On the afternoon of May 8, 2009, a psychiatrist went to a cell at Wallens Ridge State Prison in far southwest Virginia to see a patient, a 63-year-old inmate named Harvey Watson Jr. Watson was dead. He had been tied with strips of bedsheet, beaten and strangled, and his body had lain in the cell for about fifteen hours under a sheet arranged to look as if he were asleep. In that time the prison had held two standing counts and served two meals. His cellmate had answered for him and made excuses. The cellmate was Robert Charles Gleason Jr., a 39-year-old tattoo artist from Massachusetts who was already serving life for a killing in Amherst County, Virginia, two years earlier. He had planned Watson's death, he later told a judge, for the second anniversary of that first killing.
What made Gleason's case unusual was what he did next. He told the Associated Press, prosecutors and judges that he would kill again unless Virginia put him to death. When the case moved slowly, he strangled another inmate, Aaron Cooper, through the fence of a recreation cage at the state's most secure prison. He fired his lawyers, pleaded guilty to both prison killings, waived his appeals and chose the electric chair. He was executed on January 16, 2013. His case became an argument for both sides of the death penalty debate in Virginia: supporters said he proved some prisoners could not be kept from killing, and opponents said the prospect of execution had given him a reason to kill.
Gleason was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, not far from Boston, around 1970 (he was 42 when he died in January 2013). He kept a thick Boston accent all his life and signed his letters "Bobby from Boston," according to the Associated Press. Friends called him Bobby.
Court papers filed by lawyers who tried to stop his execution described a "profoundly disturbed and traumatic life," with abuse in childhood and depression and other mental health problems as an adult. He began drinking as a teenager and later used cocaine, methamphetamine and steroids, among other drugs. His criminal record went back to armed robberies he committed as a teen. He looked up to an older brother who died in a Massachusetts prison during a failed escape attempt.
He went to art school in North Carolina and became an award-winning tattoo artist, working in shops up and down the East Coast. For a time he settled outside Richmond, owned a tattoo business in Colonial Heights and took up religion, though he later said he had pretended to be religious to help his business. Patrick Hoffman, who had known him since he was a teenager and worked in his second shop, Mom's Tattoo Parlor, from 2006 to 2007, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the Bobby Gleason he knew was "a genuine nice guy," never aggressive and "a great artist." Friends quoted in his lawyers' filings recalled a man who dressed as a purple dinosaur for his young son's birthday party and organized a motorcycle run to raise money for a child with cancer. He had children, including two young sons. Amy Taylor, the mother of one of them, said after his death that he would be remembered by those who knew him as a fun, loving and compassionate person.
There was another side that those people did not see. Ron Elkins, the Wise County prosecutor who later handled both prison killings, said after the execution that Gleason had been a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club and had told the court he was a former hit man. Gleason's spiritual adviser at the end, Tim "Bam Bam" Spradling, was a former biker friend who had become a Richmond preacher. "He was the guy everyone called to take care of problems," Spradling told the Bristol Herald Courier. Hoffman said that when he heard in 2007 that Gleason had been involved in a shooting, "No one could believe it."
Michael Kent Jamerson, known as Mike, was a truck driver who lived in the Madison Heights area of Amherst County, north of Lynchburg. Little more about his life was reported, and his family was not quoted in the coverage.
According to the Associated Press, Jamerson's son was cooperating with a federal investigation into a methamphetamine ring, and Gleason was involved in that ring. The Bristol Herald Courier described the killing as an attempt "to cover up the tracks of a methamphetamine ring already eyed by federal investigators," and the Washington Post reported that prosecutors said Gleason killed Jamerson to cover up his involvement in a drug gang.
On May 8, 2007, Gleason and Jamerson stopped at a wooded area off Virginia Route 130 in western Amherst County. At his sentencing hearing in 2011, Gleason described what happened there: he took a pistol from Jamerson's own belt, told him to get right with God and began shooting. A case summary posted by the Clark County, Indiana, prosecutor's office says Jamerson was shot four times, twice in the head and twice in the body. A turkey hunter found his body the next day. Several days later, a Liberty University student fishing on the bank of the James River, about three miles from where the body lay, found the gun.
