John Lee Moore, a 41-year-old male from Bacon County, Georgia, was killed in a burst of violence that grew out of a family crisis already simmering behind closed doors. Court and state records say his daughter Robin had separated from her husband, William Sallie, after abuse in the marriage, and she and her young son had gone to stay with her parents at the family’s rural home.
In March 1990, Sallie returned to Georgia, rented a mobile home under another name, armed himself with a 9mm pistol, and went to the Moore home in camouflage. He cut the phone line outside, waited until the house was quiet, forced his way in after midnight, and went straight to the bedroom where John and Linda Moore were sleeping. There, he opened fire. John Moore was struck six times, including wounds that damaged his heart. He tried to rise from the bed but collapsed to the floor and died there while the rest of the house was thrown into terror.
What followed made the killing even more harrowing. After shooting John Moore and badly wounding Linda Moore, Sallie stepped back outside to reload. Robin and her younger sister April rushed toward their parents, trying to help in the dark and confusion, but Sallie fired again through the bedroom window. When April tried to run for help, he threatened to kill her too. He then re-entered the house, handcuffed Linda Moore and a child to a bed rail, bound Robin and April together with handcuffs and duct tape, and abducted them to the trailer he had rented in Liberty County. There, according to the court record, he raped both women before eventually releasing them later the next night in Bacon County, asking them not to press charges. By then, the case had gone far beyond a domestic dispute and become a sprawling crime scene of murder, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and sexual violence, with John Moore’s death at its center.
There was a suspect almost immediately, and the case did not remain unsolved. Authorities arrested William Sallie shortly after the abductions ended, and police found the murder weapon in his mobile home. He was prosecuted in Bacon County and convicted of malice murder, felony murder, burglary, aggravated assault, two counts of kidnapping with bodily injury, and a firearm charge. His first conviction and death sentence from 1991 were later reversed because one of his lawyers had a conflict of interest, but that did not end the case. After a new trial and resentencing proceeding, Sallie was again convicted and resentenced to death, and the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the convictions and sentence in 2003. Years of state and federal appeals followed, along with a clemency bid, but the conviction for John Moore’s murder stood. On December 6, 2016, the state of Georgia executed William Sallie, closing the legal chapter of a case that had begun with the nighttime killing of John Moore in his own bedroom more than twenty-six years earlier.
