Daniel Lee Siebert: the Talladega killings, a call in the rain and a death on death row

• Born1954 or early 1955, judging by the ages given in court and news reports; raised partly in Illinois
• Known asDaniel (or Danial) Spence and Danny Ray Spence, the names he used in Talladega and on the run
• Convicted ofCapital murder of four people in Talladega, Alabama, 19 February 1986; a fifth Talladega killing; manslaughter in Nevada, 1979
• Arrested5 September 1986, Hurricane Mills, Tennessee
• TrialsTalladega County, March 1987; Lee County, June 1987
• SentenceDeath, 17 April 1987 and 19 August 1987; life imprisonment for the fifth killing
• Other casesSaid by authorities to have confessed to as many as 13 killings; never tried for any outside Alabama and Nevada
• Died22 April 2008, Holman Correctional Facility, Atmore, Alabama, aged 53, of cancer; not executed

Daniel Lee Siebert was a drifting house painter and artist who, on 19 February 1986, strangled four people in two neighbouring apartments in Talladega, Alabama: a 24-year-old deaf woman he had been dating, her two sons, aged five and four, and her next-door neighbour. Using the name Daniel Spence, he had arrived in the town a few weeks earlier to help with the theatre programme at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. He fled the same night, was traced through a telephone call and was arrested in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, on 5 September 1986. Two juries convicted him of capital murder in 1987 and he was sentenced to death twice; he was also given a life sentence for the killing of a fifth Talladega woman. After two decades of appeals, and a stay granted the day before his scheduled execution in October 2007, he died of cancer at Holman Correctional Facility on 22 April 2008, aged 53.

The case is remembered for more than the Talladega killings. After his arrest, authorities said, Siebert admitted to as many as 13 killings across the country, and in 1987 the Los Angeles County sheriff announced that he had confessed to two there; he was never tried for any of those killings. His lawyers filed his state post-conviction petitions a few months late, a slip that kept every federal court from ruling on the substance of his claims and produced a 2007 US Supreme Court decision on habeas deadlines. And his last months tested whether Alabama would execute a man dying of pancreatic cancer while the Supreme Court was weighing the lethal injection method itself.

This account rests on opinions of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, the Eleventh Circuit and the US Supreme Court; reports by the Los Angeles Times, the Birmingham News (AL.com), the Associated Press, SCOTUSblog, NBC15 and ABC News; and statements by the Equal Justice Initiative and the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people Siebert killed, their families, the survivors and his own family are not named, and neither are the private witnesses in his trials.

A painter on the road

The sources used here do not give Siebert’s date of birth; the ages they report place it in 1954 or early 1955. The Birmingham News called him an Illinois native. At his Alabama trial there was testimony that his father abused him, that he ran away from home at 12 and that he learned to draw while hiding from his father, the Los Angeles Times reported; his trial lawyer, George Sims, told NBC15 in 2019 that Siebert had perhaps been abused by his father.

By the mid-1980s he was working as a house painter in Southern California, according to the Times. He had already served prison time in Nevada. Alabama’s courts recorded a previous conviction for voluntary manslaughter carrying ten years; the Birmingham News reported that he had pleaded guilty in Nevada to manslaughter for a fatal stabbing, and the Times dated the conviction to 1979, in Las Vegas.

Talladega, 1986

Late in December 1985, while hitchhiking near Tucson, Arizona, Siebert was given a ride by a theatre director from Los Angeles who was on his way to run a theatre programme at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. Impressed by Siebert’s drawings, the director invited him to work on the programme as a set designer. The two parted near Jackson, Mississippi, and Siebert went on to Illinois before arriving in Talladega in January 1986, where at first he shared an apartment with the director, according to the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Los Angeles Times.

He soon began seeing a 24-year-old deaf student at the institute, a relationship its rules prohibited, and the director moved out. The young woman lived with her two sons in the Sunrise Apartments; her next-door neighbour, who was also deaf, knew Siebert through the institute.

