Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (13 page)

Now it was Janice’s turn to be driven to a cheap motel for the couple’s sexual pleasure. Judith would later say that Janice was quite happy on the journey and this is
possible as she hadn’t seen John Hancock being shot. He himself would later explain that Janice was almost
childlike
and had often been sexually used by men. But Alvin Neelley would state that when the two cars stopped - moments before Judith shot John Hancock - he saw that she’d handcuffed Janice to the inside of the car.

Once at the motel, Judith Neelley sexually assaulted Janice and Alvin allegedly raped her. Alvin would say that Judith also mocked the mentally retarded woman for talking so strangely. This murder, like that of Lisa, seems to have been about power, although that power was sometimes expressed in sexual terms.

The next day Judith decided to get rid of her victim, so drove the woman to a rural part of Chattooga County. There she marched Janice out of the car and shot her. Janice continued to scream and Judith angrily shot her twice more in the chest. She would later say that Alvin had ordered her to do so, but in his version he only heard about the death from Judith as he’d
driven
on ahead (A jury didn’t believe that he’d only helped to abduct and rape her and he was charged with causing her death.)

A kindly stranger picked up the bleeding John Hancock and rushed him to the hospital. There he received
emergency treatment and soon recovered from his gunshot wound. He was able to give an excellent description of Judith and Alvin Neelley, though obviously he only knew their CB names.

A Georgia detective invited him to come down to the station and take a lie detector test, to make sure that he’d played no part in the disappearance of his partner Janice. (Though feared dead she was still officially
listed
as missing.) Incredibly, whilst he was there, he heard Judith Neelley’s voice emanating from another room. A policeman was playing tape recordings of Mrs Neelley’s phone calls to one of her almost-victims, Debbie Smith, the schoolgirl who’d declined a ride. John Hancock exclaimed that he was listening to the voice of the woman who’d shot him - and he proved to be right.

Debbie, John and other witnesses now picked out Judith Neelley’s face - and, in some instances, Alvin’s - from crime photographs that the police showed them and a warrant was issued for their arrest.

By now the couple were back in Judith’s home town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, staying with her mother, Barbara. On 9th October Judith went to a hotel there and tried to pass a bad cheque. She was arrested - and word soon got back to Sergeant Kenneth Kines, who
knew Neelley was responsible for John Hancock’s shooting and Lisa’s torture and death. After all, her taunting phone calls had told them where to find Lisa’s body, information no one but the killer could know.

The police searched Judith’s mother’s house and found some of the Neelley’s killing kit, including
handcuffs
, guns, knives and masks.

Alvin was also arrested the same week and when Janice Chatman wasn’t found with either Neelley the police strongly suspected she was dead. Alvin would later tell police where to find her body - in a rural
backwater
in Chattooga County. He’d claim that Judith told him where she’d shot the girl, that he wasn’t directly involved in her death. He even drew them a map of the killing fields and they did indeed locate the young woman’s body in the vicinity. Unfortunately she was too badly decomposed to undergo forensic tests.

Alvin now claimed that Judith was the powerful one - and certainly the police found her hard and cold, whilst several people said she had the most chilling stare they’d ever seen. A police photo at the time of her arrest showed her expression as one of repressed rage. It wasn’t the first time she’d looked frightening - she’d certainly terrorised the female student she mugged and
unsettled Debbie Smith and Diane Bobo with her compassionless gaze.

Police thought that Alvin, in contrast, was a wimp, a weak man who seemed permanently close to tears and who admitted he liked to ride in a separate car to his wife because she had terrible mood swings and would pick arguments. (Possibly the peanut butter diet played havoc with her blood sugar.) He talked about the
firebombing
, shooting and killings that she’d instigated, and said that he’d begun to fear that she’d shoot him too.

When first brought into custody Judith denied
everything
. She was pregnant again and looked unkempt and impoverished. Her eyes were blank as she stared at the police and her voice was flat. Living in a car with two children whilst expecting a third would take its toll on anyone’s health - but it still didn’t give her an excuse to inflict misery on others.

