Background: Crime scene tape marks the home on Jim Platt Road near Citronelle, Ala., Sunday, Aug. 21, 2016, where authorities said five people were killed. (John Sharp/AL.com via AP)/Inset: A photo provided by the Greene County Sheriff’s Department shows Derrick Dearman. (George County Sheriff’s Department via AP)
A man in Alabama on death row for the barbarous drug-fueled ax and gun murder of his estranged girlfriend’s five family members, including a pregnant woman, has said he will drop his appeal of both his conviction and death sentence.
Derrick Ryan Dearman was interviewed by NBC News, according to report on Thursday. It was the first time he had talked to press in the near decade since he killed Joseph Adam Turner, 26, the brother of his former girlfriend, Laneta Lester, and four other family members at Turner’s home in Citronelle, Alabama.
Dearman has admitted that he was abusive to Lester before the grisly killing took place in August 2016 and that he had refused her requests that he leave her alone. The victims, Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, who was five months pregnant, Justin Kaleb Reed, 23, Robert Lee Brown, 26, and Shannon Melissa Randall, 35, were asleep in Turner’s home when Dearman burst in with an ax he found in the yard and a gun. Court records indicate Dearman was high on methamphetamines and he has admitted openly that his rage was drug-induced.
Randall’s three-month old infant son was also in the home during the attack but was not harmed. He was, however, kidnapped by Dearman along with Lester after the bloody onslaught. He took them to his father’s home in Leakesville, Mississippi, about a half-hour from Citronelle.
Dearman, who is originally from Mississippi, has also said publicly that if he would have been sober, he would not have done what he did. He told NBC he has not had a chance to speak to family members of the victims but that he has “laid many nights thinking what I would say to any of them if I ever had the chance, the opportunity to say something?”
“I am guilty plain and simple, I turned myself in and I pled guilty,” he added.
Dearman said as he started to come down from his high that August, then began to sleep, things came back to him “a little bit more, little bit more, little bit more.”
Then, he said, he was in shock.
“I couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of what had happened because those people were good people,” he told NBC.
Though the drugs had made his thinking wildly unclear, Dearman said it did not change what he had done.
The decision to drop his appeal, first filed in August 2022, was not one Dearman said he reached lightly. He also expressed that the only reason he sought the appeal was for his family’s sake after they asked him to give it a few years to fight the conviction and death sentence.
According to court records, in exchange for state prosecutors dismissing two capital murder charges related to the murder of the unborn child and two first-degree kidnapping charges, Dearman pleaded guilty to “five counts of murder made capital because the murders were committed during a burglary and five counts of murder made capital because the victims were murdered by one act or pursuant to one scheme or course of conduct,” a 2022 ruling affirming the conviction states.
After the jury returned a verdict of guilty for each of the 10 counts of capital murder, the jury unanimously recommended a sentence of death. On Oct. 12, 2018, the circuit court followed the jury’s recommendation and sentenced him to die. The Alabama Supreme Court upheld his appeal this year.
Dearman has also reportedly fired his attorneys who represented him on a separate appeal involving claims that he had ineffective counsel. They also argued he was suffering from mental illness at the time of the murders.
Dearman told AL.com: “I knew in my heart I was always going to make this decision.”
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