Robert Carl Foley has been under sentence of death in Kentucky since 1993. Juries convicted him of six murders in two separate cases. The first case to reach trial concerned two brothers, Rodney Vaughn and Harry Lynn Vaughn, who were shot during a party at Foley's home in Laurel County on August 17, 1991. The second concerned four people, Kimberly Bowersock, Lillian Contino, Jerry McMillen and Calvin Reynolds, who were killed in Laurel County on October 8, 1989. Their deaths were not discovered until after the Vaughn killings, and by the time that case was tried in 1994, Foley was already on death row.
He has always denied the 1989 killings and has said the Vaughn shootings were self-defense, with one brother shot by another man. The Supreme Court of Kentucky has upheld both judgments and turned down a long series of later challenges, the most recent in October 2020. In the federal courts his first habeas petition failed, and in the autumn of 2026 his lawyers were asking the United States Supreme Court to hear a further case built on new evidence of brain injury. No execution date has been set.
The Kentucky Department of Corrections gives Foley's date of birth as September 13, 1956. Little about his early years appears in the court record. The Supreme Court of Kentucky, in a 2020 opinion, referred to his "brutal upbringing" and noted that members of his family had recalled head injuries he suffered as a child. Those injuries became the basis of his last round of appeals, decades after his trials.
By 1989 he was on parole. The Supreme Court of Kentucky's 2017 opinion in the four-victim case refers to his parole status and to testimony from his wife that he had threatened her over the possibility that she would tell his parole officer about his violations. The offense for which he had been paroled is not described in that opinion. He was married by the time of both cases; his wife testified at the 1994 trial and, according to the court's 1996 opinion, helped after the 1991 shootings in ways that became part of the evidence against him.
Pretrial newspaper coverage, filed as exhibits in his first appeal, reported that Foley had been an informant for the FBI and would have been jailed for another crime but for deals with the government. The Supreme Court of Kentucky recorded those reports as part of his complaint about publicity. It did not find them to be true or false.
Kimberly Bowersock, Lillian Contino, Jerry McMillen and Calvin Reynolds were killed together on October 8, 1989, in Laurel County, Kentucky. The court record says little about them as people. Their names appear in slightly different spellings across the opinions, with Bowersock sometimes written Bowerstock and McMillen sometimes McMillan or McMillian; the Department of Corrections spells them Kimberly Bowersock and Jerry McMillen.
The Commonwealth tied the killings to alleged marijuana and moonshine trafficking, according to the Supreme Court of Kentucky. Its theory was that Foley shot the four inside the home of another man. Two people who were present at the killings testified for the prosecution. The Commonwealth said Foley had spared them in order to frighten them into helping him cover up the scene, and both took part in disposing of the bodies and the victims' belongings. His wife testified that Foley had said he would retaliate against Bowersock for ruining his life, testimony the court described as reflecting his overall motive. The defense position at trial was that the man who owned the home and one of the two prosecution witnesses had done the shooting.
The four deaths stayed hidden for some time. The Supreme Court of Kentucky's 2015 opinion says the 1989 killings were discovered only after the Vaughn murders. A search eventually led police to the bodies, and on October 26, 1991, Foley was charged with killing the four people whose remains had been found in Laurel County.
On August 17, 1991, Foley and ten other adults gathered at a house in Laurel County that the Supreme Court of Kentucky later described as Foley's residence. Five children were also there. The guests included the brothers Rodney Vaughn and Lynn Vaughn, whose full name, Harry Lynn Vaughn, appears in the court's 2015 opinion, and Foley's wife. According to the court's account of the trial evidence, the other men put their pistols away in a kitchen cabinet, while Foley kept a revolver on him.
Rodney Vaughn became belligerent after drinking. Foley admitted that he started the first fight by hitting him. A second fight followed, and Foley shot Rodney, who died of gunshot wounds. Foley's position from the start was that he had acted in self-defense.
Lynn Vaughn was shot afterward, when only Foley, Lynn and one other guest were left inside. That guest testified that it was Foley who shot Lynn. Foley said the guest had done it. Lynn Vaughn also died of gunshot wounds. The Supreme Court of Kentucky wrote that Foley's explanation for having to kill Lynn was that "blood is thicker than water." Foley and three of the guests then disposed of the two bodies.
The court described what happened next as evidence of a guilty mind. Foley's wife helped clean the scene and moved the guns. The key witness testified that Foley told him anyone who testified "wouldn't make it a block from the courthouse," and the court said the jury could infer that Foley's wife and his father had pressed that witness on Foley's behalf. At trial a letter about a scheme to frame his wife was also admitted after Foley denied arranging testimony.