The reports do not say when or how Gleason was arrested. The Associated Press later reported that there was little evidence against him. The case did not end in a trial. In 2008, during a court appearance in Amherst County, Gleason had a violent outburst, cursing the court, and deputies used a stun gun on him. Shortly afterward he told the judge he wanted to "get this over with today" and pleaded guilty to murder. He was sentenced to life in prison; the Clark County summary gives the sentence as life plus three years, and the Herald Courier described it as life without parole.
He was sent to Wallens Ridge State Prison, a high-security prison in Big Stone Gap in the mountains of Wise County.
Harvey Gray Watson Jr. had been in prison for most of a quarter century. On August 11, 1983, in Lynchburg, he fired a ten-gauge shotgun into a house at 1525 Bedford Avenue. Charles Leslie Fitz was shot in the back and killed. Walter W. Cabell and Kellie Fitz were wounded, and Dominique Fitz was hurt by flying glass. A federal appeals court opinion in a later lawsuit records that Watson had been convicted of assault with a firearm the previous December and that the same shotgun had somehow been returned to him. He was convicted of murder and malicious wounding and given a 100-year sentence.
Prison records described Watson as having "mild" mental impairment, and he was often cited for disruptive and combative behavior. His sister, Barbara McLeod of Longmont, Colorado, said his mental problems had grown worse during his last decade in prison. On April 22, 2009, he set fire to his cell at Sussex II State Prison, and the next day he was moved to Wallens Ridge. On May 1 he was placed in an eight-by-ten-foot cell with Gleason.
What is known about the next week comes mostly from Gleason. He told the Associated Press that Watson sang "Dixie" and other songs at all hours, screamed profanities, masturbated, talked about having "drowned" two television sets because they "had voodoo in them," and drank his own urine and spoiled milk in the chow hall in exchange for cigarettes from other inmates. "You can't be upset with someone like that," Gleason said. "He needed help."
For seven days, he said, he asked officers and counselors to move Watson, and they responded with mockery and indifference. "That day I knew I was going to kill him," he said of the day they refused to put Watson in protective custody. "Wallens Ridge forced my hand."
After midnight on May 8, 2009, he tied Watson's hands and arms to his body with strips of bedsheet and gagged him with socks. The BBC, citing court records, reported that Gleason got Watson to let his hands be tied by pretending it was part of an escape plan. Gleason later took the gag out and gave Watson a cigarette, telling him it would be his last. When Watson spat at him, he said, he jumped on his back, beat him and strangled him. Under oath in 2010, Gleason added that he had taunted Watson about his coming death, shoved a urine-soaked sponge into his face and a sock into his mouth, and strangled him with fabric from the sheet. He told the court he had planned the killing to fall on the second anniversary of Michael Jamerson's death.
He covered the body with a sheet and kept the death hidden for about fifteen hours, through two standing counts, when officers are supposed to make every inmate stand to be counted, and two meals. He told the court he intended, once rigor mortis had passed, to get rid of the body in the garbage collected with the food trays. Watson's psychiatrist found him at 4:40 p.m. Officers had falsely recorded that they had done the counts properly. The Department of Corrections later said two officers were disciplined and two were fired, and one of the fired officers was reinstated on appeal.
"I deeply regret that the Virginia prison system set up my brother to be eliminated without due process as punishment for his mental illness," McLeod wrote years later. In 2010 she said she was upset that her brother had been housed with such a violent prisoner and angry that it took so long for guards to notice he was dead. "Supposedly they are monitoring these prisoners," she said. "I guess not."
Gleason was charged with capital murder under the Virginia law that covers a willful, deliberate and premeditated killing by a prisoner, and he was moved to Red Onion State Prison near Pound, the state's supermax, where he was held in segregation.
The Wise County commonwealth's attorney, Ron Elkins, offered to let him plead to second-degree murder, and also offered to drop the capital charge and bring one that did not carry a death sentence. Elkins did not say why. Gleason's lawyers were working toward a deal that would avoid the death penalty. In May 2010, a week before his trial was due to start on June 1, Gleason fired them, warned Elkins in court that he would kill again if the prosecutor did not seek death, and pleaded guilty. He told the AP that spring: "I murdered that man cold-bloodedly. I planned it, and I'm gonna do it again. Someone needs to stop it. The only way to stop me is put me on death row." He also said Watson "didn't deserve to die" and that he himself did.
