On the night of March 11, 2002, a delegation unlike any the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles had seen before left its offices in Atlanta. It had included a British member of Parliament reading from a letter by the Prime Minister, consular officials from five European Union countries, a nun known around the world for her book on the death penalty, the condemned man's mother and son, and the lawyer who had defended him at trial sixteen years earlier, who now told the board that he had been in over his head. The five board members heard them out and, as is their practice, gave no reasons. They denied clemency.
The man they were trying to save was Tracy Lee Housel, a forty-three-year-old former truck driver who had been on Georgia's death row since February 1986. He had pleaded guilty to killing Jean Drew, a forty-six-year-old woman he met at a truck stop in Gwinnett County in the early hours of Easter Sunday, April 7, 1985. At his sentencing he admitted that weeks earlier he had killed a Texas truck driver named Troy Smith with a hammer. Nobody, including his own lawyers, disputed that he had killed Jean Drew. The fight over his life turned on two other questions: whether the jury that sentenced him had heard the whole truth about him, and whether a man born on a British island had a claim on Britain's help.
Housel was born in 1958 at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in Bermuda, according to the Royal Gazette, while his father was working at the United States base at Kindley Field. His parents were American. The family returned to the United States when he was about a year old, and he never lived in Bermuda again, or in Britain at all. His birth on the island, then a British colony, gave him British nationality alongside his U.S. citizenship; the Royal Gazette described him as a British Overseas Territories Citizen, though not a Bermudian under the island's immigration law.
What his childhood was like became one of the central disputes of the case. At his 1986 sentencing, Housel testified that he had had "a normal upbringing" with both parents at home, and his mother told the jury that his relationship with his father had been good, though his father had become preoccupied with fraternal organizations such as the Knights of Columbus during Housel's adolescence. His father died when Housel was eighteen.
Years later his appeal lawyers told a very different story. They gathered testimony from relatives and childhood acquaintances in Rhode Island, where he grew up, describing a poor, abusive and dysfunctional family. Amnesty International, summarizing that evidence in 2002, reported that his mother was fourteen and his father forty-three when they married, that both drank heavily, and that his father beat his children so often that the boys reportedly came to school with black eyes, broken noses and bruises. Amnesty said Housel suffered several serious head injuries as a child, in accidents and in beatings, and that twenty lay witnesses, among them family members, teachers and neighbors, said on appeal that they would have testified at his trial if anyone had asked. At the 2002 clemency hearing his mother sat through a presentation on that history. "Sometimes they (the parents) would both beat up on Tracy," Sister Helen Prejean told the Royal Gazette afterward. These accounts come from his defense team and supporters; the jury never heard them, and the courts did not make findings on whether they were true.
As an adult Housel drove trucks. He married and lived in California, but he testified that the marriage came apart because he was "on the road" all the time, and he left his wife in October 1984. A month later he moved in with a woman in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He had a son, three years old at the time of his trial, with a girlfriend, and the Guardian later reported that he had two sons in all. By his own account he spent the early months of 1985 drinking, using cocaine and running with what his trial lawyer called a "sociopathic biker crowd." In his words to the court, they were "all in our leathers, dressed more or less like a rowdy little bike club, just raising Hell and discontent."
In his trial lawyer's estimation he was also intelligent, one of the brightest clients he had represented. He had no significant criminal record before 1985, according to his clemency team.
In February 1985 Housel was laid over at a truck stop in Spring, Texas, "trying to get a load." There he met a truck driver named Troy Smith. The court records say little about Smith beyond his trade and what happened to him, and neither his age nor his hometown appears in the reporting.
Housel's account, given to a Georgia detective in May 1985 and repeated on the witness stand, was that Smith had cocaine and was trying to sell it. Smith got drunk, and Housel helped him to his truck and went back to the bar. Later, wanting more cocaine, Housel climbed into the cab. Smith woke, accused him of stealing, and grabbed him by the throat, Housel said, and Housel picked up a hammer and hit him on the head eight or nine times. He took the cocaine, a CB radio, a stereo and Smith's identification, drove the truck to Beaumont and left it there. He said Smith was still breathing when they left Spring.
Smith's body was found on February 20, 1985, in the sleeper of his truck about seven miles from Beaumont. The evidence summarized by the Georgia Supreme Court and the Georgia Attorney General's office showed he had been sexually assaulted. The Eleventh Circuit later described the killing as a beating to death "in a dispute over cocaine." Investigators from Orange County, Texas, would eventually travel to Georgia to look at Housel's tattoos. Texas never charged him.
