On what should have been a day of celebration, his 40th birthday on December 1, 1977, Warren Green's life was violently cut short. A male business owner, he and his 38-year-old wife, Lois, were working at their Western Auto store in Mount Vernon, a small town just north of Mobile, Alabama, when a robbery turned into a double murder. The couple was forced into a back room of their store by a group of men.
There, they were bound back-to-back with an electrical cord and each was shot in the head at point-blank range. Warren Green died at the scene, while his wife succumbed to her injuries a couple of hours later at a local hospital.
The investigation into the brutal slayings led authorities to four suspects: Freddie Lee Wright and his accomplices, Roger McQueen, Percy Craig, and Reginald Tinsley. The group had not initially planned to rob the Greens' store; they were on their way to another robbery and had only stopped in Mount Vernon to buy tape to fix a tear in their car's seat. The decision to rob the Western Auto store was a fateful one. During the investigation, Wright’s former girlfriend, Doris Lacey Lambert, testified that he had confessed the murders to her shortly after they happened.
Freddie Lee Wright was identified by his accomplices as the man who pulled the trigger, leading to his arrest and subsequent trials for capital murder. His first trial in 1979 ended with a hung jury, with the jurors voting 11-1 for acquittal. However, a second trial was convened a month later. This time, with testimony from his accomplices and his ex-girlfriend, the all-white jury found Wright guilty. He was convicted for the murders of Warren and Lois Green and sentenced to death. His three accomplices were also convicted of murder; Craig and Tinsley eventually served their time and were released, while McQueen was serving a sentence in a federal prison for an unrelated kidnapping conviction.
Despite numerous appeals, including a claim that one of his accomplices later recanted his testimony, Freddie Lee Wright's conviction and death sentence were upheld. After spending years on death row, and following a denial of clemency from the governor, Wright was executed in Alabama's electric chair in the early morning hours of March 3, 2000. He made no final statement before the sentence was carried out.