The police let her hear tapes of the various calls that she’d made. Thereafter, she admitted firebombing one careworker and shooting into the house of another. When they played the tapes she’d made after Lisa’s death, she started to talk matter of factly about the girl’s sexual abuse, the drain cleaner torture and eventual death. She also admitted shooting Janice Chatman three times.

Asked if she was afraid of her husband Alvin, she shook her head and said that he was the only person
she’d ever trusted. She would later change this story to suggest that he’d abused her almost every day of her life - though the endless beatings mysteriously left not a single bruise. She was driven to Fort Payne, Alabama, and charged with the murder of Lisa Ann Millican. (Janice had been killed in a different jurisdiction so charges relating to her death would have to be brought separately.)

Judith Neelley gave birth to her third child, a boy, whilst waiting to go to trial. Bob French, who intially didn’t like her, reluctantly agreed to act as her defense. He arranged for her to have dental work so that her buckteeth looked better. He also arranged for her hair to be styled and got her upmarket clothes. At the end of this grooming period she looked healthy and attractive. She was also intellectually fit - tests showed her IQ was still well above average. It appears that Bob French also had her coached so that she lost her aggressive air.

Whilst putting together Judith’s defense, he found out about Alvin’s first wife and mother of his three
children
, Jo Ann Browning (she had married Mr Browning long before obtaining a divorce from Alvin Neelley, making the marriage bigamous) and managed to track her down.

Judith Neelley went to trial on the 7th March 1983. The venue was the Dekalb County Courthouse in Alabama. Seven women and five men made up the jurors. It had been clear from Bob French’s original questions during the jury selection process that he was going to take the woman-as-victim approach.

The prosecution stated that when Judith had started talking to Lisa in the mall, her plan had been to abuse her. They said that Judith was not Alvin’s victim - after all, she had acted alone during several of her crimes. She had approached complete strangers and engaged them in persistent conversations, and she had sounded confident during her calls to the police. The people who had declined to go with her also said that she was not bruised or cowed and that in some instances Alvin hadn’t even been around.

Bob French called Jo Ann Browning, Alvin’s first wife, to the stand. The couple had been married for three years in the seventies and had produced three children. Jo Ann had helped Alvin rob the stores where he worked - she would state that he made her do so. The couple had either inhabited trailers, where she said he hit her daily, or moved purposelessly around. When the stormy marriage faltered, he had insisted on keeping the children, so Jo Ann had good reason to hate him even more. A clearly immature man, he had used his
offspring as pawns to hurt his ex-wife - for after insisting on custody he’d eventually given the children to relatives.

Alvin had left Jo Ann after he met the younger Judith, so she had another reason to make him look bad in court. (Alvin Neelley was tried separately from Judith for the murder of Janice Chatman. He was found guilty and given two life sentences.) Jo Ann would claim in court that he’d beaten her over eight hundred times, often using heavy implements. The prosecution queried this as she had never had a broken bone. Whatever the reality of the relationship, it was clear that she detested her former spouse. The prosecution suggested that Jo Ann’s story was a lie or at least hugely exaggerated, the words of a woman scorned.

Prior to her trial, Judith had never alleged that Alvin had abused her - but now she followed Jo Ann to the stand and gave a defence that amounted to Battered Wife Syndrome, even though she didn’t fit the true definition of a battered wife.

The syndrome was coined to describe women who kill their abusive partners - not women whose abusive
partners
allegedly tell them to kill
someone
else
who they’ve abducted for sexual kicks. Moreover, studies of battered women who have killed their violent men show that the women had tried to escape on numerous occasions but been tracked down and re-abused. And they’d been beaten more severely than the battered
wives who didn’t go on to kill. In other words, these women had tried hard to escape their particularly violent abusers and had only killed them as a last resort.