On March 29, 1985, Housel was back in Council Bluffs. At a truck stop he met a man named Gary Kennedy and asked for a ride toward Des Moines, where he said he might find work. Kennedy agreed to take him as far as Atlantic, Iowa. When they reached the exit, Kennedy testified, Housel pulled a knife and told him to keep driving, then ordered him off the interstate and demanded his wallet, stabbing him as he reached for it. Housel told the jury that Kennedy had made a gesture he took as a sexual advance and that he "freaked." Kennedy denied making any advance.
Kennedy got out of the car. Housel pushed him down a ravine, and when Kennedy climbed back up, stabbed him again and threw him back down. The Eleventh Circuit noted that he was left for dead in single-digit weather beside the interstate. News reports said his throat was slashed. Kennedy survived and testified against Housel in Georgia. Housel found a spare key in the console and drove Kennedy's car east, using his credit cards in Iowa, Illinois and Pennsylvania on March 30 and April 1.
On April 2, 1985, in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, Housel met a young woman at a friend's apartment. He introduced himself as "Troy." When she left around 11:30 p.m. he offered to walk her to her car, and once inside it, she testified, he strangled her and forced her into a sex act, then took her money and left, telling her she was too nice to kill. The marks on her neck lasted until late that summer. She identified him in court. Housel admitted meeting her but said the sexual contact was consensual. Investigators found no physical evidence of this attack, and he was never charged with it.
From New Jersey Housel drove Kennedy's car to Spartanburg, South Carolina, abandoned it, and caught a ride to Lawrenceville, Georgia.
Jean Drew was forty-six and lived in the Lawrenceville area of Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta. The Royal Gazette called her "a Georgia mother." Little was reported about her life, her work or her family beyond her age, her town and her car, a silver-gray Ford Mustang. Even her first name is spelled two ways: court records and the Associated Press used Jean, while the BBC and Amnesty International used Jeanne. One BBC report described her as a hitchhiker; the court record, in which she drove her own car, does not support that.
Housel said he had been "drinking all night" when he met her in the early hours of Sunday, April 7, 1985, at a truck stop off Interstate 85 in Lawrenceville. The Guardian, reporting from Georgia in 2002, wrote that several witnesses saw the two drive off together in her Mustang. Housel's account was that they had sex, went for a drive, and parked in an open area behind some woods just off Beaver Ruin Road. There, he said, they argued after he spat and hit her window, and he lost his temper and began hitting her. Outside the car he struck her again, strangled her and beat her with a stick.
Her body was found later that morning in a vacant lot off Beaver Ruin Road. The pathologist testified that she had been alive when she was strangled, that her hyoid bone was broken, that the marks on her neck showed a long struggle, and that her injuries were so extensive it was impossible to count the blows. The cause of death was a combination of head trauma and strangulation. According to the Guardian, Housel's ring was found beside her.
Housel took her car and her credit cards and drove to Daytona Beach, Florida.
He stayed in Daytona Beach for several days, buying country-western clothes on Jean Drew's credit cards, until he was arrested on April 14, 1985. He was driving her car. A search of the car and of Housel turned up identification belonging to Drew and to Troy Smith, and credit card receipts in his belongings traced his route with Kennedy's car and cards from Iowa through the Midwest and down the East Coast.
The day after his arrest he gave Daytona Beach authorities a recorded statement confessing that he had beaten and strangled Drew after picking her up at the truck stop. In the same statement he admitted stabbing a man in Iowa, whom investigators identified as Kennedy. On April 18 he was returned to Gwinnett County.
The statement about Troy Smith came weeks later and became one of the most contested pieces of evidence in the case. A lawyer, Walter M. Britt, had been appointed for Housel at a magistrate hearing on April 26. According to the account accepted by the courts, Housel learned in May that investigators from Orange County, Texas, had come to Gwinnett to examine his tattoos, and told Gwinnett County police Detective John Latty that he wanted to talk. Latty refused to take a statement on the spot and told Housel he would have to initiate contact himself. On May 10 Housel telephoned him. Latty took him from the jail to the police station, read him his rights, and reminded him that he had a lawyer. Housel declined to have Britt present, calling him a "sawed-off sonofabitch." Latty tried to reach Britt at home anyway and could not. Housel signed a waiver, repeated it on tape, and described killing Smith.