On October 18, 1991, a Laurel County grand jury indicted Foley on two counts of capital murder, one count of second-degree arson and one count of being a persistent felony offender. Eight days later he was charged in the four 1989 deaths. The circuit court placed officials under a gag order and extended it to the second indictment, but Foley's lawyers complained of hostile publicity. The Supreme Court of Kentucky noted that officials had publicly called him the "worst criminal ever seen" and a "remorseless killer."
The Vaughn trial was set for August 11, 1993. Foley's lawyers moved for a change of venue on August 10, the day before, and the motion was denied. The trial went ahead in Laurel Circuit Court. The jury convicted him of both murders, and on its recommendation the court sentenced him to death on each count in September 1993. The Department of Corrections lists the Laurel County sentence date as September 23, 1993. No mitigating evidence was offered at the penalty phase, a point the Supreme Court of Kentucky noted in 2020.
At trial a defense witness on the firearms evidence was not allowed to testify as an expert but was allowed to testify as a lay witness, a ruling the appeals court upheld.
The four-victim case was tried in 1994 in Madison Circuit Court, outside Laurel County. A jury convicted Foley of all four murders, and the court imposed four death sentences on April 27, 1994, according to the Department of Corrections. The aggravating circumstance identified in the later appeal was a substantial history of serious assaultive criminal convictions, based on the Vaughn murder convictions. Those killings came later in time than the 1989 deaths, but the Vaughn judgment was already final when the second trial took place.
Two parts of the trial strategy were later attacked as ineffective. Defense counsel agreed to the autopsy findings rather than calling an independent expert, which the Supreme Court of Kentucky later called a reasonable way to keep graphic testimony from the jury. Counsel had also advised Foley to give a statement to a detective, in which he identified the murder weapon, at a time when the Commonwealth had no information about it. The aim, the court said, was to take the death penalty off the table in the other case. Instead the prosecution used the statement in closing to argue that Foley was the "trigger man."
The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed the Vaughn convictions and death sentences on November 21, 1996, in Foley v. Commonwealth, 942 S.W.2d 876. The majority opinion, by Justice Graves, rejected each of his claims: that the trial should have been moved, that ten jurors should have been excused, that an omission of the word "intentionally" from one instruction was reversible, that the intimidation evidence should have been kept out, and that the death sentences were excessive or disproportionate. Justice Stumbo dissented, joined by Chief Justice Stephens, and would have ordered a new trial on venue, jury selection, the penalty instructions and the intimidation evidence. Justice King joined part of the dissent. The opinion was amended in December 1996, and rehearing was denied on April 24, 1997. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case later in 1997.
In 1997 the Supreme Court of Kentucky also affirmed the four death sentences in the 1989 case, Foley v. Commonwealth, 953 S.W.2d 924, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in 1998.
Foley then turned to collateral attacks. In the Vaughn case he argued under Kentucky's Rule of Criminal Procedure 11.42 that his trial lawyers had been ineffective for failing to investigate and present mitigating evidence. The circuit court denied relief, and the Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed on June 15, 2000, in Foley v. Commonwealth, 17 S.W.3d 878. His post-conviction lawyers had asked for money for a ballistics expert and a clinical social worker, and those requests were denied. In the 1989 case the court affirmed the denial of a motion for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence, Foley v. Commonwealth, 55 S.W.3d 809 (Ky. 2000).
His federal habeas corpus petition in the Vaughn case, which again centered on his lawyers' failure to present evidence about his background at the penalty phase, did not succeed, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it in 2008, according to the Kentucky Attorney General's office. A series of motions under Kentucky's civil rule 60.02 also failed, in 2003, 2009 and 2010, by the Supreme Court of Kentucky's later account. In 2008 he asked a court to declare unconstitutional the self-defense statute that had been in force at the time of the Vaughn killings; the Supreme Court of Kentucky upheld the dismissal of that suit in Foley v. Commonwealth, 306 S.W.3d 28 (Ky. 2010), because no actual controversy had been adequately alleged.
On November 23, 2009, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway asked Governor Steve Beshear to set execution dates for three men on death row: Ralph Baze, Greg Wilson and Foley. Conway said each had exhausted his appeals of right in state and federal court, Kentucky Public Radio reported. Associated Press reporting carried by ABC7 later said Beshear had signed a death warrant for Foley but that no execution date was ever set, and a judge later halted lethal injections in the state.
Because his death sentences were imposed before March 31, 1998, when Kentucky adopted lethal injection, Foley was allowed to choose between that method and the electric chair. In a 1998 interview with WHAS11 he said he had picked lethal injection by flipping a medallion. "I hadn't gave it any real thought, but it's nice to have that kind of choice," he told the station.
