Draft:1992 Dayton Christmas murders
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| 1992 Dayton Christmas murders | |
|---|---|
| Location | Dayton, Ohio, United States |
| Date | December 24 – December 26, 1992 |
Attack type | Murders by shooting |
| Victims | 6 murdered, 2 injured |
| Convicted | Marvallous Keene, 19 Heather Nicole Matthews, 20 DeMarcus Maurice Smith, 17 Laura Jeanne Taylor, 16 |
| Verdict | Guilty |
| Convictions | Aggravated murder |
| Sentence | Keene Death Taylor, Smith and Matthews Life imprisonment |
The 1992 Dayton Christmas murders were a series of murders committed by a four-member juvenile gang "Downtown Posse" during a three-day period around Christmas Day of 1992 in Dayton, Ohio, United States. The four murderers, led by ringleader Marvallous Keene, had killed a total of six people and injured another two, with varying motives of robbery and to silence potential witnesses, and the deceased victims included two friends of Keene. All four perpetrators, aged between 16 and 20, were arrested and charged with multiple counts of aggravated murder.
The trial of the four ended with Keene sentenced to death for five of the murders, while the rest – Heather Nicole Matthews, Laura Jeanne Taylor and DeMarcus Maurice Smith – were all sentenced to life in prison and remains incarcerated as of today. Keene was ultimately executed by lethal injection on July 21, 2009, therefore becoming the 1,000th person in the U.S. to undergo a lethal injection execution since 1982.
Murders
[edit]Murder of Joseph Wilkerson
[edit]On December 24, 1992,
Murder of Danita Gullette
[edit]On December 24, 1992,
Shooting of Jeffrey Wright
[edit]On December 24, 1992,
Murder of Richmond Maddox
[edit]On December 25, 1992,
Shootings of Sarah Abraham, Jones Pettus and Edward Thompson
[edit]On December 26, 1992,
Murders of Marvin Washington and Wendy Cottrill
[edit]Five days after the murder of Abraham, the police received a tip-off about a couple shot to death in a field in Dayton.
Murder trials and sentencing
[edit]Marvallous Keene (July 5, 1973 – July 21, 2009)
Heather Nicole Matthews (born February 27, 1972)
Laura Jeanne Taylor (born January 31, 1976)
DeMarcus Maurice Smith (born July 3, 1975)
Appeal processes
[edit]After the end of the trial, Laura Taylor appealed against her murder convictions and life term. On November 17, 1995, the Ohio Second District Court of Appeals rejected her appeal.
Marvallous Keene, the only member of the gang to be held on death row at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, spent more than a decade appealing against his death sentence.
On January 21, 1998, Keene filed an appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court, but the appeal was dismissed on May 13, 1998.
On April 25, 2008, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Keene's appeal. Keene had earlier argued that the prosecution's decision to pursue the death penalty against him was racially motivated since he was African-American while his other adult co-defendant Heather Williams was White and did not face the death sentence after reaching a plea bargain, and cited a precedent case where a series of murders committed under similar circumstances as the Dayton murders did not end with the three accused – all of whom were White – sentenced to death. A case study cited by Keene showed that there were 9% of African Americans in Ohio, yet 49% of the death row population in Ohio were of African American descent, which was used to support Keene's argument of racial discrimination caused by capital punishment. Keene also submitted that the surviving witness Kathie Henderson's pre-trial identification of him as the shooter was unduly suggestive and it violated his due process rights.
However, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Keene's arguments did not hold much weight in his favour, as the difference between Keene and Matthews was that Matthews did not personally shoot the victims while Keene pulled the trigger in most of these murders, and the evidence to prove Matthew's direct involvement in the murders paled in comparison to the more prominent role Keene played in the deaths of the victims. It was noted that Matthews faced only two counts of murder and while she was involved, the evidence did not affirmatively suggest that she intended to cause the death of these two victims, and Keene himself personally murdered at least four of the victims, and hence the decision to seek the death penalty solely against Keene was not proven to be racially motivated. The precedent case cited by Keene also showed that out of the three White men accused of killing two men, two of them agreed to testify against the third, who was in the end acquitted of one murder while convicted of the other, and the aggravating factors were lesser than the ones proven in Keene's case, which showed that the death penalty against Keene was more appropriate than the precedent capital case.
Furthermore, the court found that Henderson's identification of Keene as the gunman who stole her car before the murder of Joseph Wilkerson was reliable since she had been held on gunpoint by Keene and had ample opportunity to gain the facial description of Keene and observe distinctive features of the robber. Hence, the use of the identification was admissible and did not breach the fairness of Keene's trial. Therefore, on these grounds, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Keene's appeal. In fact, the Ohio Supreme Court had rejected similar arguments of racial bias and unfair trial practices from Keene back in 1998.
On the other hand, both DeMarcus Smith and Heather Matthews did not appeal with respect to their cases.
Execution of Marvallous Keene
[edit]About 17 years
On July 21, 2009, 36-year-old Marvallous Keene was put to death via lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.
Prior to his execution, Keene ordered a final meal of one Porterhouse steak with A-1 sauce, one pound of jumbo friend shrimp with cocktail sauce, french fries and onion rings, a tube of Pillsbury dinner rolls and butter, two plums, a mango, one pound of seedless white grapes, German chocolate cake, two bottles of Pepsi and two bottles of A&W cream soda.
Incarceration of Matthews, Taylor and Smith
[edit]In the aftermath of Marvallous Keene's execution, his three surviving accomplices – Heather Matthews, Laura Taylor and DeMarcus Smith – remains in prison serving their sentences.
Both Taylor and Matthews are detained at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville as of 2021, while Smith was serving his life sentence at the Mansfield Correctional Institute as of 2021. The trio would not be eligible for release on parole for a period of more than 100 years.
About 29 years after the Dayton Christmas murders, Taylor, who was sentenced to 145 years to life in prison, was scheduled to participate in a parole eligibility hearing on December 29, 2021, as she was a juvenile at the time of the offence and therefore allowed to be considered for parole at this point under the law. The state confirmed they would oppose the release of Taylor.
Close to 32 years after the killings, Smith, who was also a minor when the murders happened, was similarly set to be assessed for parole eligibility on January 1, 2025.
Aftermath
[edit]See also
[edit]- Capital punishment in Ohio
- List of people executed in Ohio
- List of people executed in the United States in 2009
- List of rampage killers in the United States
References
[edit]