Housel later claimed the confession was not voluntary. He said he had been held in solitary confinement, shocked with a stun gun, and denied a shower for three months in the Gwinnett County Jail, and that Latty had cultivated him with visits, Burger King Whoppers and cigarettes. Amnesty International and his supporters in Britain repeated those claims, including that he was shocked while standing in water. The federal courts found that the evidence offered did not connect any mistreatment to the time of the confession: the deputy who described jail conditions had started work after it, and the inmate affidavits could not be pinned to dates. The district court found Latty had spoken with Housel only three times before the statement and had promised him nothing.
In 2002, by then Gwinnett County's police chief, Latty told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Housel had once told him the full extent of his crimes. According to the Guardian's account of that interview, Latty asked how many murders he had committed, and Housel replied, "Seventeen." No such killings were ever identified or charged, and Housel's lawyers denied the claim.
A Gwinnett County grand jury indicted Housel on June 4, 1985, for murder, rape, theft by taking of a motor vehicle and three counts of financial transaction card theft. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment on July 23, the same day the state announced it would seek the death penalty. District Attorney Thomas C. Lawler III prosecuted.
Jury selection began on January 28, 1986. On February 4, with the jury chosen, Housel pleaded guilty to murder and motor vehicle theft. In return the state dropped the rape count; the card theft counts were merged into the theft charge. The plea bargain contained no promise about sentencing, and the state went ahead with its demand for death. The case went straight to a sentencing trial before the jury.
Britt's reasons for that course came out years later in federal court. Keeping the rape charge away from the jury was worth a great deal, he believed, and an intoxication defense had little chance before a Gwinnett County jury, given how deliberately Housel had behaved after the killing. His plan was to have Housel accept responsibility and ask for mercy.
The state's case for death was, in large part, a case about other crimes. Gary Kennedy and the New Jersey woman testified. So did officers from Texas, Florida and Georgia. The jury heard both of Housel's recorded statements, about Drew, Kennedy and Smith.
The defense case was short; Housel's later lawyers said it lasted less than thirty minutes. His girlfriend, the mother of his three-year-old son, said he had been a good provider and a caring father. The boy was introduced to the jury and invited to call out "Hi, Daddy" from the gallery; the prosecutor later complained on the record that the child cried for his father within earshot of the jury for the rest of the hearing. Another girlfriend pleaded for mercy. His mother asked the jurors to be lenient: "Don't give him the death penalty because if you do you're killing two people. I lost my husband, and if he dies I I do, too."
Then Housel took the stand. He confessed again to the killings of Drew and Smith and the stabbing of Kennedy, described his upbringing as normal, said he had been baptized a Christian, and asked for mercy. Asked by the prosecutor whether he was blaming his parents, he said: "There is no reason why anybody should kill anybody."
Britt asked the judge to tell jurors they could not consider the out-of-state crimes unless they first found beyond a reasonable doubt that Housel had committed them. The judge refused and let the jury weigh all of it. On February 7, 1986, the jury found that the murder was "horrible or inhuman" and involved depravity of mind and aggravated battery, a statutory aggravating circumstance under Georgia law, and returned a sentence of death. The judge imposed it, along with twenty consecutive years for the car theft.
On direct appeal, Britt argued that the Troy Smith confession should have been suppressed because Housel's right to counsel had attached and he had a lawyer when Latty took the statement, and that the trial court should have given the requested instruction on the other crimes. On May 19, 1987, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected both claims in a unanimous opinion by Presiding Justice Clarke. The court held that Latty's explanation that he could not start the questioning was not interrogation, that Housel had initiated the contact himself on May 10, and that he had validly waived his right to counsel. It found the instructions given adequately covered the law, that the evidence supported the aggravating circumstance, and that the sentence was not the product of passion or prejudice or disproportionate to sentences in similar cases. Reconsideration was denied on June 3, 1987. The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on June 30, 1988, and rehearing on August 25, 1988.
Housel's next lawyers, Michael O. Spivey and Gary A. Alexion, filed for habeas corpus in the Superior Court of Butts County. The core claim was that Britt had not investigated Housel's mental health, drug use and childhood. After a hearing, the court denied relief on December 21, 1990. The Georgia Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal on March 1, 1991, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review later that year.