Judith Neelley didn’t fit this pattern at all. She had been free at times when Alvin was locked up. She could have gone anywhere she wanted - indeed, in one letter she had told him so, stating that she only waited for him to leave jail because she wanted to be with him. She wasn’t dependent on him for her livelihood - she had taken a cashier’s course whilst in the youth correctional centre so could have taken legitimate shop work anywhere in the states.

Judith produced just one photograph where she was bruised and claimed that Alvin had hit her, bit her, kicked her and raped her, but a mental health expert said that she could have gotten these injuries in many ways. He said that she retained her free will, that she hadn’t been brainwashed by Alvin. Other photographs showed the couple smiling happily as they posed with various guns. Judith had been
au
fait
with guns for years and owned several weapons of her own. She now said that Alvin had made her smile for each of the photographs but neither the prosecution or the jury were convinced.

Judith explained Lisa’s abduction by saying that Alvin had decided he wanted a virgin. She was allegedly afraid not to comply with this request, so duly got thirteen-year-old Lisa for him. She would at first give
the impression that Lisa was happy to stay with the Neelleys - but later slipped up and mentioned
handcuffing
her to the car. She said that Alvin had made her help him beat Lisa at the motel whilst their babies watched.

She gave a similar story when it came to Janice Chatman’s sexual assault and death, saying that Alvin had made her do it. But John Hancock was able to assert that
Judith
had shot him. At the time Alvin was out of sight so if Alvin was truly the instigator she could just have pretended to fire at John and let him go. Under questioning, John admitted that she’d fired the shot when Alvin told her to hurry up - and that it was Alvin who had determined where the two cars would meet up. But Judith Neelley had done the actual shooting - she’d taken a malicious pleasure in taunting him in the previous moments and hadn’t appeared at all intimidated by her spouse.

Her defense suggested that if one of the women she’d approached had given her ‘Christian witness’ (talked to her about religion) then Judith - already an armed robber, persistent thief and mugger -
wouldn
’t have gone on to kill. In reality, more serial killers come from deeply religious areas of the world than from more secular ones. And Alvin Neelley’s
possessions
included tracts from a TV evangelist - but that hadn’t stopped Alvin having sex with underage girls.

The jury now recommended that Judith be sent to prison for life without possibility of parole - but in Alabama the final decision is the judge’s and he
sentenced
her to die in the electric chair. It was the only time she cried throughout the trial, and the tears were clearly for herself.

At eighteen, Judith Neelley was the youngest woman ever to be sentenced to death in the states. But then she wasn’t like most young woman - she’d tortured a thirteen-year-old child and ultimately murdered her. And she’d sexually assaulted and killed a twenty-three-year old woman of limited mental ability and shot her companion, leaving him for dead.

She’d also fired bullets into one house, probably knowing it contained children as well as an adult
careworker
. She’d firebombed the home of another careworker, again having no control over who was potentially maimed or killed. She’d mugged a student and had scammed money from many of the
convenience
stores that gave her work. She’d often stolen cheques from people’s mailboxes and she’d tried to entice other teenagers and women into her car.

By the time she was eighteen she’d had three children, all born whilst she was incarcerated. She’d driven
the first two - the twins - around the country, never giving them a stable home.

Judith was sent to a prison for women in Alabama to await execution, and spent much of her time there reading and lodging various appeals. She had a cell to
herself
, an improvement on the car-based living she was used to. She took her exercise periods and her meals alone, presumably because child killers are often assaulted by other prisoners. She might also have been seen as a risk to other young women given her
aggressive
tendencies.

She continued to be visited by her defense attorney Bob French, by now an expert on Battered Wife Syndrome. Local feeling against her was high, and people understandably turned against Bob too and stopped being his clients. Eventually he had to file for bankruptcy.

Meanwhile Judith’s appeals - including one which alleged that Bob French had failed to represent her properly and that he’d already decided to write a book on the subject at the time of her trial - were turned down. Her final appeal was heard in 1998, after which she was left with no further legal redress.