Darrell Rudolph, a 33-year-old Black man, was found unresponsive in the early morning hours of September 19, 2018, in the 500 block of Rosa Parks Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama. Police and fire medics were called to the scene at about 5:45 a.m., and by the time they reached him, his injuries were fatal and he was pronounced dead there on the street.
In the first public reports, Montgomery police described the case as a shooting death and said only that they had opened a homicide investigation, leaving the city with more questions than answers as the day wore on.
As investigators worked backward through Rudolph’s final days, the case began to take shape around two people authorities said he had only recently come to know: Mitchell Call and Abigail Peace, both from Kingsport, Tennessee. Later reporting tied the case not to a gunshot, but to a fatal stabbing, suggesting that some of the earliest public details were either incomplete or later clarified as detectives developed the evidence. Police said the investigation identified Call and Peace as the suspects, though no motive was publicly laid out in the reporting I found. That absence leaves the story with a particularly uneasy edge: a man dead in Montgomery, two out-of-state acquaintances at the center of the case, and a violent ending that appears to have emerged from a relationship investigators believed was still new.
The arrests came quickly but not locally. Authorities said Call and Peace were taken into custody in Missouri on September 26, 2018, by the U.S. Marshals Metropolitan Task Force in St. Louis along with the St. Louis County Police Department Bureau of Crimes against Persons. They were later extradited back to Montgomery on October 13 and each was charged with murder. Reporting at the time said both were held in the Montgomery County Detention Facility under $150,000 bond. Beyond those arrests and charges, I did not find reliable public reporting that clearly established the final outcome of the case, such as a trial, plea, conviction, or sentence, so the public record available online appears to tell the story most clearly up to the point where the suspects were identified, captured, and formally accused in Rudolph’s killing.
