Larry Lamont White, already convicted of killing two young women in the summer of 1983, was found guilty Friday of raping and murdering a third woman, shot dead just weeks before his other two victims.
Pamela Armstrong, a 22-year-old mother of five, was raped, shot twice in the head and left half-naked in a West End alley on June 4, 1983.
Her daughter, 5 years old when her mother was murdered, left the courtroom after the guilty verdict and wailed.
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“Thank you God, thank you God,” she cried. “Oh lord, thank you God.
Armstrong’s brother jumped and skipped down the hallway.
“I kept it all in for a long time,” said Kenny Armstrong, who was 17 years old when his sister was killed. “Nobody’s family should have to go through what we’ve been through this week, what we’ve been through for 31 years.”
Pamela Armstrong left home on the morning of June 4, 1983, to pick up food stamps to feed her five children. She was found dead around 11:30 a.m.
This week, her family packed the courtroom and listened as generations of detectives and analysts who investigated the case over the last 31 years detailed the crime scene, the bullets that killed her and the DNA left behind that would three decades later connect White to the killing.
The family cringed as photos of her body were displayed for the jury.
“I’ve experienced a cascade of different emotions that are really difficult to process,” said Lavonne White, Armstrong’s daughter, who is of no relation to the defendant. “It’s so upsetting, not just because it was my mother, but for anyone to be treated like that, to be left on display like roadkill. She didn’t deserve that, she didn’t deserve to have two bullets in her head. Nobody does.”
The jury will return on Monday to decide whether Larry Lamont White should be sentenced to die for the crime.
In the summer of 1983, three young women were raped and murdered within blocks of one another. Each was shot with a .38-caliber gun, and found naked, or nearly naked.
Yolanda Sweeney, 21, was shot dead on June 13, nine days and six blocks from Armstrong’s murder. Deborah Miles, 22, was killed in her bedroom on July 7. Ballistics showed that Miles and Sweeney were killed with the same gun.
Larry Lamont White was convicted in 1985 of killing Miles and Sweeney and sentenced to death. But the Kentucky Supreme Court overturned his conviction. He later pleaded guilty to the murders and accepted a sentence of 28 years in prison, which he has finished serving. He remains incarcerated at a medium-security facility on a 2006 conviction for being a felon in possession of a firearm. He is eligible for parole in July 2016.
Lavonne White, Armstrong’s daughter, said she never let her mother’s murder go. She was five and she remembers her mother only in glimpses: how she used to string beads into the braids in her hair, how they walked together to the grocery store.
“It’s terrible to have a sense of not belonging to anyone, of growing up and not belonging,” she said. “I lost not only my mother, I’ve lost three decades of my life. He cannot take any more from me.”
She called the Louisville Metro Police Department in December of 2003, 20 years after the murder, and asked them to reinvestigate her mother’s killing.
Cold case detectives found that Armstrong’s underwear, spattered with semen, had been preserved, though DNA technology did not exist in 1983.
The underwear was tested, and the DNA was found to match Larry Lamont White, an original suspect and convicted serial killer.
Armstrong’s family said they’d never met him, and had never before heard of him.
Lt. Todd Kessinger, who leads the department’s homicide unit, said after the verdict Friday that three generations of detectives, together, managed to puzzle the case together over 31 years.
“It says a lot about the detectives before us, that they collected and preserved this evidence,” he said. “They didn’t have the answer then, but they had the wisdom to see that we might today.”
White’s attorneys, Mark Hall and Darren Wolff, attempted to convince the jury that the DNA found in Armstrong’s underwear and vagina were evidence only that the two had sex, perhaps days before her murder. They hammered police detectives over holes in the investigation — fingerprints that weren’t taken, potential suspects who weren’t interviewed, leads that were never followed — and asked the jury to consider the possibility that Armstrong had consensual sex with White, and another person murdered her later.
The murders of the two other women, they argued, were not proof that White killed Armstrong too.
“One plus one does not equal three,” they repeated for the jury.
Prosecutor Mark Baker told the jury to use their common sense.
“One plus one doesn’t equal three,” Baker agreed. “But one plus one plus one equals something pretty damn hideous.”
The jury deliberated about two hours before finding him guilty of both rape and murder.
They will return Monday afternoon to deliberate his fate.
Kentucky law allows prosecutors to seek the death penalty if a number of aggravators are present, including if the murder was committed during another violent act or if the defendant was previously convicted of another murder.
Armstrong’s son, Rodshina Armstrong, said sitting through trial this week felt like watching a movie about his mother.
One of his most vivid childhood memories is his aunt gathering him and his four siblings around a piano bench, the two youngest on her lap and the three older children standing around her.
“I’m sorry,” he remembers her saying. “Your mother is dead.”
Baker told the jury that story during his closing argument Friday and Rodshina had to leave the courtroom.
“This is a journey that nobody wants to take, but it’s worth it in the end,” he said. “God has smiled on me; he has set me free.”
