William Clyde Gibson III was convicted of murdering three women in southern Indiana. He stabbed Karen Hodella, a hairdresser from Florida, in October 2002, and her killing went unsolved for almost ten years. In March 2012 he strangled Stephanie Kirk, a 35-year-old mother from Charlestown, and buried her behind his house in New Albany. Less than a month later he strangled Christine Whitis, 75, who had been his late mother's best friend. His sisters found her body in the garage of the family home on April 19, 2012, and he was arrested that day in her van.
He confessed to all three killings, in police interviews, in letters to detectives and in letters to newspapers and television stations. A jury convicted him of the Whitis murder in October 2013 and recommended death. He pleaded guilty to the other two killings in 2014 and received 65 years for Hodella and a second death sentence for Kirk. Both death sentences have been upheld by the Indiana Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review them. As of October 2026 he remained under sentence of death, and his lawyers were in federal court arguing that a habeas petition filed two years late should still be heard.
Most of what is known of Gibson's early life comes from the mitigation evidence his lawyers presented at his trials and in his appeals. He lived for most of his life in New Albany, a city on the Ohio River across from Louisville, Kentucky; a next-door neighbor told NBC News in 2012 that she had known him since childhood. At his first trial his lawyers described a "military-style" household with a father who drank, while one of his sisters testified that their childhood had been "pretty normal," according to the Indiana Supreme Court's 2015 opinion. In a later petition to the U.S. Supreme Court his lawyers said trial counsel had called his childhood miserable and abusive, while his half-sister had testified that it was fairly normal and that their father was not physically or verbally abusive. The half-sister also described a family history of mental illness and substance abuse, and the suicide of a brother.
Gibson served in the Army as a young man. His lawyers later said his bipolar disorder first surfaced during that service. The Indiana Supreme Court's 2016 opinion notes that the trial judge counted among his good qualities a college degree, artistic and woodworking talent, and the care he gave his elderly mother. He married in 1980. He worked as a tree trimmer and was promoted to supervisor, according to the 2020 certiorari petition.
In January 1991 he crashed a car while driving drunk and cut his head. His former wife and others later testified that after the crash his drinking grew worse, that he had blackouts and acted impulsively, and that he could no longer do his job the way he had. The marriage broke up about seven months after the accident. Years later his post-conviction lawyers argued that the crash had caused a traumatic brain injury that his trial lawyers never properly investigated. A neurologist who examined an MRI for the defense before trial had found no brain damage; an addiction psychiatrist, Dr. R. Andrew Chambers, concluded at the post-conviction hearing that a traumatic brain injury was likely and had gone "grossly undertreated."
On October 2, 1991, a Louisville police officer on foot patrol heard a woman screaming near a shopping mall and found Gibson attacking her at a pay phone. Gibson punched her, took her purse and ran. The officer chased him for several blocks and tackled him; it was the officer's first arrest, he told WAVE News in 2012. Gibson refused to give officers his name. He pleaded guilty in Kentucky to sexual abuse and robbery, and he was released from prison in 1999. Psychologists who interviewed him in prison rated him a low risk to reoffend, WAVE reported. The conviction placed him on the sex offender registry, where he remained in 2012.
The woman he attacked in 1991 survived.
By 2012 Gibson's criminal history covered more than twenty years. The Indiana Supreme Court listed convictions for assault, robbery, sexual abuse, operating while intoxicated, resisting law enforcement, reckless driving, receiving stolen auto parts, conversion and auto theft. A woman who dated him in 1999 and 2000 told WAVE News in 2012 that he drank heavily, used drugs, took her rent money to buy drugs, and hit her repeatedly in the face during one incident.
On March 11, 2005, he was placed on three years of probation for a Class D felony auto theft. By April 7, 2005, he had violated it, the court noted, and he was still on probation for that offense when he killed Stephanie Kirk and Christine Whitis in 2012. The probation status became one of the aggravating circumstances in both death penalty cases.
Karen Sue Hodella was a hairdresser from Port Orange, Florida. She was visiting the Louisville area in 2002 when she disappeared. Reports give her age as 44 or 45. Gibson stabbed her to death in October 2002, as he admitted in his 2014 guilty plea. Her body was found in January 2003 near the Ohio River in Clarksville, Indiana, and was decomposed. For more than nine years no one was charged with her death.
