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Ohio Executes Alton Coleman, Condemned in Three States for His 1984 Midwest Killing Spree

Coleman was put to death in Lucasville for the murder of Marlene Walters in her Norwood home. He also held death sentences from Indiana and Illinois.

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Alton Coleman, in a white T-shirt, held by officers outside a brick building after his 1984 arrest, in a black-and-white photograph

Of roughly 3,700 people on America's death rows, only Alton Coleman had been condemned by three different states. On April 26, 2002, Ohio executed him.

Coleman, 46, was pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. His last words were "The Lord is my shepherd," which he repeated again and again. He had been baptized three days earlier. Gov. Bob Taft had denied clemency on April 24, saying no court had questioned Coleman's responsibility for the killing that led to his execution.

Ohio put him to death for the murder of Marlene Walters, 44. On July 13, 1984, Coleman and his companion, Debra Denise Brown, came to the Walters home in Norwood, a Cincinnati suburb, asking about a camping trailer for sale. Walters was killed, and her husband was badly hurt but survived. Ohio also sentenced Coleman to death for killing Tonnie Storey, 15, of Cincinnati, but a federal appeals court set that sentence aside in 2001 because his lawyers had not investigated his background, while a different panel of the same court let the Walters sentence stand.

The two Ohio murders were part of a crime spree that summer that prosecutors said left eight people dead. Indiana sentenced Coleman to death for killing Tamika Turks, 7, of Gary, and Illinois for killing Vernita Wheat, 9, of Kenosha, Wisconsin, whose body was found in Waukegan, Illinois. He and Brown were captured in Evanston, Illinois. Brown was also sentenced to death, but her Ohio sentence was commuted to life in 1991.

Coleman's lawyers argued that he had been abandoned as a baby, abused as a child and left with brain damage. "I think I was doomed," Coleman told the Chicago Tribune shortly before his execution. "Perhaps I should have died at birth."

One Cincinnati newspaper described the 1984 spree as reaching six Midwestern states, while another said at least four.

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