On the night of 19 February 1986, by his own account to police, Siebert strangled his girlfriend in her apartment and then strangled her two sons. He went next door to the neighbour’s apartment, strangled her, and drove out of Talladega in her car. Because he robbed her, her killing was charged as capital murder committed during a robbery. Police later said he had also killed a fifth Talladega woman and that all five had been strangled within a few hours, the Birmingham News reported.

The bodies of the young woman and her sons were found on 24 February, after a deaf neighbour raised the alarm and a social worker from the institute let herself in with a passkey, according to the appeals court; NBC15, reading the local coverage in 2019, said four bodies were found at the Sunrise Apartments that day. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1987 that Talladega police also believed Siebert had killed a 19-year-old woman whose body was found in neighbouring Calhoun County the day after the killings. He was never charged in her death.

Six months on the run

The neighbour’s car was found abandoned in Kentucky with a flat tyre (the accounts differ on where and when). At a campsite nearby police found a birth certificate in the name of Danny Ray Spence, the Times and the appeals court reported, and, according to the court, fingerprints on the car were Siebert’s. The court’s summary of the evidence also places him in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on 10 March 1986, and in New Kent County, Virginia, on 14 June 1986, each time showing local officers a Social Security card bearing the name of one of the dead boys.

Talladega detectives traced him through his friends. Having subpoenaed the telephone records of people he knew around the country, they were alerted by a woman in Las Vegas when he called her complaining that he had been drenched in a downpour, the Los Angeles Times reported. The National Weather Service told police that Tennessee was having the only such rain in the country, and a trace led to a pay phone near Hurricane Mills, about 50 miles west of Nashville. Robert Rumsey, a former district attorney, gave NBC15 the same account in 2019.

Siebert was arrested there on 5 September 1986. According to the Court of Criminal Appeals, he told Captain Hurst of the Talladega police that he would admit to the killings but give no details until he was back in Alabama; he waived extradition and was indicted on two counts of capital murder on 11 September.

Two trials, two death sentences

The neighbour’s case was tried first, in Talladega County, before Judge William C. Sullivan. Siebert was convicted on 19 March 1987 and, following the jury’s recommendation, sentenced to death on 17 April 1987. Because of pretrial publicity, according to the Court of Criminal Appeals, the case of the young woman and her sons was moved to Lee County, where the same judge presided. On 18 June 1987 a jury there convicted Siebert of capital murder for killing two or more people in one course of conduct and unanimously recommended death; on 19 August 1987 he was sentenced to death by electrocution.

He received a life sentence for the killing of the fifth woman, according to the Associated Press and the Birmingham News; the News reported that he pleaded guilty.

The confessions elsewhere

On 27 March 1987 Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block announced that Siebert had confessed to strangling two women found dead in December 1985, and that he had given information “that would be known only to a person involved”, the Los Angeles Times reported. One of the two deaths had been on the list of the task force hunting the so-called Southside killer, but Block said Siebert was not a suspect in any of the 16 other killings it was investigating. Because Siebert faced a death sentence in Alabama, Block said, it was not certain he would ever be brought to California for trial. No source used here records that he was.

The Times also reported that Siebert had been charged with killing a tour-bus guide found dead in an Atlantic City hotel room in the spring of 1986. Rumsey told NBC15 in 2019 that Siebert had strangled a tour guide in New Jersey and killed another person in Virginia, and that he had been wanted in California for choking a woman who escaped. No source used here records a trial in New Jersey or any charge in Virginia.

The totals that circulate rest on his own statements. Authorities said in 1987 that he had admitted to as many as 13 killings, and the Birmingham News repeated the figure in 2007 and 2008; the Associated Press wrote at his death that the exact number was not known. What courts established is narrower: a manslaughter conviction in Nevada, two capital murder convictions in Alabama covering four deaths, and a life sentence for a fifth Alabama killing. Everything else is his own account or what investigators said.

