relevant to the kidnapping charge and portrayed him as a generally violent man. The kidnapping conviction was reversed again in 2015. By then New Mexico had caught up with him: in 2014 he was convicted there of second-degree murder in the death of Timothy Keeling.
A retrial on the kidnapping was set for May 8, 2017. Instead, on April 12, 2017, St. Clair, sixty, pleaded guilty in Hardin Circuit Court before Special Judge John David Seay and was sentenced to thirty years for kidnapping Brady, twenty for the attempted murder of Trooper Bennett, and five years each for receiving the two stolen trucks and for facilitating the arson of Keeling's. Brady's widow, Merle Brady, had sat through every one of the earlier trials; she could not be there for the plea, though prosecutors had consulted her before agreeing to it. When the hearing was over, St. Clair was taken back to death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville.