Robert Foley

What the record shows

Robert Carl Foley is a Kentucky death row prisoner convicted of six murders committed in Laurel County, in the southeastern part of the state, between 1989 and 1991. A Laurel County jury convicted him in 1993 of killing brothers Rodney and Lynn Vaughn at his home in August 1991, and a jury in Madison County, where the second case was moved, convicted him in 1994 of four killings carried out in 1989. He received a death sentence for each of the six murders. All of his appeals have so far failed, and he remains on death row, where Kentucky executions have been halted by a court order since 2010, according to Associated Press reporting.

According to the Sixth Circuit's 2007 opinion in Foley v. Parker, the Vaughn killings took place on August 17, 1991, at Foley's house in Laurel County. Foley admitted starting a fight by punching Rodney Vaughn, who was intoxicated. After the two were separated, Foley knocked Rodney down several more times, drew a revolver and shot him six times at close range. He then fetched another gun and shot Lynn Vaughn, whose full name the Kentucky Supreme Court gives as Harry Lynn Vaughn, in the back of the head. The court said Foley organized three other men to help dispose of the bodies, which were dumped in Sinking Creek and found two days later. Foley was indicted on two counts of capital murder and related charges.

While the Vaughn case was pending, investigators uncovered the earlier killings. In October 1991, the Sixth Circuit recorded, authorities recovered four bodies from property in the Bald Rock community of Laurel County; they had been covered in lime and placed in a septic tank capped with cement. The victims were Kimberly Bowersock, Lillian Contino, Jerry McMillen and Calvin Reynolds, whose surnames are spelled in slightly different ways across court records. The Associated Press reported that they were shot on October 8, 1989, because Foley believed one of them had reported him to his parole officer. The Kentucky Supreme Court has noted that prosecutors also linked the killings to Foley's alleged trafficking in marijuana and moonshine, and that the Commonwealth's theory placed the shootings inside the home of a man named David Gross.

The Vaughn trial was set for August 11, 1993, in Laurel Circuit Court. The judge refused a last-minute request to move it, despite heavy local coverage that included the septic tank discoveries, and the jury found Foley guilty of both murders and recommended death. The Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed in November 1996. The trial on the four 1989 murders was moved to Madison County and held in April 1994. That case rested largely on two eyewitnesses who were present at the killings and who, according to the state's high court, said Foley spared them to intimidate them into helping cover up the scene. He was convicted of all four murders and given four more death sentences, which the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed in 1997. The Vaughn convictions were used as an aggravating factor in the second penalty phase.

Foley has maintained that he is innocent of the 1989 killings and has argued that he shot the Vaughns in self-defense. His later challenges have all been rejected. The Sixth Circuit affirmed the denial of his federal habeas petition in 2007 over a dissent that questioned the fairness of the Laurel County jury. In 2009 Attorney General Jack Conway asked Governor Steve Beshear to set an execution date, saying Foley had exhausted his appeals as of right, WUKY reported. In March 2014 the Kentucky Supreme Court unanimously refused to reopen the Vaughn case on the basis of a firearms expert's report, finding nothing new in it. In February 2017 the same court rejected two further challenges in the 1989 case, including affidavits from people who claimed to have seen Calvin Reynolds alive after the killings.

Foley also brought a federal lawsuit over the state's failure to arrange a hip replacement, which a magistrate judge dismissed in 2014. The Associated Press reported that six facilities declined to host the operation, partly because of security concerns about him. With six victims, he has more murder convictions than any other prisoner on Kentucky's death row, according to the AP. The Louisville Courier Journal listed him in July 2024, aged 67, as one of 25 people under a death sentence in the state, after 30 years on death row.