Wilbert Lee Evans
Wilbert Lee Evans was an American convict who was executed in Virginia's electric chair for the murder of 47-year-old Deputy Sheriff William Gene Truesdale in Alexandria, Virginia. Truesdale's murder occurred in 1981 during Evans's attempted escape from custody, as Evans was accused of other crimes in North Carolina, including a previous murder, and had been temporarily transported to Virginia to testify in another man's extradition hearing there.
Evans's execution was controversial due to several factors, including his documented good behavior and rehabilitation behind bars; trial errors and prosecutorial misconduct that human rights organizations, death penalty abolitionists, and Evans's attorneys argued should have resulted in a retrial or a reduced sentence; and the gruesome nature of Evans's death, as reporters who witnessed his execution in Virginia's electric chair described it as botched, and The Virginian-Pilot called Evans's execution "one of Virginia's worst." In 2023, NPR obtained and released documents and tape recordings of several executions in Virginia's electric chair, one of which was that of Evans; the tape recording of Evans's execution did not include mention of it being botched, although contemporaneous press reports and witness accounts did.
Early life
Evans was born to a father who was a funeral home director and a mother who was a housekeeper. He had five brothers and sisters. He grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. When Evans was six years old, his mother died. His father died of a heart attack in March 1990, months before Evans's execution. Evans had only an elementary school education, although he gained literacy skills by reading court opinions and educating himself in law while on death row.At the age of 18, Evans burglarized a gas station, seriously injuring one person. At another point in his youth, he took three members of a prison disciplinary committee as hostages and held them at knifepoint.
At the time of Truesdale's murder, Evans was charged with crimes in North Carolina. Several newspapers in 1981 described the charges as being for capital murder and robbery, while The Washington Post described the charges in 1990 as being for assault; the Richmond Times-Dispatch further stated that Evans had entered a North Carolina credit union, taken an employee to a backroom, threatened to kill her while holding her at gunpoint, and beaten her. While in custody in North Carolina awaiting trial on those charges, he was sent to Alexandria, Virginia, to testify at an extradition hearing for Clifton Taylor, alias Rufus Blood Taylor, a man charged with capital murder in the death of Bishop Mae Lawson.
On August 31, 1978, Evans was accused of shooting and killing 37-year-old Alton J. Collins during an argument over $20 in a card game in Raleigh. Evans was charged with Collins' murder, but the case never went to trial.
Murder of William Truesdale
At approximately 3:30 pm on January 27, 1981, 47-year-old Deputy Sheriff William Truesdale, a native of Landover, Maryland, was in the process of transferring Evans and two additional prisoners in a van from the Alexandria Courthouse to the Alexandria City Jail following the extradition hearing at which Evans had testified. While the three prisoners left the van, Evans overpowered Truesdale and grabbed Truesdale's.38-caliber revolver. Evans then fired the gun, striking Truesdale at least once in the chest and causing Truesdale to fall down the stairs leading outside the jail. Evans then used the same revolver to shoot at the handcuffs keeping him tethered to the other two prisoners and fled the scene. Evans was a fugitive for fewer than 30 minutes. During this time, as Evans evaded other officers who responded to Truesdale's shooting, he attempted to shoot at two additional police officers, but the gun misfired. Police cornered him in a parking lot eight blocks away, at which point Evans shot himself in the stomach. Evans's self-inflicted gunshot wound proved to be nonfatal; Evans was sent to a hospital, where, the day after the shooting, he was reported to be in stable condition.Truesdale died during surgery at Alexandria Hospital the day after the shooting.
Trial, death row, and appeals
Trial
At trial, Evans apologized for the murder of Truesdale, testifying on the stand, "I didn't have no intention to shoot anyone. I'm sorry." During his trial and on death row, Evans insisted that Truesdale's shooting was an accident and that he unintentionally shot Truesdale while trying to shoot his handcuffs. Other officers who pursued Evans after Truesdale's shooting disputed Evans's contention that the shooting was an accident. One testified to Evans pointing Truesdale's gun at them and attempting to shoot at him and his partner when they caught up to Evans. Evans also claimed that his desire to run was impulsive, testifying during the trial that " ended up with a hold of the gun and were tussling. was trying to shoot off the handcuffs" when he struck Truesdale by accident. An employee with the sheriff's department conducted an internal investigation during which he interviewed other inmates and concluded that Evans's escape was planned, and that Evans intended to leap from a window when he thought his handcuffs would be removed in the courthouse.On April 18, 1981, a jury of eight women and four men deliberated four hours before convicting Evans of capital murder in the shooting of William Truesdale. They had the choice of pursuing a sentence of life imprisonment or the death penalty, and they recommended the death penalty. On June 1, 1981, Circuit Court Judge Wiley R. Wright formally sentenced Evans to death, stating that the jury served as "the conscience of the community" and that "their verdict had to be given great weight." Immediately after the trial, Evans's attorney stated he would file for a new trial; in the meantime, Judge Wright initially scheduled Evans to be executed on September 1, 1981.
