On the evening of January 6, 1987, Kimberly Ann Ruggles, twenty-three, a cab driver in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was sent to an address to pick up a passenger called Ron. Early the next morning military police on patrol found her empty cab at the edge of the woods near Fort Bragg, and her nude body a short distance away. She had been raped, sodomized, beaten and stabbed seven times. Her mouth was gagged with a cloth belt that matched a pair of black karate pants police had found hours earlier on Ronald Adrin Gray, a twenty-one-year-old Army cook. His fingerprints were on the cab's inside door handle, hers were on money he was carrying, and his footprints were at the scene.
Gray was born on August 14, 1965, in Cochran, Georgia, and grew up in Liberty City, a public housing project in Miami. At his court-martial his mother, Lizzie Hurd, and his sister testified that his stepfather had abused him, and an Army forensic psychiatrist described poverty, the lights cut off for unpaid bills, and a stepfather who beat him with belts until he bled. He enlisted at eighteen in 1984, and at the time of his arrest was a specialist serving as a cook with the 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.
On April 27, 1986, he killed Linda Jean Coats, twenty-three, a student at Campbell University. On December 11 he abducted, raped and killed Tammy Cofer Wilson, eighteen. On December 15 he abducted Private Laura Lee Vickery-Clay, eighteen, from Fort Bragg; witnesses saw her with him at a Kmart, her car was found a block from her home with the driver's seat pushed back and three of his fingerprints on the hood, and a soldier found her body in the woods on January 17, raped and shot in the neck, forehead, chest and back, with the stolen .22 pistol sixty feet away. On January 3, 1987, he got into the barracks room of Private Maryann Lang Nameth, nineteen, on the pretext of a party notice, tied her, raped her and stabbed her repeatedly in the neck; with a lacerated trachea and a collapsed lung she survived, and she identified him when his photograph appeared in the news. Three days later came Kimberly Ruggles.
In November 1987 he pleaded guilty in Cumberland County Superior Court to twenty-two felonies, among them the second-degree murders of Coats and Wilson and five first-degree rapes, and received eight life sentences, three of them consecutive. A general court-martial at Fort Bragg, running from December 1987 to April 1988, convicted him of twelve charges, including the premeditated murders of Ruggles and Vickery-Clay, the attempted murder of Lang Nameth, and three rapes, and on April 12, 1988, the panel unanimously sentenced him to death. He was twenty-two.
A military death sentence cannot be carried out until the president approves it. On July 28, 2008, President George W. Bush approved his execution, which would have been the first by the U.S. military since 1961, and it was set for December 10, 2008. On November 26 a federal judge stayed it. The Army Court of Criminal Appeals denied him relief on January 26, 2012, and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces denied a petition for extraordinary relief on November 13, 2017. He remains under sentence of death at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.