He gave the court a reason that he repeated often. He said that at Red Onion an officer had put metal in his food, that he had told a close friend he would kill an officer, and that the friend had made him promise not to. "I gave my promise not to harm another CO, but I know me," he said, "and the only way to keep that promise was to tell the truth on everything at trial, and the jury would in fact sentence me to death." He also said he wanted to show his children, including his two young sons, where his kind of life led. "I wasn't there as a father and I'm hoping that I can do one last good thing," he said.
Sentencing was set for August 31, 2010. McLeod told the AP that Gleason should spend the rest of his life in prison with no privileges. "He doesn't deserve to be able to control his own destiny at this point," she said. "He doesn't deserve to have his death on the conscience of the state of Virginia."
Aaron Alexander Cooper was 26 and was serving a 34-year sentence for crimes including carjacking and robbery. The AP described him as a carjacker with gang ties. He was held in the segregation unit at Red Onion, where inmates are kept alone except for one hour a day, when they are placed in separate outdoor cages for recreation.
His mother, Kim Strickland, said Cooper and Gleason talked about God and other things to pass the time. Gleason gave him stamps and paper to write home, and even wrote to Strickland asking her to be his pen pal. "I don't want you thinking that I'm talking with a Satan worshipper or the boogeyman," Cooper wrote to his mother on June 24, 2010. "He's just another guy locked up." Strickland was confident her son was safe in the state's most secure prison.
Gleason later said that a prison attorney had told him he would not get the death penalty for Watson, and that he then decided to kill Cooper. He told the court he had targeted Cooper to make a point to the prosecutor and as a favor to another inmate who was about to be released, so that the man would owe him and do his bidding outside. He said he was so sure of what he would do that he wrote to an investigator beforehand, telling him to come and see him about a murder. At the 2011 sentencing hearing an inmate testified that he too had warned investigators two weeks ahead that an assault was planned for the recreation yard, according to the Drake University death-sentence database's summary of the Herald Courier's reports.
On the hot afternoon of July 28, 2010, Gleason took a long-sleeved shirt out to the recreation yard with a noose of braided bedsheet hidden in it. He said officers did not search him properly. His cage shared a chain-link fence with Cooper's. He asked Cooper to try on a "religious necklace" he was making; the prosecutor described it as a supposed gang necklace. Cooper helped him pass the end of the noose through the fence and put it around his own neck. Gleason then strangled him, by his own account choking him "'til he turned purple," waiting "until his color came back," and starting again. The AP reported that surveillance video showed Cooper being choked on and off for nearly an hour. Gleason said he laughed at the reaction of the other inmates. Guards noticed Cooper only when they came to take Gleason back to his cell; Gleason said Cooper had been dead about 45 minutes by then. As staff tried to revive him, Gleason mocked them: "you're going to have to pump a lot harder than that."
"You knew this man threatened to kill, and you gave him the opportunity to kill my son," Strickland said days later. At first she did not want him executed, because that was what he wanted. "If he wanted to die, why didn't he commit suicide?" she asked. "He should rot in prison, die in prison."
The Watson case was reassigned to a new judge, who wanted Gleason to enter his plea again. In late August or early September 2010, instead of being sentenced, Gleason pleaded not guilty, and a trial was set for February 2011. He said he wanted to put officers and prison staff on the stand because he blamed them for Watson's death. In letters to the AP he admitted both killings.
Elkins received a letter from him that year with "BOOM!!!" penciled on the envelope and "See You In Hell!!!" inside. "With him, it was definitely something that worried me," Elkins said later. "I didn't worry for me as much as I worried for my family." "I think he was one of the most intellectual people I've been with and one of the most manipulative human beings I'd ever seen in my life," Elkins said. Gleason had a knack, the Herald Courier reported, for finding personal information about guards, potential jurors and victims' families and using it to taunt them. The AP reported that prison and jail officials intercepted letters and calls in which he discussed killing or threatened judges, lawyers, jurors and mental health experts. He told investigators that killing was "like tying a shoe" or "going to the fridge to get a beer."
On December 21, 2010, after an evaluation confirmed he was competent, he pleaded guilty again to killing Watson, representing himself with standby counsel. "I'm not on a suicide mission, Your Honor," he told Judge John C. Kilgore. "I'm just trying to prevent another death, and keep a promise to someone that's really close to me." He blamed Red Onion's warden and head of security for ignoring his threats. "Something must be done with me, Your Honor," he said. "I think my actions speak louder than my words." He told the court he "already had a few [other] inmates lined up, just in case I didn't get the death penalty, that I was gonna take out."
