The Missouri Supreme Court on Thursday turned down a request to postpone next week’s execution of a Jennings man.
Attorneys for Leonard Taylor had filed a motion with the Supreme Court, asking that the execution be pushed back 90 to 120 days so experts could conduct an “additional review†of the victims’ times of death.
The court denied Taylor’s request without a written explanation, as is typical for such orders.
A ºüÀêÊÓƵ County jury in 2008 convicted Taylor of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death in the 2004 deaths of his girlfriend and her three children. Taylor, 58, did not testify at trial but claims he is innocent of the killings.
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Taylor is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
The murder victims were Angela Rowe, 28; her daughters, Alexus Conley, 10, and AcQreya Conley, 6; and her son, Tyrese Conley, 5. All had been shot execution style at the house on Park Lane that Rowe sometimes shared with Taylor.
"Any additional delay simply frustrates the interests of justice," Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey wrote in a court filing Wednesday.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys sparred over several issues in court filings this week submitted to the Missouri Supreme Court. One of the key points was whether the bodies had rigor mortis when they were discovered. The presence of rigor mortis, a stiffening of the joints and muscles during postmortem rigidity, would be key for Taylor's defense, as medical experts say it normally sets in a few hours after death and disappears about 36 hours later.Â
Taylor's attorneys claim he has an airtight alibi because he left for California eight days before the bodies were discovered in the family's Jennings home on Dec. 3, 2004. Airport surveillance footage confirmed when Taylor left town, and his defense team claims that the presence of rigor mortis proves the victims could not have been killed before he left.Â
Prosecutors argue Taylor shot the four victims execution-style before he left town on November 26, 2004.Â
Joe Lebb, an investigator for the ºüÀêÊÓƵ County medical examiner's office, said at Taylor's trial that two of the four bodies showed signs of rigor mortis when they were found.Â
Bailey told the state Supreme Court that Lebb "had never been trained in how to identify rigor mortis and had learned to do it 'by just watching somebody else.'"Â In response, Taylor's attorney Kent Gipson said it was "not possible that rigor mortis would still be present in a dead body a week or more after the person expired." Gipson said Lebb had years of experience and "any layperson can easily detect rigor mortis in a dead body."
At Taylor’s trial, the deputy medical examiner who performed the autopsies, Dr. Phillip Burch, said the killings could have happened two or three weeks before the discovery of the bodies. Burch said his opinion changed — he initially said they'd died just a few days before they were found — after realizing that air conditioning was running in the house and the thermostat was turned to 50 degrees, which would have slowed decomposition.
Gipson argued that Burch's time of death window changed once authorities learned of Taylor's alibi, and the change was part of the prosecutor's "shenanigans."
Taylor's defense team asked the Supreme Court to give a local forensic pathologist, Dr. Jane Turner, time to review the times of death. However, Bailey indicated that giving Turner more time to investigate the time of death could, in the end, provide competing expert testimony, not proof of actual innocence.
With execution just days away, Gipson is now asking the court to stay the execution and appoint a special master to hear Taylor’s claims of innocence, prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective assistance of counsel. Taylor also is asking Gov. Mike Parson for clemency.
From the archives: Post-Dispatch coverage of Leonard Taylor case
Leonard Taylor of Jennings was sentenced to die for the 2004 shooting deaths of his girlfriend Angela Rowe, 28, her daughters Alexus Conley, 10, and AcQreya Conley, 6; and her son Tyrese Conley, 5.
Here is the Post-Dispatch coverage of the case from 2004 to 2023.
“Muslims don’t die. We live eternally in the hearts of our family and friends,†Leonard Taylor wrote in his final statement following a verse …
Attorneys for Leonard Taylor had filed a motion with the Supreme Court, asking that the execution be pushed back 90 to 120 days so experts cou…
"We are not filing a motion to vacate Leonard Taylor's sentence — the facts are not there to support a credible case of innocence," the prosec…
Defense attorneys want the Missouri Supreme Court to postpone the execution date by 90 to 120 days.
Dr. Jane Turner said there is “significant scientific probability†that a full review of the autopsy records “would discredit Dr. Burch’s tria…
They want to trigger a state law that lets a prosecutor seek a hearing if the prosecutor has information a defendant could be innocent or wron…
Leonard Taylor was convicted of killing Angela Rowe, 28; and her children, Alexus Conley, 10, AcQreya Conley, 6, and Tyrese Conley, 5.
The prosecutor said after the sentencing that Taylor "earned his four death sentences."
The man who lived in plain sight for 19 months in north ºüÀêÊÓƵ County was cornered in the backseat of a friend's car in Kentucky.
A witness in a quadruple-murder trial told a jury she saw Leonard Taylor throw a revolver into a sewer.
Perry Taylor stated that he had been dragged out of his truck and beaten by police in Atlanta.
A man also living at the home on Park Lane in Jennings was wanted for questioning but has not been found, a Major Case Squad official said.
“Despite his self-serving claim of innocence, the facts of his guilt in this gruesome quadruple homicide remain," Parson wrote of Leonard Taylor.