Alabama Bureau of Investigation

The Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI) entered the account of the murder of Ronda Morrison as an outside agency called in when local investigators had run out of leads. Its first effort produced no arrest, and its agents later pursued a theory connecting Walter McMillian to the murder despite a monitored encounter that gave them reason to doubt the alleged association. Years afterward, a renewed ABI investigation reached the opposite conclusion: new investigators found that McMillian had nothing to do with either of the murders used to implicate him and reported that two trial witnesses had admitted their testimony was false. The agency’s changing role exposes both the force of pressure for an arrest and the possibility of correction through a more searching inquiry.

Entry into the Morrison Investigation

In the late morning of November 1, 1986, Ronda Morrison, an eighteen-year-old college student, was found shot three times in the back on the floor of Monroe Cleaners in Monroeville. The murder was unprecedented in a community where such violence was uncommon, and public anxiety grew as the investigation stalled. Police first pursued two Latino men seen looking for work in town that day, tracked them to Florida, and determined that they could not have committed the crime. The former owner, Miles Jackson, came under suspicion without evidence identifying him as the killer; the current owner, Rick Blair, was questioned but considered unlikely. Within weeks, investigators had exhausted their leads.

As months passed without an arrest, criticism of the police, sheriff, and local prosecutor grew louder in newspapers and on local radio. The ABI was called in, but it achieved no more success solving the Morrison murder than local officials had. Local businesses offered rewards worth thousands of dollars for information leading to an arrest, and gun sales increased. The agency therefore entered an investigation already shaped by public fear and mounting demands for an answer. Its inability to solve the crime did not end that pressure; it formed the backdrop to the increasingly urgent search for a suspect.

The McMillian Theory and the Monitored Meeting

The Morrison investigation intersected with the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman, for which Ralph Myers had become a suspect. After initially denying direct involvement, Myers offered shifting accounts. He first blamed Isaac Dailey, then claimed that the killer was a nearby county sheriff. ABI agents appeared to take the allegation seriously and questioned Myers further, even as his story became less credible and officials began to suspect that he was trying to shift blame from himself.

Myers then connected Karen Kelly and her Black boyfriend, Walter McMillian, to the Pittman murder, and accused McMillian of killing Morrison. The Morrison case had drawn much more public attention than Pittman’s death, and the new accusation redirected investigators’ focus toward McMillian. Yet McMillian had never met Myers. To test whether the two men were associated, an ABI agent arranged for Myers to meet McMillian at a store while agents monitored them. Myers could not pick McMillian out from among several Black men; he had to ask the store owner to identify him. He then handed McMillian a note purportedly written by Kelly. Witnesses saw McMillian appear confused by both the stranger and the note. He threw the note away and returned to what he had been doing.

The encounter yielded no evidence of a relationship between the men and instead suggested that they had never met. The agents monitoring them had seen Myers fail to recognize McMillian without help, but the McMillian theory persisted. By then, seven months had passed since Morrison’s murder, and a fearful, angry community was criticizing officials. The book presents the demand for an arrest as the immediate context for the decision to continue pursuing McMillian despite the weakness of the supposed connection.

A Renewed Inquiry After the Hearing

After evidence challenging the prosecution emerged at a hearing, Tom Chapman, the prosecutor defending McMillian’s conviction, called Tom Tate, Woodrow Ikner, and Benson together. He asked them to explain the contradictions in the evidence. Unsatisfied with their answers, Chapman formally asked ABI officials in Montgomery to conduct another investigation to confirm McMillian’s guilt. He did not tell McMillian’s lawyers that this inquiry had begun, although they had sought a re-examination of the evidence for more than two years.

The new investigators, Tom Taylor and Greg Cole, contacted McMillian’s lawyer, who agreed to share files and information. The defense also provided memoranda and original evidence. The lawyer worried that if the conviction were overturned and the case retried, giving state investigators so much material might help the prosecution undermine the defense. Even so, the information was shared in the expectation that an honest investigation would expose the charges’ absurdity. Taylor and Cole appeared to be experienced investigators with no ties to the local participants, and within weeks they seemed doubtful that McMillian was guilty.

Findings and Consequences

Six months after the appeal had been filed, Taylor and Cole returned to discuss their findings. Taylor stated that McMillian could not have killed Morrison and said the investigators would tell the attorney general, the district attorney, and anyone else who asked that McMillian was innocent and had nothing to do with either murder. Taylor questioned the prosecution’s portrait of McMillian as a drug kingpin, contrasting it with his difficult timber work and long hours. He also said that Myers’s trial account made no sense and expressed disbelief that a jury had convicted McMillian.

Cole added that Bill Hooks and Joe Hightower had admitted their trial testimony was false. The investigators also explained that, when assigned to examine the case, they had been told that Hooks accused the defense lawyer of offering him money and a condominium in Mexico to change his testimony. The reported accusation was therefore part of the circumstances surrounding their inquiry, but the new investigators’ findings undermined the prosecution’s witnesses rather than confirming the original case.

The ABI’s work in the story is not a simple progression from failure to success. Its initial involvement did not solve Morrison’s murder; its agents later monitored a meeting that failed to support the alleged link between Myers and McMillian, while officials continued to pursue that theory. The later investigation, conducted by Taylor and Cole, examined the case materials and reached a clear conclusion of innocence, while exposing the falsity of two witnesses’ trial accounts. This contrast makes the agency’s role consequential not because every stage corrected the last, but because the renewed inquiry supplied an official finding that directly contradicted the conviction the first investigation had helped sustain.