Prosecutors charged him over Cooper under the law covering more than one premeditated killing within three years. On February 11, 2011, he pleaded guilty; the judge held the plea pending a mental health evaluation and accepted it on April 22, 2011. The Supreme Court of Virginia later noted that the trial court had let him change his plea in the Watson case from not guilty to guilty, to not guilty and back to guilty, granted every continuance he asked for and appointed every expert he requested.
The two cases were heard together, without a jury, in a multi-day sentencing hearing in Wise County Circuit Court that ended on Tuesday, September 6, 2011. Gleason, acting as his own lawyer, spent much of it arguing that he was sane. Guards testified that he had the power and connections to hurt them outside prison and that he was the only prisoner known to have killed an inmate in a separate cage. A 2010 psychiatric evaluation had found a history of substance abuse and depression but concluded he was not suicidal and was competent. Two evaluations done before sentencing described him as depressed and impulsive but competent to make decisions.
Kim Strickland testified. Gleason had written to her, describing her son's death and noting that he was keeping her address. "A very reliable source told me I was not safe and I have moved four or five times," she said. "I have no sense of home anymore." She had set aside her religious opposition to the death penalty after Gleason sent her Bible verses about an eye for an eye, the AP reported, and she testified that he deserved to die.
Judge Kilgore found both aggravating factors Virginia law allowed, vileness and future dangerousness, beyond a reasonable doubt in both cases, and imposed two death sentences. He told the court that the only things he could consider were those statutory factors, whatever reasons Gleason offered for wanting to die. Gleason grinned and joked about whether he would be executed twice.
At that hearing, according to the News and Advance, he said there were more bodies in his past than the three on his record: some people he had been paid to kill, others had simply angered him, and once a witness had vanished to make a criminal charge go away.
Gleason waived his appeals and was found competent to do so. Virginia law still required the Supreme Court of Virginia to review every death sentence. In its brief, the attorney general's office called him "an unrepentant murderer" who "has no regard for human life and will continue to kill." On June 7, 2012, in an opinion by Justice Leroy F. Millette Jr., the court found that the sentences were not imposed under passion, prejudice or any arbitrary factor and were not excessive or disproportionate. It noted that both killings were premeditated ligature strangulations involving taunting or torture, that Gleason had shown he could arrange a killing inside Virginia's most secure prison, and that he had told the court he had "no remorse for it, zero." It quoted him: "You guys can lock me 24/7, take everything out of my cell. . . . Sooner or later, I'm gonna be the nice little man, and get out there" and kill again.
He spent more than a year on death row. Former lawyers, among them Jon Sheldon, tried to stop the execution against his wishes. They argued that he had a long history of mental illness, including depression and several suicide attempts; that isolation on death row had worsened his condition; and that he suffered from paranoia, delusional thinking and severe anxiety that left him with "a nearly overwhelming urge to end his own life." Sheldon told the Washington Post that the death penalty was "actually the sole motivator for the killing." A caseworker's report from 2011, the Herald Courier reported, described paranoia, anxiety and depression and suggested that life in prison would simply be too much for him to bear. A federal habeas case, Gleason v. Pearson, was decided in the Western District of Virginia in January 2013.
Gov. Bob McDonnell said on January 11, 2013, that he would not intervene. Gleason, he said, had expressed no remorse, had not appealed or sought clemency, and "has been found competent by the appropriate courts to make all of these decisions." On January 16, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond refused to order a new competency review, and that evening the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay.
Virginia inmates had been able to choose between lethal injection and electrocution since 1995. Gleason chose the chair. He told the AP that he believed lethal injection was painful, and that he could not imagine going out lying down. "Why prolong it? The end result's gonna be the same," he said. "The death part don't bother me. This has been a long time coming. It's called karma."
He did not see his family on his last day; families of the condemned may not witness executions in Virginia. He asked for a final meal and asked that it not be made public. He spent two hours with Spradling, who said they talked about how their lives had gone in opposite directions and that Gleason cried for his victims and asked God's forgiveness.