The case was solved only because of what happened in 2012. On April 20, 2012, the day after his arrest for the Whitis killing, Gibson confessed to killing Hodella. Prosecutors charged him with her murder on April 24, 2012, and refiled the charge under a separate case number on May 23, 2012.
Stephanie Marie Kirk was 35 and lived in Charlestown, in Clark County, Indiana. She had a teenage daughter. On March 25, 2012, she left a friend's home in New Albany, apparently to meet a man for a motorcycle ride, and was not seen again. She was reported missing that month.
The Indiana Supreme Court's 2016 opinion, drawing on Gibson's own statements, says he met Kirk on March 24, 2012, and that they spent time drinking, smoking marijuana and taking pain pills. The next day, after an argument about pills and marijuana, he strangled her in his living room during a sexual assault. He hid her body in his garage and then buried it in a shallow grave in his backyard. The court later found that she was alive during the assault, which made the killing eligible for the death penalty under Indiana law.
For weeks her family did not know what had happened. Her father said in late April 2012 that the family could not sleep for worrying and simply wanted her to come home.
Christine Whitis was 75 and lived in Clarksville. She was a widow, close to her son and her grandchildren. "She is loved, and she loved," the Floyd County prosecutor, Keith Henderson, told jurors at Gibson's trial. Her son described her as an extraordinary person who would help anybody.
She had been the best friend of Gibson's mother. After his mother died, Gibson spent time with Whitis, the Indiana Supreme Court's 2015 opinion records. Prosecutors said he drew her to his mother's house in New Albany on April 18, 2012, by presenting himself as a son still grieving his mother. There, intoxicated, he attacked her when she rejected him, sexually assaulted her and strangled her.
Over the next 30 hours Gibson drove her van from bar to bar and returned home, the court said. A friend came by the house for drinks without knowing what had happened.
On April 19, 2012, one of Gibson's sisters went to the house and found Whitis's body in the garage. His sisters called police. Later that day officers made a brief chase and arrested Gibson as he drove Whitis's van in New Albany. His blood alcohol level was 0.23, WAVE News reported. He was first booked on charges of drunk driving and resisting arrest.
In a videotaped police interview Gibson admitted killing Whitis but said he had not planned it and had "just snapped." On April 24, 2012, he was charged with her murder and as a habitual offender, and the court appointed Floyd County's chief public defender, J. Patrick Biggs, to represent him. The public defender's office did not formally receive the order until April 26. That day Biggs met Gibson, strongly advised him to stop talking to police, and warned him that he could face the death penalty. Gibson signed a waiver after the judge explained the consequences and went on talking, to police and to the press.
By then Gibson had raised a missing woman with detectives. While jailed on the Whitis charge, he told them about Kirk, whom police had not yet connected to him. In interviews on April 23, 24 and 26, 2012, he confessed to killing her. Police did not know she was dead when he began talking about her, the Indiana Supreme Court said, and at first he gave conflicting accounts of where her body was.
Late on a Friday, eight days after Whitis's body was found, crews with a backhoe began digging in Gibson's backyard on information developed earlier that day. They found human remains and worked through the night under a tent. The remains were identified as Kirk's, and the Floyd County coroner gave the preliminary cause of death as strangulation.
Her grandmother told reporters she was relieved in a way. "Knowing that she's not tied up in a room somewhere held prisoner, or whatever. Now, she's in heaven with her mother," she said, according to Agence France-Presse. Prosecutor Henderson said Gibson had implicated himself in all three deaths. A next-door neighbor who had known Gibson since childhood told NBC News that he had been in and out of trouble with the law but was always willing to help around the neighborhood.
The State charged him with Kirk's murder on May 23, 2012, and gave notice that it would seek the death penalty.
The arrest drew the interest of other investigators. In June 2012 authorities in Bloomington, Indiana, explored whether Gibson could be linked to the disappearance of an Indiana University student, ABC57 reported. Later that month officers searched his New Albany property again after a tip that there could be more victims. No other killing was charged against him, and no other case was reported to have been tied to him. Before the Whitis trial the court excluded any reference to the Kirk and Hodella cases.