Early appeals and prosecutorial misconduct
Most of Evans's appeals were based on procedural errors and prosecutorial misconduct during his trial. In Virginia, to secure a death sentence against a defendant, it was necessary to prove that the defendant would pose an ongoing threat to society if they were to remain alive. The prosecutor in Evans's case, Alexandria Commonwealth Attorney John Kloch, argued in favor of a death sentence by showing the jury documentation that Evans had seven prior convictions. The documents motivated the jury to recommend the death penalty for Evans. In 1982, while Evans was on death row, his attorneys discovered that most of the convictions never occurred and that a computer error multiplied the number of convictions Evans had on his record, while other supposed convictions never made it to trial because their charges were dropped prior; further memos showed that Kloch was aware of the errors but used them to his advantage anyway.On March 28, 1983, Virginia admitted error in Evans's sentencing. The same day, Virginia Governor Chuck Robb signed legislation providing the state with the ability to re-sentence Evans. The previous law, decided in the 1981 Supreme Court of Virginia case Patterson v. Commonwealth, would have required Virginia to reduce Evans's death sentence into a mandatory and automatic life sentence, but the new law overrode Patterson and made it possible for Evans to receive another death sentence. In a hearing on April 12, 1983, Kloch admitted that he knew the evidence he used against Evans was falsified. Evans's attorneys criticized the delay in Virginia officials admitting error in Evans's case, arguing that the state intentionally delayed the admission of error in Evans's case so that it would be affected by Robb's re-sentencing legislation.
In February 1984, Evans was granted a new sentencing hearing before a different jury from the one that had sentenced him to death. The second jury heard evidence that prosecutors did not introduce in the first trial to justify that Evans posed an ongoing threat to society, including the 1978 murder of Alton Collins, for which Evans never went to trial. The second jury re-sentenced Evans to death. In September 1983, a judge affirmed Evans's second death sentence, ruling that the prosecutors and state attorney general's office had not participated in intentional misconduct by waiting until the new law overriding Patterson went into effect before they admitted error in Evans's case.
Role in Mecklenburg death row escape
On May 31, 1984, six death row inmates escaped from Mecklenburg Correctional Center. Evans attended initial planning meetings for the escape months prior, but he eventually stopped and did not ultimately participate in the escape attempt. He and fellow death row inmate Willie Lloyd Turner remained behind, and while Turner helped some of the escaping inmates to break out of the prison, he and Evans also saved several prison staff members' lives during the escape, protecting them from other inmates who wanted to rape and murder them, like the Briley Brothers. Evans said he originally stood against a wall and stayed out of conflict until he saw inmates strip, bound, and begin sexually assaulting a nurse, at which point he stopped them and convinced them that it would be more difficult for them to negotiate for clemency if they harmed the guards they held hostage. One unidentified guard stated in a published report a few days after the escapes, "I owe my life, as do all the other , to Evans and Turner." One of Evans's attorneys, Jonathan Shapiro, told the press, "This kind of behavior needs to be rewarded because it was the right thing to do. It's also right as a matter of policy to put the message out in putting down prison uprisings."The widow of Evans's murder victim criticized efforts to paint Evans as a hero. As Evans's attorneys attempted to use his intervention in the escape attempt as evidence of his heroism and against the notion that Evans posed an ongoing threat, Truesdale's widow told a reporter, "I don't want this man, whether he lives or dies, to be a hero. He is not a hero. He is not a martyr in our lives." Truesdale's widow also questioned Evans's motives for protecting the guards, accusing Evans of engaging in a "ploy, to save the people to help save himself," although Evans's attorneys, a former administrator for the Virginia Department of Corrections, and a criminology professor from Virginia Commonwealth University who once worked as a corrections official insisted that Evans's motive did not matter, that "a life saved is a life saved," and rewarding Evans with mercy for his good behavior would provide encouragement for other inmates to improve their own behavior.
Governor Robb and the state prison director conducted an investigation into the prison escape; their investigation considered the roles the Evans and Turner had played in the escapes and protecting prison workers. Shapiro requested that the state parole board and Robb commute Evans's death sentence to life based on his role in protecting prison workers; Evans's legal team argued that his role in protecting guards during the prison escape demonstrated that he did not pose a future threat to society.
Evans's execution was later scheduled to take place in October 1990. U.S. District Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. granted Evans a last-minute stay of execution on October 14 to hold a "minitrial" to investigate the claims that Evans protected guards during the Mecklenburg escape. Evans's attorneys also sent Governor Douglas Wilder 29 pages of poetry, essays, and songs Evans had written while on death row, as well as contests he entered and awards he had been granted for his poetry. Multiple corrections officials sent pleas on Evans's behalf to spare his life. The state attorney general's office protested the delay, stating that it was the role of the jurors and the governor to respectively dictate what sentence an inmate got and whether it should be commuted. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the attorney general's office and overruled Merhige's delay, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Evans's case.