John Hall

On May 28, 2021, 68-year-old John Hall III was found brutally murdered in his Baltimore, Maryland, apartment in the 3800 block of Clarks Lane. The grim discovery was made by maintenance workers who entered his apartment after residents below reported water leaking into their units. They found Mr. Hall on the floor, bleeding and covered with a blanket. Emergency responders were called to the scene and pronounced him dead. An autopsy would later reveal the horrifying extent of his injuries: at least 17 blunt-force trauma injuries and a total of 88 sharp-force trauma injuries. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.

Investigators learned that the evening before his murder, Mr. Hall had won approximately $1,000 at a casino, but a search of his apartment yielded no large sums of money, suggesting robbery as a possible motive. There were no signs of forced entry into the apartment. It was later revealed that due to a severe case of gout that made walking painful, Mr. Hall had a habit of leaving his apartment door unlocked in the mornings.

Suspicion soon fell on a fellow resident of the apartment building, Reginald Lively. Surveillance footage from the morning of the murder showed Lively leaving his own apartment and later emerging from an elevator carrying a plastic bag with a weighted object covered in what appeared to be a reddish substance. He was seen returning to the building a short time later without the bag. Detectives also learned that Mr. Hall had previously accused Lively of attempting to steal money from him.

On June 11, 2021, a search warrant was executed on Lively's apartment, where police found clothing that matched what he was wearing in the surveillance video on the day of the murder. A DNA search warrant was also executed, and the results circumstantially confirmed Lively's presence in Hall's apartment. Following an investigation by the Baltimore Police Department and the State's Attorney's Office's Cold Case Unit, Reginald Lively was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Reginald Lively, who had a history of violent crime, was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder and concealing a deadly weapon in the death of John Hall III. This marked Lively's third murder conviction. He had previously been convicted of second-degree murder in 1986 and again in 2000, serving portions of his sentences before being paroled. For the murder of John Hall III, Reginald Lively was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.