Murderer asks to forgo parole to spare victim’s family from pain
Convicted killer Judith Ann Neelley has asked to skip her scheduled parole board hearing.
Neelley, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of a LaFayette, Ga., teenager, asked Tuesday that her May 23 hearing be canceled. Family members of her victim, 13-year-old Lisa Ann Millican, planned to speak against her at the hearing.
“Although I am grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate how much God has changed my heart and life over the past 36 years,” she wrote, “I know that now is not the right time. In Judith Ann order to spare the Millican Neelley family the pain and trauma of having to attend the hearing, I have agreed to waive my right to be considered for parole at this time. I will continue to pray daily for God’s forgiveness and for peace for the [Millican] family.”
Judy Millican Bradley, the victim’s younger sister, said attorneys told her that Neelley’s request is not automatically granted. The parole board has to give her a waiver to sign, which has not yet happened. They expect to do that this week. Then, she said, Neelley could come back up for parole in five years.
Neelley’s attorney and Sarah Still, the assistant executive director of Alabama Boards of Pardons and Paroles, did not return emails seeking comment for this story. Nobody answered at the board’s listed phone number, which does not allow callers to leave a voice mail.
According to Times Free Press archives, Millican was staying at a Cedartown, Ga., home for juveniles in September 1982 when the group took a trip to a mall in Rome. She then disappeared. Neelley later confessed that she picked up the girl, whom she didn’t know, and traveled with her in the region for about four days, staying in motel rooms. Neelley’s twin babies and her husband, Alvin Howard Neelley, were with them.
During a March 1983 trial, FBI Agent Bill Burns testified that Neelley confessed to killing Millican. She brought the teenager to the rim of Little River Canyon near Fort Payne, Ala., and forced her to lie face down in handcuffs. She injected Millican with Liquid-Plumr and Drano. Later, she told Millican to face the canyon. She shot her in the back.
Police later received a tip and found Millican’s body in a tree at the bottom of the 80-foot cliff. Officers told the Times Free Press that they believed Neelley may have called in the tip.
“I’m glad she’s staying in [prison],” the victim’s sister, Bradley, said Wednesday morning. “I know that’s wrong. I may not get to heaven because I can’t forgive her. She killed my sister. Lisa never got to grow up, never got to finish school, never got to hold a kid.”
Bradley was 18 months old when Millican died. But she grew up hearing stories about her from their mother and brother. Even years later, she said, her mother couldn’t get through an anecdote about Millican with her voice intact. Her mother told her not to read “Early Graves: The Shocking True-Crime Story of the Youngest Woman Ever Sentenced to Death Row,” a 1990 book about the case.
But when she was 13, Bradley said, she made sure nobody was around to see her when she read through the account in the library.
“I never got to know Lisa,” she said. “I figured there was a way to find out for myself. But it was not. It was not a good way to find out. I never should have read that as a child.”
Neelley’s attorney, Robert French, argued that Alvin Neelley had essentially brainwashed her. She grew up in a poor family in Rutherford County, Tenn., according to Times Free Press archives. A local detective told a reporter back then that officers knew the family pretty well.
Neelley testified that her mother was “one of the biggest whores in Murfreesboro” and would service clients in their manufactured home, Neelley hearing the details of the business transactions from her bedroom. When she was about 15, she met Alvin Neelley, after he came with a friend to visit her mother. He was 10 years older than Neelley. They began having sex later that year.
During the trial, three teen girls in the Rome area said that Neelley tried to pick them up around the time that she found Millican. French argued that Alvin Neelley beat his wife repeatedly and demanded that she bring girls back to him for “kinky sex.” But Neelley told police that she was alone with Millican when she killed her. When a prosecutor asked her why didn’t she just leave her husband, Neelley said, “I didn’t think about it.”
A Fort Payne jury convicted Neelley of murder after deliberating for about an hour in March 1983. A month later, a judge sentenced her to the death penalty. Former Alabama Gov. Fob James commuted her sentence to life in 1999.
In August, French released a book about his dealings with the Neelley murder trial. TV producers have created multiple documentaries about what happened. Cassie Millican, the wife of Millican’s brother, said those forms of entertainment are unfair to the family. She said the case is continually on her husband’s mind, though they have tried not to build too many walls around their own children.
“It was sort of disgusting,” she said of French. “That’s the kind of respect we get from these people, who we consider bottom feeders.”
In addition to the murder of Millican, Neelley and her husband are linked to the death of 23-year-old Janice Chapman. In October 1982, about a month after Millican’s death, Neelley picked up Chapman and her common-law husband, John Hancock. Chapman and Hancock had been walking along the road in Rome, near their home. Neelley offered to give them a ride, Hancock told the Times Free Press about a month later.
He said Neelley explained she was new to the area and asked them to show her around. They drove through several counties in Georgia. In Gordon County, he said, he walked into the woods to urinate.
“The chick walked up behind me with a pistol, pulled the hammer and told me not to talk,” he recalled to the Times Free Press. “… The last thing she told me was not to worry about my girlfriend.”
He said Neelley shot him in the back before she and her husband took off with Chapman. He managed to get near the road and flag down a truck. Investigators later found Chapman’s body in Chattooga County. Neelley pleaded guilty to kidnapping in that case, receiving a life sentence. Alvin Neelley was convicted of murder, and he died in a Georgia prison in 2005.