From the Floyd County Jail Gibson wrote to reporters. In a letter reported by The Courier-Journal of Louisville in June 2012, he said he would accept the death penalty, writing, "after all, I am guilty," and said he had told the prosecutor he would plead guilty to spare people more pain. He wrote to WAVE 3 that he had offered to plead guilty in exchange for a death sentence. Not guilty pleas were entered for him all the same, and Biggs told The Courier-Journal he intended to defend him vigorously.
Letters between Gibson and law enforcement, released in July 2013, described Kirk's death, the News and Tribune reported. In one he wrote, "I guess I am really evil."
Because of the publicity in the New Albany area, Gibson's lawyers asked for a change of venue. On September 28, 2012, the judge ruled that the trial would stay in Floyd County but that the jury would come from Dearborn County, in southeastern Indiana, and would be sequestered. Henderson said his office opposed moving the whole trial but did not object to bringing in jurors. Two medical experts were expected to testify that Gibson was competent to stand trial. Christine Whitis's son, who attended every hearing, told WAVE News he was trying not to hate. His daughters started a fund in her memory, "Justice for Mamaw: The Christine Whitis Foundation," to help older people improve the security of their homes.
The trial was delayed more than once; the court denied the defense a fourth continuance. Jury selection began on September 23, 2013, and ran four days in two phases. The guilt phase ran from October 21 to 25, 2013. Jurors watched more than an hour of Gibson's videotaped police interview, and prosecutors relied on medical evidence and on his confessions, recorded on video and written in letters. The prosecution took four days and the defense one. Biggs argued that Gibson had been drinking heavily since his mother's death, was impaired by alcohol and marijuana, had barely slept, and was not thinking clearly. The judge refused to instruct the jury on voluntary manslaughter, finding no evidence of sudden heat.
On October 25, 2013, the 12 jurors deliberated for about 17 minutes and found Gibson guilty of murder. "Justice is served," a member of the Whitis family said as the family left the courtroom. Henderson said no murder case he had prosecuted had troubled him more.
The penalty phase took place on October 28 and 29. The jury found four aggravating circumstances proven beyond a reasonable doubt: two counts of killing during criminal deviate conduct, killing while on probation, and dismemberment of the victim. The defense presented evidence of his upbringing, a suicide attempt in custody, and expert testimony that alcoholism, bipolar disorder and antisocial personality disorder had left him afraid of rejection and abandonment. The jury found the aggravators outweighed the mitigation and recommended death. On October 30 it found him to be a habitual offender. Under Indiana law at the time, the judge was bound by the jury's recommendation.
On November 26, 2013, Floyd Superior Court Judge Susan Orth sentenced Gibson to death and set an execution date of November 26, 2014. The sentence went automatically to the Indiana Supreme Court for review. Gibson told the court he deserved it. "I deserve what I'm getting. No question," he said, according to the Associated Press. The AP reported that the trial cost the county about $275,000.
On March 20, 2014, Gibson pleaded guilty to murdering Karen Hodella under an agreement with prosecutors. He admitted stabbing her. In exchange for his plea he received a fixed sentence of 65 years instead of facing a death penalty request, and the State agreed not to use the Hodella killing as an aggravating circumstance in the Kirk case. The court entered judgment in April 2014; the AP reported the formal sentencing on April 17, 2014.
While awaiting the Kirk trial, Gibson had the words "Death Row X 3" tattooed on the back of his head. At a hearing in May 2014 his lawyers asked how the tattoo could be hidden from jurors. Judge Orth, who had already ordered that his hair not be cut, said she was inclined to have his hair dyed, The Courier-Journal reported, as summarized by the ABA Journal. The tattoo came back in his appeals. The trial judge treated it as evidence of pride rather than remorse, and the Indiana Supreme Court, quoting her, said he wore his worst crimes "as a badge of honor."
The Kirk trial opened on June 2, 2014, with jury selection. The next day, June 3, Gibson pleaded guilty to her murder on the advice of his lawyers. He had no plea agreement on the sentence. The State dropped the habitual offender allegation, and he gave up his right to have a jury decide his punishment, leaving it to Judge Orth. Henderson said he was surprised. He said the plea spared Kirk's family a trial and saved the county money, and that the State would still ask for death.
