On a September evening in 1984, 17-year-old Richard Stephenson and a fellow Trinity High School student, Scott Nelson, were traveling to a football game in Louisville, Kentucky, when they became lost and stopped at a Moby Dick restaurant for directions. Two men who offered to guide them, Victor Taylor and his cousin George Wade, instead forced the boys at gunpoint into a vacant lot. There the teenagers were stripped, robbed, bound and gagged; one of the boys was sexually assaulted and both were shot in the back of the head. Their bodies were found the next morning.

Investigators linked Taylor and Wade to the killings after a relative reported Wade had given them a Trinity High School jacket and a search of Taylor’s mother’s home recovered personal items belonging to Stephenson and Nelson. Both men were arrested and charged. The case, widely covered locally as the Trinity murders, was tried in a different venue. In 1986 Victor Taylor was convicted of kidnapping, robbery, sodomy and murder and sentenced to death; George Wade was convicted of kidnapping, robbery and murder and given life in prison. Wade later recanted testimony that implicated Taylor but that recantation did not change Taylor’s conviction.