(September 30, 2008)—A district court jury in Bryan returned a guilty verdict Tuesday in the capital murder trial of Darnell Hartsfield, 47, who was charged in the 1983 slayings of five people who were abducted from a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Kilgore and later killed execution style.
The victims were David Maxwell, 20, Mary Tyler, 37, Opie Ann Hughes, 39, Joey Johnson, 20, and Monte Landers, 19.
All of the victims except for Landers worked at the restaurant.
Landers was a friend of Maxwell and Johnson.
Hartsfield is a convicted robbery who’s already serving life prison term for perjury.
He had no visible reaction to the verdict.
He received an automatic life sentence because prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty.
Prosecutors spent two weeks laying out a largely circumstantial case against Hartsfield, but jurors returned the guilty verdict in less than two hours.
Hartsfield’s cousin, Romeo Pinkerton, agreed to plead guilty to five murder charges midway through his trial a year ago.
The notorious killings, among the oldest unresolved mass murder cases in Texas, occurred the night of Sept. 23, 1983, when the five victims were taken from the KFC store in Kilgore during an robbery.
They were driven about 15 miles to a remote oilfield road where they were shot to death.
Their bodies were found the next morning.
A prosecutor today described the murders Tuesday as "one big, long armed robbery that turned very, very bad."
Assistant Attorney General Lisa Tanner showed jurors a poster-size photograph of four of the slain victims lying face down in the dirt.
She told jurors, during closing arguments, that Hartsfield is one of the people "responsible for this."
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