The sentencing hearing ran four days, from July 28 to July 31, 2014, with 14 witnesses and 47 exhibits. The defense pointed to Gibson's alcoholism and bipolar disorder, and Biggs argued that a second death sentence was unnecessary. Kirk's father told reporters that Gibson should be executed for killing his daughter.
On August 15, 2014, Judge Orth sentenced Gibson to death a second time, in a 26-page order that called death "the only appropriate sentence." She found four aggravating circumstances: two forms of criminal deviate conduct, which she merged and gave moderate weight; his conviction for the Whitis murder, to which she gave great weight; and his probation status, also given great weight. She gave moderate weight to his guilty plea, minimal weight to his family history, mental illness, alcoholism and his help to the investigation, and no weight to his claimed remorse.
The Indiana Supreme Court decided the Whitis appeal on September 24, 2015, in an opinion by Justice Mark Massa. It rejected all six issues Gibson raised: the denial of a continuance, the refusal to dismiss the jury pool over publicity, limits on questions to prospective jurors, two challenges to jurors for cause, the refusal of a voluntary manslaughter instruction, and the appropriateness of the sentence. The court called the offense "beyond horrendous" and noted that no one had testified that Gibson was unable to understand the seriousness of what he did. Rehearing was denied on December 7, 2015, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on October 3, 2016.
In the Kirk appeal, argued on December 10, 2015, Gibson's lawyer told the court that without his confession no one would ever have known why Stephanie Kirk disappeared, and that the trial judge had given the confession too little weight. A deputy attorney general replied that the claim that police could never have connected her death to him without the confession went "a bit far." On April 12, 2016, in an opinion by Chief Justice Loretta Rush, the court affirmed the death sentence. It found substantial evidence that Kirk was alive during the assault, found no fundamental error in a change to the charging papers, declined to reweigh the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and held that the sentence was not inappropriate. Rush wrote that Gibson had "murdered a defenseless woman in a brutal attack."
Gibson sought post-conviction relief in all three cases. He filed his petition on June 16, 2016, and the Floyd County court held an evidentiary hearing from July 17 to 21, 2017, then denied relief on October 6, 2017. In the Hodella case the Indiana Court of Appeals rejected his claim that his plea had not been knowing and voluntary, and the Indiana Supreme Court declined to hear it.
The two capital cases went directly to the Indiana Supreme Court, which heard argument on January 10, 2019. His appellate lawyer argued that trial counsel had failed to investigate the 1991 crash and a possible brain injury, and that Biggs, as chief public defender, had a conflict of interest because of his caseload, administrative duties and pressure to control costs. A deputy attorney general called Gibson "the worst of the worst" and said managing limited funds was a challenge for every defense lawyer, not a conflict.
On October 24, 2019, in a 40-page opinion by Justice Massa, the court affirmed the denial of relief. It found Gibson's claims "unpersuasive and largely unsupported by the record." It held that the conflict claim was governed by the ordinary test for ineffective assistance, which requires a showing of prejudice, and that Gibson had shown none; the public defender's office had been reimbursed more than $686,000 in expenses without denial or delay. It held that his plea in the Kirk case was knowing and voluntary and that his lawyers' advice to let a judge decide the sentence was reasonable. "We have little doubt that Gibson received quality representation," the court wrote. Rehearing was denied on February 3, 2020. On October 13, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court denied two petitions for certiorari, which had asked whether a presumption of prejudice should apply to the conflict claim.
Gibson's one-year deadline to file a federal habeas petition ran from the denial of rehearing and expired on February 3, 2021, according to the Seventh Circuit. Two lawyers appointed in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, filed a motion for more time on January 21, 2021, citing problems communicating with him, his mental health and the need for a psychiatric evaluation. The district court denied it as premature. No petition was filed by the deadline, and the case sat largely dormant for about 18 months. Both lawyers withdrew in 2022, and a new lawyer, Oliver Loewy, was appointed in August 2022. He filed the petition on February 23, 2023, about two years late.