In June 1994 Housel filed a federal habeas petition in the Northern District of Georgia. This time the evidence was fuller: relatives and childhood acquaintances describing abuse; experts saying he had residual effects from childhood head injuries; an expert on hypoglycemia, a disorder of blood sugar, who said Housel was prone to episodes of extreme irritability; and evidence that he had been drunk on the night of the murder and had a long history of substance abuse. The district court held a hearing at which Britt testified, and on March 31, 1998, denied the petition.
On January 18, 2001, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (Judges Dubina, Carnes and Cox, with Judge Cox writing) affirmed. On the claim that Britt was ineffective, the court found he had made reasonable choices. He had asked Housel for a life history and contacted everyone Housel named; both Housel and his mother told him the childhood was normal, and nothing in any public record suggested otherwise. Housel had never mentioned hypoglycemia, two psychological evaluations gave no reason to dig further, and Britt saw nothing unusual in a client he considered unusually intelligent. As for drink and drugs, the court called such evidence "a two-edged sword" and accepted Britt's judgment that Gwinnett County jurors in the 1980s would respond better to remorse than to excuses.
On the other crimes, the panel did not decide whether the Constitution requires a jury to find them proved beyond a reasonable doubt before weighing them. It held that such a rule would be new, and that new constitutional rules cannot be applied on collateral review. "Perhaps since last a court visited the question Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has evolved to recognize the right that Housel espouses," the court wrote, a line Amnesty International later quoted in its appeal for clemency. On the Troy Smith confession, the court held that Housel had initiated the contact and unequivocally waived his right to have his lawyer present, and that the claims of mistreatment were not tied to the statement.
Rehearing by the full court was denied on April 6, 2001. The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on February 25, 2002. Two days later, on February 27, a Gwinnett County judge signed the order setting the execution for March 12.
In the clemency campaign, Housel's lawyers, led by Robert McGlasson and Beth Wells of the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta with the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, did not argue that he was innocent. They argued that the jury had decided his fate without the facts that mattered. Amnesty International summarized their evidence: Britt had never tried a capital case or led a murder defense; an expert on hypoglycemia had concluded that Housel was in "an acute state of hypoglycemia, exacerbated by alcohol, at the time of the crime" and could not tell right from wrong; and two mental health experts found brain damage and psychological impairment. The state did not offer experts to rebut them, Amnesty said, though the state had pointed to pretrial evaluations finding Housel competent and free of major mental illness. "The solution to all Tracy's problems was a Mars bar," Stafford Smith told the Guardian.
The strongest statement came from Britt himself. At the clemency hearing he told the board, as the Guardian reported: "It's often said doctors bury their mistakes and lawyers don't talk about theirs but I'm here to say I made mistakes. I was not properly trained. I was in over my head." To the Royal Gazette's reporter he said: "I just wasn't experienced. It's something I've thought about for the last 16 years." BBC News Online reported that he had acknowledged he would not have advised a guilty plea had he known of Housel's condition.
Housel spoke through his lawyer to BBC News Online in early March. "I believe in God and I believe in an afterlife, so I am not necessarily afraid of dying. But I have a strong will to keep living," he said. Of Jean Drew he said: "I also worry about how my actions have hurt others and constantly replay the events that led up to Jeanne Drew's death. It's hard not to play the 'what if' scenario. If my dying would bring her back I would happily go to my death tomorrow." In an interview with the Sunday Times, quoted by the Royal Gazette, he said he could not remember much of the spree, calling it "a drugged-up fog," and added: "I will never forget what I did to Jean Drew and her family."
Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter took the opposite view. "Housel was traveling around the country at the time luring people in at truck stops, then raping and killing them," he told the Associated Press. "He is a serial killer, and he deserves to be executed." Porter said Housel had been linked to three other murders. McGlasson answered that there was "no evidence of these alleged 'serial' killings" and that Porter was "throwing sufficient quantities of mud in the hope that some of it sticks."
Britain had stayed out of the last such case. In 1995, when Georgia electrocuted Nicholas Ingram, a British national born in Cambridge, Prime Minister John Major said he had been advised there were no proper grounds to intervene. By 2002 policy had changed. The Labour government had abolished the death penalty for all crimes at home in 1998 and had committed to speaking out whenever a British national faced execution, whatever the facts of the case.
