Before the party at Robert Carl Foley's house in Laurel County, Kentucky, on August 17, 1991, the guests locked their guns away in a kitchen cabinet. Foley kept his, a .38 Colt snub-nose revolver, in the small of his back under his belt. Eight other adults were there besides Foley and two brothers, Rodney Vaughn and Harry Lynn Vaughn, along with five children, and there was a great deal of drinking. Foley and Rodney got into a fistfight that was quickly broken up. Foley asked Lynn to take his brother home; then the two men shook hands and the party went on. They fought again. This time Foley drew the revolver and shot Rodney six times in the left arm and trunk, and then shot Lynn in the head and limbs. Both brothers died in the house.
Foley ordered the witnesses to clean up and to dump the bodies in Sinking Creek. His own version was that Rodney had pointed a gun at him and threatened to shoot, so that he fired in self-defense, and that Lynn had been killed by one of the other guests. He was charged with both murders on August 20, three days later, and the arrest led investigators to the rest.
He was born in Harlan, Kentucky, on September 13, 1956, one of four brothers, and grew up poor; his father worked at a landfill and drove a coal truck. When he was twelve, his grandmother and step-grandfather were convicted of murdering a state trooper who had arrested one of their sons, Foley's uncle. At some point in his life he is said to have become an informant for the FBI.
On April 17, 1976, in Harlan, Foley shot and killed Zetler Fields Jr., twenty-two, and wounded two other men, Jimmy Joe Ball, seventeen, and Wendell Hale, twenty. The trial opened on March 17, 1977, and the testimony was finished the same day. Two days later the jury convicted him of murder and of two counts of first-degree assault, and he was sentenced to thirty-five years. He served four at the Kentucky State Reformatory and was paroled in 1981. In 1984 he was sentenced in Ohio to fifteen months for assault and possession of a firearm by a felon, and he was released in December 1985. Assault charges from two further incidents, one in 1988 and one in 1989, were still pending when he was arrested in 1991.
On October 8, 1989, Foley and an acquaintance arrived at a cabin in Laurel County where eight people had gathered. As they sat together he grabbed Kimberly Bowersock by the hair. Calvin Reynolds tried to step in, and Foley pulled his gun and fired repeatedly, killing Bowersock, then Reynolds, then Lillian Contino and Jerry McMillen. With the help of the acquaintance and of David Gross, who owned the cabin, the four bodies went into a septic tank that was then covered with lime and cement. The Commonwealth's case was that Foley believed Bowersock had accused him of growing and selling marijuana, which got him into trouble with his parole officer, and that he killed the other three because they had seen it. The septic tank stayed sealed for two years. Police dug the bodies out after the Vaughn arrest, and on October 27, 1991, Foley was charged with four more counts of murder.
David Gross did not live to testify. He was shot dead in October 1990, at forty-three, during a dispute in which he was said to have stabbed Foley at his home, and his body was found buried at Foley's house together with a gun police believed had been used in the cabin killings. Foley was the prime suspect. He was also questioned about the death of Kentucky State Trooper John Edrington, shot with his own .357 Magnum revolver on December 20, 1988, apparently after stopping a speeding driver, a death the medical examiner ruled out as suicide in July 1989; he was never charged with it. A man named Robert Tucker, whom Foley had beaten on September 8, 1988, and left incapacitated, died of his injuries years later. In April 1995 prosecutors decided not to try Foley for Tucker's death, since he already had six death sentences.
A Laurel County grand jury indicted him for the Vaughn murders after the case was sent to it on August 24, 1991. Jury selection began on August 23, 1993, the jury convicted him on September 1, and two days later it unanimously recommended death on both counts. On September 22, 1993, he was formally sentenced to die in the electric chair. The cabin killings were indicted on December 20, 1991, and on September 28, 1993, a judge granted his request to move that trial out of Laurel County. It opened on April 5, 1994. The jury convicted him of all four counts of first-degree murder on April 8 and voted for death on April 11, and on April 27 the court imposed four more death sentences. In May 1992, while awaiting trial in the Madison County Detention Center, he had been charged with assaulting a fellow prisoner, Owen Ray Gadd, who was himself charged with raping a seven-year-old girl.
The appeals ran for more than twenty years. The Kentucky Supreme Court rejected his appeal in the Vaughn case on November 21, 1996, and on April 24, 1997, it upheld the four death sentences for the cabin killings, refusing his argument that four death sentences for one crime were manifestly excessive. The United States Supreme Court dismissed his appeal in that case on March 21, 1998. The Kentucky Supreme Court found in March 2000 that he had been adequately represented in the Vaughn trial and turned down another appeal in the cabin case that November, and the United States Supreme Court dismissed his Vaughn appeal in December 2000. Further appeals were denied by the Kentucky Supreme Court in March 2010 and March 2014. In June 2015 it dismissed a challenge he brought with another condemned man, Ralph Baze, to the state's clemency procedures. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals turned him down in August 2016, and the Kentucky Supreme Court denied his post-conviction petition on February 16, 2017.
The Vaughn family sued the FBI in January 1993, alleging negligent supervision of Foley as an informant. A federal district court rejected the suit in July 1996, finding that the FBI had played no part in the killings. In April 2015 Foley lost a lawsuit asking the state to pay for a $50,000 hip replacement; the court found he had been given a walker, pain medication and a steroid injection, and that the operation was not medically necessary. Rodney Vaughn's daughter said in 2018, and again in 2019, that she was still waiting for him to be executed and wanted Kentucky to resume executions. A 2024 count listed him as one of twenty-five men on the state's death row, and as of 2026 he remains at the Kentucky State Penitentiary.