Foley's health later became the subject of a public dispute. Associated Press reporting, based on emails and memos it obtained and carried by ABC7, said that Foley, then 55, had a degenerative right hip and had complained in September 2010 that his leg sometimes gave out. He had first tried to make his own hip brace from flip-flops and other everyday items, which prison staff confiscated. The operation was estimated at $56,000. Officials described him as an extremely dangerous prisoner, and that was one reason the state had trouble finding a surgeon. A prison nurse reported that orthopedists in Paducah, Madisonville and Murray wanted no part of the case, and a hospital in Frankfort agreed to do the surgery and then backed out, its chief executive saying Foley was "too high a profile person to be the first."
The warden of the Kentucky State Penitentiary, Phil Parker, wrote in a November 2010 email that the surgery could make "Fox News on a slow news day" and might have political consequences. State officials denied that politics played any part, and the AP reported that the documents showed no evidence that it did. The Department of Corrections acknowledged the degenerative hip and said he had received adequate care. Foley had filed a federal lawsuit over the surgery, which was pending when that report appeared.
In March 2014 the Supreme Court of Kentucky unanimously rejected Foley's claim that new evidence cast doubt on the Vaughn convictions, the Associated Press reported. He had argued that a firearms expert's examination showed he acted in self-defense. The court found that the expert had only re-examined old evidence and witness statements and had not presented anything not previously known. The decision is reported as Foley v. Commonwealth, 425 S.W.3d 880 (Ky. 2014). In October 2014, after losing an appeal in the federal appeals court in Cincinnati that April, he petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, again over his trial lawyer's handling of ballistics evidence and possible expert testimony.
In the 1989 case, Foley filed a motion in 2012 seeking a new trial on the strength of three sworn statements. Each claimed that one or more of the victims had been seen alive after the date of the killings; one also claimed to have seen the man whose home the Commonwealth said was the scene shoot one of them. The trial court found the statements untimely, unexplained and not credible. On February 16, 2017, the Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed. It noted that the accounts were inconsistent, that two of the three people who gave them were convicted criminals who had kept quiet for decades, and that the third was not adequately identified. "Because his motion was not timely filed and justice does not demand granting him relief, we affirm the ruling below," the court wrote.
The same day the court affirmed the denial of his long-running Rule 11.42 motion in the 1989 case. That motion had begun with 22 grounds; the trial court ordered a hearing on some of them in 2011, and Foley added 21 more claims in 2012; the trial court found thirteen of the supplemental claims untimely. The Supreme Court of Kentucky rejected his complaints about the impeachment of witnesses, uncalled witnesses, the autopsy stipulation, the police statement, his wife's testimony and the search that found the bodies. On the marital privilege issue it found the trial court had erred as to two threats he made to his wife, but that there was no prejudice given the overwhelming evidence.
In April 2013 Foley and Ralph Baze, another man on Kentucky's death row, sued the governor, the corrections commissioner and the Kentucky Parole Board, asking a court to declare the state's clemency procedures unconstitutional. They argued that the governor's clemency power was absolute, and that in Kentucky no recommendations or hearings are needed before the governor decides whether a condemned person should be spared, the AP reported. The Franklin Circuit Court dismissed the suit, saying that it "would violate the separation of powers for the courts to attempt to dictate to the Governor the procedures he must employ in considering pardons."
On June 11, 2015, the Supreme Court of Kentucky unanimously affirmed in an opinion by Justice Lisabeth Hughes Abramson. The court pointed out that neither man had yet filed a clemency petition, and it presumed that "if called upon the Governor will abide by the mandates of both Section 77 and the federal Due Process Clause."
In 2018 a federal court approved funding for a neuropsychologist in a separate federal habeas proceeding. The clinical psychologist Daniel Martell then examined Foley for more than fifteen hours over two days. He reported a decline in Foley's cognitive abilities "consistent with his history of multiple head injuries," found "multiple areas of impairment in frontal lobe executive functioning," and said Foley appeared to suffer from progressive chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
Foley asked the Laurel Circuit Court to vacate the Vaughn death sentences, calling the report newly discovered evidence. Judge Michael O. Caperton denied the motion as procedurally improper, time-barred or otherwise defective. On October 29, 2020, the Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed in an unpublished opinion. It called the question "a somewhat close call," but held that the report rested on a history of head injuries that Foley had raised about twenty years earlier, so it was not newly discovered. It also refused to let him relitigate his trial lawyers' effectiveness and found that his post-conviction lawyers had not been deficient for relying on family testimony rather than a psychological expert.
