Alvin Ray Allen appears in a booking photo. (Mobile Police Department)
A combative literary reference wasn’t enough to save an Alabama man from being convicted of killing a young woman decades ago.
On Tuesday, Mobile County jurors determined that Alvin Ray Allen, 65, murdered 19-year-old Sandra Elaine Williams on Sept. 11, 1980. Investigators and prosecutors also believe the victim was raped.
The day before, the condemned man’s defense attorney compared him to Tom Robinson, the wrongfully accused Black character defended by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
In the book, considered a classic of modern literature and one of the most trenchant observations of race relations in America, Robinson is convicted by a racist Alabama jury despite knowing that he is innocent of the crime he had been accused of – raping a white woman.
Defense attorney Dennis Knizley acknowledged some reticence to compare himself to Finch, according to a courtroom report by Mobile-based Fox affiliate WALA. This time, the defense attorney argued, the jury deciding the man’s fate was different from the jury in the book.
“You’re going to be fair and just, and you’re going to follow the rules,” Knizley said.
The state was none too pleased with that line of argument.
“This is not ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ladies and gentlemen,” Assistant District Attorney Ashley Rich said during her closing arguments. “And these are not the times of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ We have DNA. They didn’t have DNA in 1980.”
The slain 19-year-old was found on a dead-end street in Mobile’s Toulminville neighborhood – miles away from her own apartment.
The prosecutor went on to argue that if law enforcement had simply been trying to pin Williams’ murder on a Black man, Allen – who was the white woman’s neighbor – would have been quickly arrested in the case. Instead, Rich said, Allen wasn’t even a suspect for a decade.
The investigation eventually stalled. The cold case was only reopened in recent years after the victim’s family pleaded for investigators to reopen the case and re-test evidence for DNA. The state eventually tied Allen to the slaying due to fluids discovered on Williams’ jeans
“He forced Sandy to have sex with him at knifepoint, and then he murdered her,” the prosecutor said. “Sandy Williams did a horrific, painful death…She was stabbed over 15 times.”
The defense argued that Allen and Williams had a consensual sexual relationship – albeit one that remained under wraps due to the severely racist attitudes of white Alabamians in 1980.
“I can’t have mamma and my family knowing I’m talking to a black man,” Knizley said, essaying the deceased woman’s thoughts. “If you talk to him, you might find out we have a relationship that’s a little different than what you think.”
Racism, often violent and fatal for Black people in the state back then, was the reason the defendant remained guarded around law enforcement for so long – refusing to submit DNA or fingerprints and dodging investigators at a time he knew they wanted to speak with him about the case. When Allen was finally arrested for the murder on Sept. 10, 2019, he refused to leave his residence and was only taken into custody after a SWAT team broke down his door.
Knizley referenced an incident where Mobile Police Department members put a noose around a Black man’s neck in the late 1970s in order to exact a confession. In 1981, the defense attorney said, the Ku Klux Klan lynched a Black teenager in Mobile.
“These were some of the real-life experiences Black people went through,” the defense attorney told jurors.
But reminding jurors about the viciousness and prejudices of racial hatred wasn’t enough to save his client.
The jury deliberated just 30 minutes before returning their guilty verdict.
This was the second time Allen was tried for Williams’ murder. An initial trial in 2019 ended in a mistrial after jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict.
“It’s been a long time coming and she needs to rest,” Williams’ sister, Judy Barfield, said in comments to local CBS affiliate WKRG in 2017. “Those beautiful green eyes of hers, that pretty smile and that brown hair. It’s time for her to rest.”
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