Lorenzo Gilyard

What the record shows

Lorenzo Gilyard is a former trash company supervisor from Kansas City, Missouri, who was convicted in March 2007 of murdering six women whose strangled bodies were found around the city in 1986 and 1987. Arrested in April 2004 after a DNA match, he was at one point charged with 13 killings of women and girls dating from 1977 to 1993. A Jackson County judge, sitting without a jury, found him guilty on six counts and acquitted him on a seventh, and in April 2007 he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He has denied killing anyone and remains in prison.

The killings stretched over 16 years. According to court papers listed by the Associated Press, the women and girls named in the charges were Stacie L. Swofford, 17; Gwendolyn Kizine, 15; Margaret J. Miller, 17; Catherine M. Barry, 34; Naomi Kelly, 23; Debbie Blevins, 32; Ann Barnes, 36; Kellie A. Ford, 20; Angela Mayhew, 19; Sheila Ingold, 36; Carmeline Hibbs, 30; Helga Kruger, 26; and Connie Luther, 29. AP reported in 2004 that eight of the original 12 deaths occurred in 1986 and 1987, that 11 of those women were sex workers and the 12th was a mentally ill woman who accepted rides from strangers, and that the victims were strangled with items including nylon stockings, shoestrings and wire. Bodies were found in an abandoned van, a field, a parking lot and, in the last case in 1993, a snowdrift.

Investigators did not connect any of the deaths until 1994, when two were linked, and the remaining connections were made in roughly the 10 months before the arrest, according to the AP. A federal grant funded the Kansas City crime lab to analyze DNA from old unsolved cases, and analysts eventually traced semen from multiple victims to a single unknown man. The identification came from a blood sample taken from Gilyard in 1987, when he was among several men sampled as suspects in one of the killings; the technology to compare it with the crime scene evidence did not exist until 2000. According to a probable cause statement cited by NBC News, the match was made on April 12, 2004.

Gilyard, then 53 and married, was arrested on April 16, 2004, and charged the next day with 10 counts of first-degree murder and two counts of capital murder, the charge in force at the time of two of the deaths. He had worked for Deffenbaugh Disposal Service since 1986, first on a trash crew and later supervising several crews; a company spokesman told reporters the allegations did not match the man his co-workers knew. The AP reported that he had been in and out of jail and prison in the 1970s and 1980s on charges ranging from burglary and assault to molestation. A 13th murder count, involving a 26-year-old woman found dead on a street in 1989, was added in 2006.

In January 2007 prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty if Gilyard waived a jury, and his lawyers also gave up nearly all of his appeal rights. When trial opened before Judge John O'Malley on March 5, 2007, prosecutors dropped six counts, including one involving an Austrian woman, saying the remaining seven cases were stronger, and reserved the right to refile them. The state's case rested on DNA: semen linked to Gilyard was found on six of the women, and one of his hairs was found on the sweater of the seventh. Defense attorneys Susan Elliott and Tom Jacquinot argued that the evidence showed only sexual contact, not murder.

On March 16, 2007, O'Malley convicted Gilyard of the first-degree murders of Catherine Barry, Naomi Kelly, Ann Barnes, Kellie Ford, Sheila Ingold and Carmeline Hibbs. He acquitted him of killing Angela Mayhew, the only victim on whom no semen was found, saying the state had offered suspicion rather than convincing proof. Barry, according to her family, was the only one of the six who was not a sex worker. On April 13, 2007, the judge imposed six terms of life without parole, the only sentence available, and said Gilyard had forfeited any right to live among the public. Prosecutor Jim Kanatzar said his office would review the six dismissed cases; no refiling is reported in the sources consulted.

Gilyard was born in Kansas City on May 24, 1950, according to the Wikipedia article. He has consistently maintained his innocence, including, the Wikipedia article says, in a 2018 television interview with Piers Morgan. The same article states that he served his sentence at Western Missouri Correctional Center before being moved to Crossroads Correctional Center in July 2019.