In the winter of 1988, a heated argument over a planned vacation tragically escalated into a brutal murder that ended the life of 26-year-old Virginia 'Ginger' Porter Moore, a white female from Berrien County, Georgia. On December 22nd, her then-boyfriend, William Earl Lynd, in a fit of rage, shot her in the face with a. 32 caliber derringer pistol at their home. Despite the grievous injury, Moore regained consciousness and stumbled onto the front porch, only to be shot a second time by Lynd.
What followed was a chilling attempt to conceal the crime. Lynd placed Moore, who was still alive, into the trunk of her car. As he drove, he could hear noises from the trunk. He stopped the car, opened the trunk, and shot her a third and final time. He later confessed to a sheriff that he was 'tired of that goddamn bitch thumping around in the car.' After the murder, Lynd drove to a remote farmhouse and buried her body in a shallow grave in Tift County.
After disposing of Moore's body, Lynd fled the state. He sold the murder weapon in Ohio, and authorities later recovered it. He abandoned Moore's car in Florida, where police also found it, along with incriminating evidence. His flight from justice was not without further violence. Two days after murdering Moore, on Christmas Day, he shot and killed a teacher named Leslie JoAnn Starkey in Ohio during a botched robbery.
Lynd eventually traveled to Texas, where his brother convinced him to surrender to the authorities. On New Year's Eve of 1988, William Earl Lynd turned himself in to the Berrien County Sheriff's Department. He was indicted on February 7, 1989, for one count of malice murder and one count of kidnapping with bodily injury. On February 27, 1990, a Berrien County jury convicted him and sentenced him to death for the murder of Ginger Moore. After years of appeals, William Earl Lynd was executed by lethal injection on May 6, 2008. He had no last words and declined a final prayer.