The appeals

Both convictions were affirmed on direct appeal in 1989 and 1990; in the Lee County case the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected arguments over the wording of the Miranda warning he was given in Tennessee and over his extradition. The US Supreme Court declined to hear either case in 1990.

Alabama then gave prisoners two years from the final state judgment to seek post-conviction relief. Siebert’s petitions were filed on 30 June 1992 in Lee County and 25 August 1992 in Talladega County, a few months too late. According to the Court of Criminal Appeals, the state did not raise the deadline until 1995, in the middle of an evidentiary hearing; the petitions were nonetheless denied, and in 1999 the appeals court held them untimely and nearly every claim procedurally barred. The Alabama Supreme Court declined review on 15 September 2000.

His federal habeas petitions, filed in September 2001, were dismissed as late under the one-year federal deadline, because a state petition rejected as untimely does not pause that clock. The Eleventh Circuit disagreed in 2003. On remand the Lee County petition was held procedurally defaulted because of the late state filing, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed on 13 July 2006. The Talladega County petition was dismissed again after the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Pace v. DiGuglielmo, and in 2007 the Eleventh Circuit reversed once more, treating Alabama’s deadline as an affirmative defence rather than a condition of filing.

On 5 November 2007 the Supreme Court summarily reversed that ruling in Allen v. Siebert. A petition rejected by a state court as untimely is not “properly filed”, the unsigned opinion said, whatever the form of the time limit, so Siebert was not entitled to extra time. Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented. The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which had urged reversal, called the 7–2 decision a reinstatement of his death sentence. No federal court ever ruled on the substance of his claims, which included, according to the Eleventh Circuit, his lawyers’ failure to investigate and present mitigating evidence.

The execution that did not happen

His execution was set for 25 October 2007 at Holman prison. Siebert had already sued in federal court over Alabama’s lethal injection protocol. In 2007 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and hepatitis C, and he amended his suit to argue that the execution drugs could interact with his illness and medication and cause him severe pain. On 25 September the US Supreme Court agreed to review Kentucky’s lethal injection method in Baze v. Rees, and executions in several states were put on hold. Doctors expected the cancer to kill him within months, the Birmingham News and the Equal Justice Initiative reported.

Governor Bob Riley declined to halt the execution, saying, the News reported, that letting Siebert die of natural causes would in effect commute his sentence to life. The federal district court, whose judge the Equal Justice Initiative named as Mark Fuller, refused an injunction while allowing the claim based on his illness to go forward. On 24 October 2007, the day before the execution, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit, Judges Gerald Tjoflat, Rosemary Barkett and Charles Wilson, reversed and stayed the execution pending the decision in Baze. Judge Tjoflat wrote separately that the stay was justified by Siebert’s individual claim rather than by the Kentucky case.

The next day, SCOTUSblog reported, Alabama asked the full Eleventh Circuit to intervene; a majority voted to rehear the matter, set aside the panel’s order and kept the execution on hold pending further consideration. On 5 November came the Supreme Court’s ruling against him in the habeas case.

Death on death row

Siebert died at 1:35 p.m. on 22 April 2008 at Holman Correctional Facility near Atmore. Brian Corbett, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections, said the cause would be determined later but appeared related to his pancreatic cancer, according to the Associated Press and the Birmingham News. He was 53 and had spent 21 years under sentence of death. Less than a week earlier, the AP noted, the Supreme Court had upheld the most widely used lethal injection method in the Kentucky case.

In prison he drew pictures that were sold on so-called murderabilia websites, the AP and the Birmingham News reported.