The warden moved to dismiss it as untimely. Gibson asked the court to excuse the delay, citing the pandemic, abandonment by his earlier lawyers and his mental condition. Experts for the defense said he probably had damage to the brain's white matter, and Dr. Chambers reported diagnoses of bipolar disorder, addictive disorders and a history of significant traumatic brain injury. Chambers also said Indiana prison officials had stopped some, and possibly all, of Gibson's psychiatric medication for all or part of 2018 to 2023.
Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana granted Gibson discovery and an evidentiary hearing on the delay, and ordered him taken to an Indianapolis hospital for an MRI and a PET scan. The warden appealed. On March 31, 2026, a Seventh Circuit panel of Judges Scudder, Lee and Pryor reversed the transport order, holding that Gibson had not shown how the scans would support a habeas claim or his request to excuse the delay. The court said the evidentiary hearing on equitable tolling should go ahead. Rehearing was denied on April 16, 2026.
Gibson's lawyers then took the transport question to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Amy Coney Barrett extended their filing deadline, and the petition for certiorari was filed on September 12, 2026, as No. 26-5586. On October 1, 2026, the Court extended the State's time to respond to November 13, 2026. The court has not yet ruled on whether his federal petition can be heard at all.
Indiana resumed executions in December 2024, its first since 2009, and carried out three within twelve months. In October 2025 the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported that five men remained on the state's death row, all held at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, and that Gibson was one of them, with appeals continuing in federal court. In August 2026 the Indiana Supreme Court set another prisoner's execution for November 5, 2026. Gibson has no execution date.
Gibson was convicted of three murders, and those three are the only killings charged against him. In 2012 investigators in Bloomington looked at whether he could be linked to an unrelated disappearance, and police searched his property again after a tip about other victims; neither inquiry was reported to have produced a charge.
Accounts also differ on some details. Karen Hodella's age is given as 44 and as 45. The Indiana Capital Chronicle's 2025 summary said all three women were strangled in 2012; the court records show that Hodella was stabbed in 2002. Some reports put Hodella's death in 2003, the year her body was found.
January 1991: Gibson crashes a car while driving drunk and injures his head.
October 2, 1991: Arrested in Louisville after attacking a woman at a pay phone; later pleads guilty to sexual abuse and robbery.
1999: Released from prison in Kentucky.
October 2002: Kills Karen Hodella.
January 2003: Hodella's body is found near the Ohio River in Clarksville.
March 11, 2005: Placed on three years' probation for auto theft; violates it within a month.
March 24 to 25, 2012: Meets and kills Stephanie Kirk; she is reported missing.
April 18, 2012: Kills Christine Whitis.
April 19, 2012: His sisters find Whitis's body; he is arrested in her van.
April 20, 2012: Confesses to the Whitis and Hodella killings.
April 23, 24 and 26, 2012: Confesses to killing Kirk.
April 24, 2012: Charged with murder; public defender appointed.
Late April 2012, eight days after Whitis was found: Kirk's remains are recovered from his backyard.
May 23, 2012: Charged with Kirk's murder; the State seeks death.
September 28, 2012: Judge orders jurors drawn from Dearborn County.
October 25, 2013: Jury convicts him of murdering Whitis after about 17 minutes.
October 29, 2013: Jury recommends death.
November 26, 2013: Sentenced to death for the Whitis murder.
March 20, 2014: Pleads guilty to the Hodella murder; 65 years.
June 3, 2014: Pleads guilty to the Kirk murder.
August 15, 2014: Sentenced to death for the Kirk murder.
September 24, 2015: Indiana Supreme Court affirms the Whitis death sentence.
April 12, 2016: Indiana Supreme Court affirms the Kirk death sentence.
October 3, 2016: U.S. Supreme Court denies review of the Whitis case.
October 6, 2017: Post-conviction relief denied in Floyd County.
October 24, 2019: Indiana Supreme Court affirms the denial.
October 13, 2020: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
February 3, 2021: Federal habeas deadline passes with no petition filed.
February 23, 2023: Federal habeas petition filed.
March 31, 2026: Seventh Circuit reverses the order for brain scans.
September 12, 2026: Petition for certiorari filed in the U.S. Supreme Court.
November 13, 2026: State's response due.