The campaign for Housel grew through the winter of 2001 and 2002. One hundred and twenty-one members of Parliament signed a Commons motion calling for commutation, and an amicus brief signed by 106 MPs, the Law Society of England and Wales and the Bar Council's human rights committee was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 2002. Amnesty International UK pressed Tony Blair to act personally. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw wrote to the parole board: "The British government fully shares Georgia's desire to punish violent criminals and recognizes the need for severe penalties. We are not, however, persuaded that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment or deterrent." On February 27 he telephoned Governor Roy Barnes, whose spokeswoman said the governor had explained that he had no power to change the sentence and had referred Straw to the board. In Georgia only the board can commute a death sentence.
Porter was unmoved. "Housel is no more English than I am," he said. "To me, it's a very legalistic ploy to involve another government to manipulate the judicial system of Georgia."
On March 7, as Amnesty supporters demonstrated outside 10 Downing Street, Blair's official spokesman said the prime minister was aware of the case and would discuss the way forward with Straw. Blair did not telephone Georgia. Instead he wrote to Vera Baird, the member of Parliament for Redcar and a barrister whose chambers had joined Housel's legal team: "Even at this late stage I very much hope that the representations we have made will result in Mr Housel's sentence being commuted." The consuls general of Britain, Germany, France, Greece and Belgium in Atlanta prepared a formal demarche on behalf of all fifteen European Union states. Amnesty reported that the Council of Europe also appealed, and Sister Helen Prejean said she quoted a letter from the papal nuncio in Washington asking for mercy on behalf of Pope John Paul II.
In Bermuda the case raised an awkward question. The island had abolished capital punishment by a vote of its House of Assembly in December 1999 and had not carried out an execution since 1977. On January 29, 2002, Baroness Amos, the British minister responsible for the Overseas Territories, wrote to Premier Jennifer Smith asking her government to urge the Georgia board and governor to commute the sentence. A letter from the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center dated December 17, 2001, had already gone unanswered.
On March 1 the Royal Gazette published an editorial urging the government to speak. Housel's connection to the island was tenuous, it conceded, and as a dependent territory Bermuda could not deal government to government with Georgia, but it could issue a statement of principle. "The true test on a matter of principle," the paper wrote, "comes when taking a stand is likely to be unpopular." Gary Proctor, a lawyer and accountant who had lived in Bermuda before leaving to volunteer on Housel's case, appealed to Bermudians to write to Georgia as people living "where Tracy was born, as a fellow British citizen, or simply as a denizen of humanity."
The premier made no public statement. The attorney general, Dame Lois Browne Evans, a longtime opponent of the death penalty, wrote to the parole board in her personal capacity. After the execution a government spokeswoman told the Royal Gazette she could not say whether any reply had gone to Baroness Amos, "but the Bermuda Government is against capital punishment." Proctor said he had been told a fax was sent on the day of the hearing, hours after the board had already decided. The opposition's John Barritt said Bermuda should at least have told Britain where it stood. Amnesty International's chair in Bermuda, Lucy Attride-Stirling, said more than 18,000 signatures, some from Bermuda, had been gathered asking that Housel be spared.
The board met on Monday, March 11, 2002, the six-month anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The hearing was closed. Baird read from Blair's letter. Prejean spoke. Housel's twenty-year-old son, Randall, spoke and came out wishing he had said more: "There are not many ways to explain how to love your father. I thought none of them was listening to what was being said." Board members were shown two christening gowns Housel had crocheted in prison for his lawyer's twin babies.
After the European consuls made their case, board member Dr. Eugene Walker answered: "You know, you have strong sentiments against the death penalty. You've got to know we have strong sentiments for it and it's part of our law." Prejean said later she thought the European arguments may have done more harm than good. A little after three in the afternoon the board's decision came. Baird flew home and described the hearing as more like "some minor hearing before a benefits appeal tribunal than a panel deciding a matter of life and death."
On March 12 Housel's lawyers made final applications, including a claim that he had been denied consular access as a British national. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay and certiorari that evening, while granting the parliamentary supporters leave to file their brief. Earlier that day he was visited by his mother, his son and his former wife. Gary Proctor was also among his visitors; they talked, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, about Harley-Davidson motorcycles and his days as a truck driver. His last meal was steak, a baked potato, salad, corn, a milkshake and ice cream. A Department of Corrections spokesman said he was "very nervous, very edgy" and refused a sedative.
In the death chamber at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, according to the Journal-Constitution, he chatted with the staff and recited the 23rd Psalm and a verse from Second Corinthians with the chaplain. He apologized to Jean Drew's family, saying he was "sorry from the very centre of my heart," though corrections officials said they had been unable to find any of her relatives to attend. To his family and friends he said: "Take care of yourselves. May God be with you all." He was pronounced dead at 7:28 p.m.