Where the accounts differ

• How many he killed: the Los Angeles Times reported in 1987 that authorities said he had admitted to as many as 13 killings, and the Birmingham News gave the same figure in 2007 and 2008; the AP wrote at his death that the exact number was not known.
• How many he was convicted of: the Birmingham News said he was convicted of five Alabama murders; the AP’s report of his death said he had awaited execution for strangling four people, counting only the two capital cases. Neither figure includes the Nevada manslaughter.
• The abandoned car: the Court of Criminal Appeals, in the Lee County case, said it was found in March 1986 near Elizabethtown, Kentucky; its account of the Talladega County case, quoted in its 1999 opinion, said about 13 days after the killings; the Los Angeles Times said about eight days later, beside Interstate 65 south of Louisville.
• The neighbour and the institute: the Court of Criminal Appeals, describing the Talladega County case, called her a teacher at the E. H. Gentry School, part of the institute; the Los Angeles Times said she had already been through the institute’s job-preparation programme; the Birmingham News called her a resident of the apartment complex.
• What he was doing at the institute: the courts said he was invited to work with the theatre programme as a set designer; NBC15 said in 2019 that he volunteered there; the Birmingham News said he came to Talladega to work at the institute.
• Why his execution was stayed: the Eleventh Circuit panel’s order of 24 October 2007 stayed it pending the Supreme Court’s decision in Baze, and the Birmingham News and the Equal Justice Initiative reported it that way; Judge Tjoflat’s concurrence said the stay was justified by Siebert’s individual claim, not by the Kentucky case.
• How close it came: the Equal Justice Initiative said the stay came just hours before the execution; the Eleventh Circuit order is dated 24 October 2007 and the Birmingham News reported it was granted on the Wednesday, the day before the Thursday execution, which the AP described as coming within a day of execution.
• The Southside link: Sheriff Sherman Block said in 1987 that one of the two Los Angeles deaths Siebert confessed to had been on the Southside task force’s list, but that Siebert was not a suspect in the 16 others; by 2008, ABC News reported, Los Angeles investigators believed the Southside killings were the work of several men.
• The New Jersey case: the Los Angeles Times reported in 1987 that he had been charged with the Atlantic City killing; Rumsey told NBC15 in 2019 that he strangled a tour guide there; neither says how, or whether, the charge was resolved.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. The full page shows Siebert with long, wavy hair and a heavy moustache, set against a lattice of twisted rope with figures of women in the background. Medallions on the right hold a fixed-blade knife and a coil of rope. In one corner is a map of the United States labelled Alabama; in the other, a hooded reaper with a scythe beside the figures 9–12, a range wider than the five killings courts recorded in Alabama. The nameplate, framed in knotted rope, reads “Daniel Lee Siebert” and “1979 – 1986”, with a judge’s gavel and a ticket marked “Death” beneath it. For other case files, see Bobby Joe Long, Donald Gaskins and Rodney Alcala.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Murderer in Alabama confesses 2 L.A. killingsLos Angeles Times, 28 March 1987
2. Siebert v. State, 555 So. 2d 772 (Lee County case, direct appeal)Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, 1989 (CourtListener)
3. Siebert v. State, 778 So. 2d 842 (post-conviction appeal, both cases)Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, 30 December 1999 (CourtListener)
4. Siebert v. Allen, No. 05-16646 (habeas, Lee County case)US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, 13 July 2006
5. Siebert v. Allen, No. 07-14956 (stay of execution)US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, 24 October 2007
6. Allen v. Siebert, 552 U.S. 3 (per curiam, with dissent)Supreme Court of the United States, 5 November 2007 (Legal Information Institute)
7. Allen v. SiebertCriminal Justice Legal Foundation, case summary
8. Controversy over lethal injection escalatesSCOTUSblog, 25 October 2007
9. State of Alabama unsuccessful in efforts to execute terminally ill manEqual Justice Initiative, 26 October 2007
10. Dying killer gets stay of executionThe Birmingham News (AL.com), 25 October 2007
11. Serial killer Siebert dies of cancer on Death RowThe Birmingham News (AL.com), 22 April 2008
12. Ala. death row inmate who challenged protocol diesAssociated Press (Alabama Public Radio), 22 April 2008
13. Looking back: Alabama serial killer captured after murder spreeNBC15 (WPMI), 15 February 2019
14. Prosecutors: L.A. serial killer really 4-5 menABC News, 19 December 2008

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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