At 8:55 p.m. on January 16, 2013, at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, officers led him into the death chamber, holding his tattooed arms. He wore flip-flops, a blue shirt and dark pants with the right leg cut off at the knee. He smiled, winked toward Spradling and gave a thumbs-up. His last words, as the Herald Courier recorded them, were: "Well, I hope Percy ain't going to wet the sponge. Put me on the highway to Jackson and call my Irish buddies. Pog mo thoin. God bless." Percy is the guard in The Green Mile who leaves an execution sponge dry; "Jackson" was a Johnny Cash song that reminded him of a woman he had loved; the Irish phrase is an insult. A leather strap was fastened over his face. He received two 90-second cycles of current, the first starting at about 9:03 p.m. A physician listened at his chest below a tattooed skull and pronounced him dead at 9:08 p.m.
He was the first person executed in the United States in 2013, the first in Virginia since August 2011, and the first in the country to die in the electric chair since Paul Powell, also in Virginia, in March 2010. He was the 110th person executed in Virginia in the modern era and, according to the Times-Dispatch, only the second of them to die for killing an inmate.
Kim Strickland watched from a separate room. "May God have mercy on his soul," she said beforehand. "I've been praying and will continue to pray that his family can heal from this ordeal." No one from Watson's family attended. Barbara McLeod said she had "mixed feelings" but "didn't want him to be able to kill more people." Elkins also watched. "My first thought is that it was much more humane than what he did to people," he said.
Strickland sued the prison system over her son's death; the outcome of that suit has not been reported. Outside the prison, Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty held a vigil for Gleason and his victims. Its executive director, Stephen Northup, said: "If we didn't have a death penalty, he wouldn't have killed these men," and argued that the state could keep truly dangerous prisoners in solitary confinement. Supporters of capital punishment pointed to the same case to argue that keeping men like Gleason alive put others at risk.
Three killings are on the record, each by Gleason's own guilty plea: Michael Jamerson in 2007, Harvey Watson in 2009 and Aaron Cooper in 2010. The rest is his word or other people's belief. He told the AP he had killed others, "perhaps dozens more," but refused to give details. He said in court that he had been a paid killer and that a witness had once vanished on his behalf. He insisted he killed only criminals: "I killed people that's in the same lifestyle as me." Elkins said he would not be surprised if Gleason were tied to other murders, and Spradling said he believed more bodies might be in his past. No other killing was charged, and no report names another victim.
His accounts of the prison killings also cannot be fully checked. The description of Watson's behavior and of the guards' indifference comes from Gleason. His explanations for why he wanted to die changed: a promise to a friend, a lesson for his children, karma. The Herald Courier's reporter wrote after the execution that no one seemed to know the real reason.
About 1970: born in Lowell, Massachusetts.
August 11, 1983: Harvey Watson Jr. kills Charles Leslie Fitz and wounds others in a shotgun attack in Lynchburg; later sentenced to 100 years.
2006 to 2007: Gleason runs tattoo shops in the Colonial Heights area.
May 8, 2007: Gleason shoots Michael Jamerson in a wooded area off Route 130, Amherst County. A turkey hunter finds the body the next day; the gun is found days later on the James River.
2008: after a courtroom outburst, Gleason pleads guilty in Amherst County and is sentenced to life.
April 23, 2009: Watson is moved to Wallens Ridge State Prison; on May 1 he becomes Gleason's cellmate.
May 8, 2009: Gleason kills Watson. The body is found about fifteen hours later, at 4:40 p.m.
May 2010: Gleason fires his lawyers and pleads guilty to capital murder of Watson; tells the AP the only way to stop him is death row.
July 28, 2010: Gleason strangles Aaron Cooper through a recreation cage fence at Red Onion State Prison.
Late August or early September 2010: Gleason withdraws his Watson plea before a new judge.
December 21, 2010: pleads guilty again to the Watson killing.
February 11, 2011: pleads guilty to the Cooper killing; plea accepted April 22, 2011.
September 6, 2011: Judge John C. Kilgore imposes two death sentences in Wise County Circuit Court.
June 7, 2012: Supreme Court of Virginia affirms both sentences.
January 11, 2013: Gov. Bob McDonnell declines to intervene.
January 16, 2013: the Fourth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court refuse to halt the execution. Gleason is executed in the electric chair at Greensville Correctional Center and pronounced dead at 9:08 p.m.