Proctor and Britt watched together. "We would be OK for a moment and then we would both start crying," Proctor told the Royal Gazette. Outside, under a tarpaulin in the rain, about twenty foreign journalists, from the BBC, London newspapers and a French news service, outnumbered the five Georgia reporters present. Housel was the first British national executed in the United States since Nicholas Ingram, Georgia's sixth lethal injection, and, by Amnesty's count, the fifteenth execution in the country that year. A spokesman for Blair said afterward that the government had been in regular contact with U.S. authorities, "but there are limits to what we can do."
On February 27, 2002, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an organ of the Organization of American States, had received a petition from Housel's British and American lawyers and asked the United States to preserve his life while it examined the case. The United States replied on March 8 that the execution was scheduled, and it went ahead.
On February 27, 2004, the commission declared the petition admissible, finding it stated colorable claims about his treatment in pretrial detention, the quality of his trial lawyer, the use of unadjudicated crimes at his sentencing, the sixteen years he spent on death row, and the execution itself in defiance of the request for precautionary measures. Two commissioners dissented. The admissibility report decided nothing on the merits, and whether a final merits report ever followed is not known.
Proven by conviction: the murder of Jean Drew, by Housel's guilty plea, and the theft of her car.
Confessed but never charged: the killing of Troy Smith in Texas, in a recorded statement whose voluntariness Housel later disputed and the courts upheld, and again in his own sworn testimony. Also the stabbing of Gary Kennedy, which Kennedy described under oath.
Alleged and denied: the sexual assault in New Jersey, which the victim described under oath and Housel said was consensual. The rape count over Jean Drew was dropped in the plea bargain, though news reports through 2002 described him as having confessed to robbing and raping her.
Claimed without evidence: Latty's report that Housel once said "seventeen"; Porter's statement linking him to three other murders and later speculation, reported by the Guardian, of as many as thirty; and the Journal-Constitution's mention of links to a killing in California. None was charged or publicly substantiated.
Disputed mitigation: the abuse, head injuries, hypoglycemia and psychosis described by his later lawyers were never tested before a jury. The federal courts held that his trial lawyer's choices were reasonable, not that the evidence was false.
Tracy Lee Housel was executed on March 12, 2002, as recorded by the Georgia Attorney General's office and in the Georgia Department of Corrections' history of executions. The Inter-American Commission's merits review, opened in 2004, is not known to have produced a report.
1958: Housel born at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, Bermuda; family moves to the U.S. about a year later.
October 1984: Leaves his wife in California; a month later moves to Council Bluffs, Iowa.
February 1985: Kills truck driver Troy Smith with a hammer at a truck stop in Spring, Texas, by his own account; Smith's body found near Beaumont on February 20.
March 29, 1985: Stabs Gary Kennedy near Atlantic, Iowa, and takes his car; Kennedy survives.
April 2, 1985: Sexual assault of a woman in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, described by the victim at trial.
April 7, 1985: Jean Drew, 46, killed off Beaver Ruin Road, Gwinnett County, Georgia.
April 14, 1985: Arrested in Daytona Beach, Florida; confesses to Drew's murder the next day.
April 18, 1985: Returned to Gwinnett County.
May 10, 1985: Confesses to Detective John Latty to killing Troy Smith.
June 4, 1985: Indicted for murder, rape, motor vehicle theft and card theft.
February 4, 1986: Pleads guilty to murder and motor vehicle theft; rape count dropped.
February 7, 1986: Jury sentences him to death.
May 19, 1987: Georgia Supreme Court affirms.
December 21, 1990: Butts County Superior Court denies state habeas relief.
March 31, 1998: Federal district court denies habeas relief.
January 18, 2001: Eleventh Circuit affirms; rehearing denied April 6, 2001.
January 22, 2002: Amicus brief of British MPs and lawyers filed in the U.S. Supreme Court.
January 29, 2002: Baroness Amos asks Bermuda's premier to support clemency.
February 25, 2002: U.S. Supreme Court denies certiorari.
February 27, 2002: Execution date set; Jack Straw telephones Governor Roy Barnes; Inter-American Commission requests a stay.
March 11, 2002: Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denies clemency.
March 12, 2002: Executed by lethal injection at Jackson, Georgia, 7:28 p.m.
February 27, 2004: Inter-American Commission declares the petition admissible.