Ronald Adrin Gray, born in Cochran, Georgia on August 14, 1965, joined the US Army at 18 and was trained as a cook. Posted to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1986, he killed four women on and around the base between April 27, 1986 and January 6, 1987: Linda Jean Coats, 24, a Campbell University student, Tammy Wilson, 18, the wife of a soldier, Private Laura Lee Vickery-Clay, and Kimberly Ann Ruggles, 23, a taxi driver.
Ruggles had been dispatched to collect a fare called Ron at Gray's address; her body was found that night near her empty cab. Police had held Gray hours earlier on another matter and identified the gag on her body as his. His fingerprints were throughout the cab and hers were on money he was carrying. He is also convicted of raping three women and attempting to murder one of them.
He was tried in two systems. A general court-martial at Fort Bragg running from December 1987 to April 1988 convicted him of two premeditated murders, an attempted murder and three rapes, and sentenced him to death on April 12, 1988. In North Carolina state court he pleaded guilty to two further murders and five first-degree rapes and received eight consecutive life sentences.
President George W. Bush approved the death sentence on July 28, 2008, making Gray the only prisoner on the military's death row with presidential approval; only the President can authorise a military execution. A federal judge in Kansas stayed the December 10, 2008 execution on 26 November. That stay was lifted in 2016, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces denied relief in November 2017, and the Supreme Court declined to hear his petition in June 2018. He remains at the US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth with no execution date set. An execution would be the first carried out by the US military since 1961.