Foley then went back to federal court with a motion to reopen his habeas case and a second habeas petition, which raised a claim that his trial lawyers had failed to present mitigating evidence and a separate claim about access to the courts. On September 29, 2025, the federal district court transferred the motion and the mitigation claim to the Sixth Circuit as a successive petition while keeping the access-to-courts claim, according to the Kentucky Attorney General's office. Foley later agreed to drop the motion to reopen. The Sixth Circuit ruled against him on March 4, 2026, and denied rehearing on April 30, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court docket shows.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh extended the deadline for a petition for certiorari to September 27, 2026. Foley's petition, Foley v. Plappert, No. 26-5670, was filed on September 21, 2026, by David M. Barron of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. The Kentucky Attorney General's office, representing the warden, filed its brief in opposition on October 21, 2026. It argued that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to review an appeals court's finding that a petition is successive, that the case presented no conflict among the courts, and that evidence offered only in mitigation cannot meet the federal standard for a successive petition, which requires facts pointing to innocence. The filing noted that Foley does not claim to be innocent of the Vaughn killings. Foley's reply was filed on October 27, 2026, and the petition was pending at the end of October 2026.
Foley has been on death row since 1993, the Associated Press reported. The AP described him in 2014 as having more killings than any of the other 34 men then on the state's death row. When WHAS11 interviewed members of the Vaughn family, at a time when Foley was 62, he was held on death row at the state penitentiary in Eddyville, more than 200 miles from where the brothers had lived. A daughter of Rodney Vaughn told the station that the long delay had been painful for the family and that she wanted to witness the execution. The station reported that his execution was held up by a judge's stay on executions in Kentucky.
The Kentucky Department of Corrections continues to list him among the state's death row inmates, with his two sets of death sentences from Laurel County in 1993 and Madison County in 1994.
Foley has denied killing Kimberly Bowersock, Lillian Contino, Jerry McMillen and Calvin Reynolds, and in the Vaughn case he has said he shot Rodney in self-defense and that another guest shot Lynn. Juries rejected both accounts, and the Supreme Court of Kentucky has upheld the verdicts each time. The 2012 sworn statements claiming that the 1989 victims were seen alive after the killings were found not credible.
Pretrial reports that Foley had worked as an FBI informant were noted by the Supreme Court of Kentucky but not tested or confirmed by it. Other killings and assaults attributed to Foley in some published accounts have not led to any conviction.
September 13, 1956: Robert Carl Foley is born, according to the Kentucky Department of Corrections.
October 8, 1989: Kimberly Bowersock, Lillian Contino, Jerry McMillen and Calvin Reynolds are killed in Laurel County.
August 17, 1991: Rodney Vaughn and Harry Lynn Vaughn are shot dead at a party at Foley's Laurel County home.
October 18, 1991: A Laurel County grand jury indicts Foley on two counts of capital murder, second-degree arson and being a persistent felony offender.
October 26, 1991: Foley is charged with the four 1989 killings after the bodies are found in Laurel County.
August 10, 1993: His motion to move the Vaughn trial is denied; the trial is set for the next day.
September 1993: Laurel Circuit Court sentences him to death for both Vaughn murders.
April 27, 1994: Madison Circuit Court imposes four death sentences for the 1989 killings.
November 21, 1996: The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirms the Vaughn judgment, 942 S.W.2d 876; rehearing is denied April 24, 1997.
1997: The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirms the 1989 judgment, 953 S.W.2d 924.
1998: Kentucky adopts lethal injection on March 31; the U.S. Supreme Court denies review of the 1989 case. In an interview that year Foley says he chose lethal injection by flipping a medallion.
June 15, 2000: The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirms denial of his ineffective assistance claim in the Vaughn case, 17 S.W.3d 878.
2008: The U.S. Supreme Court declines to review the denial of federal habeas relief.
November 23, 2009: Attorney General Jack Conway asks Governor Steve Beshear to set an execution date.
2010: The Supreme Court of Kentucky upholds dismissal of his challenge to the self-defense statute, 306 S.W.3d 28.
April 2013: Foley and Ralph Baze sue over Kentucky's clemency procedures.
March 2014: The Supreme Court of Kentucky rejects his firearms-expert evidence claim, 425 S.W.3d 880.
October 2014: He petitions the U.S. Supreme Court after losing in the federal appeals court that April.
June 11, 2015: The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirms dismissal of the clemency suit.
February 16, 2017: The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirms the denial of a new trial and of his Rule 11.42 motion in the 1989 case.
2018: Funding for a neuropsychologist is approved in federal court.
October 29, 2020: The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirms denial of his motion based on the brain injury report.
September 29, 2025: The federal district court transfers his successive claims to the Sixth Circuit.
March 4, 2026: The Sixth Circuit rules against him; rehearing is denied April 30, 2026.
September 21, 2026: His petition for certiorari, No. 26-5670, is filed in the U.S. Supreme Court.
October 27, 2026: Foley files his reply to the Commonwealth's brief in opposition; the petition is pending.