Alton Coleman was born on November 6, 1955, in Waukegan, Illinois. Coleman’s mother worked three jobs, and he lived with his 73-year-old grandmother. A middle-school dropout, Coleman was well known to Illinois law enforcement, having been charged with sex crimes six times between 1973 and 1983. Two of those cases were dismissed, with Coleman pleading guilty to lesser charges in two and twice being acquitted. Coleman was scheduled to go on trial in Illinois on charges stemming from the rape of a 14-year-old girl when he fled and began his killing spree.

Debra Brown, one of eleven children, is borderline intellectually disabled, suffered head trauma as a child, and was diagnosed with dependent personality disorder by a psychiatrist. She was engaged to another man when she met Coleman in 1983, but left her family and moved in with him shortly afterwards. Although a willing participant in Coleman’s assaults and murders, Brown had no history of violence or any criminal history prior to their relationship.

Coleman and Brown committed their first murder when they killed 9-year-old Vernita Wheat from Kenosha, Wisconsin. After Coleman had befriended her mother, Juanita Wheat, he abducted Vernita and took her to Waukegan on May 29, 1984. Vernita’s badly decomposed corpse was discovered on June 19 in an abandoned building four blocks from Coleman’s grandmother’s apartment. It was determined she had been raped, and the cause of death was ligature strangulation.

In June 1984, Coleman and Brown were in Gary, Indiana and encountered two young girls there: 9-year-old Annie and her niece 7-year-old Tamika Turks. The couple sexually assaulted the two children. Annie survived the violent attack, but Tamika did not; her partially decomposed body was discovered on June 19. The same day, Donna Williams, a 25-year-old woman from Gary, disappeared. On July 11, Williams’s decomposed body was discovered in Detroit, Michigan, about half a mile from where her car was found. She had been raped and killed by ligature strangulation.

Brown, who was originally sentenced to be executed in Ohio for her complicity in the crimes, had her death sentence commuted to life imprisonment by Governor Richard Celeste in 1991. In commuting Brown’s sentence, Celeste cited her low IQ scores, ranging from 59 to 74, and her “master-slave” relationship with Coleman influencing her actions. Brown was one of eight Ohio death row inmates (including all four of the Ohio’s female death row inmates) to have her sentence commuted by Celeste, a staunch opponent of capital punishment, a week before he left office.

On April 25, 2002, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a claim by Coleman’s attorneys that the state’s plan to accommodate the large number of victims and survivors who wanted to view the execution would turn it into a “spectator sport”. So many victims and survivors of Coleman’s crimes were allowed to witness the execution that prison officials had to set up a closed-circuit viewing venue outside of the building. For his last meal, Coleman ordered a well-done filet mignon smothered with mushrooms, fried chicken breasts, a salad with French dressing, sweet potato pie topped with whipped cream, French fries, collard greens, onion rings, cornbread, broccoli with melted cheese, biscuits and gravy, and Cherry Coke.

Brown is currently serving her sentence without possibility of parole at the Dayton Correctional Institution in Dayton, Ohio. She finally expressed remorse for her crimes when she apologized to the victims’ families in a video in 2005.

Despite her non-violent history before the spree, Brown was initially unrepentant for her acts. During the sentencing phase of her first Ohio trial, she sent a note to the judge which read in part: “I killed the bitch and I don’t give a damn. I had fun out of it.” She was also given a death sentence for the murder of Tamika Turks in Indiana; however that sentence was ultimately commuted to 140 years imprisonment in 2018.