On the night of April 23, 1986, Carlos Kearns, a 71-year-old man from Lexington, Kentucky, was drawn into what would become one of the city’s most notorious killing sprees. A retired Air Force veteran, he lived with his wife Virginia in a modest home on the southeast side of town, surrounded by a small circle of friends and neighbors who often dropped by to visit or help out, including caregiver Trudy Harrell and neighbor Jimmy Roger Keene, who frequently brought along his friend Theodore
Sweet.
That Wednesday had begun like many others, but as evening fell, two acquaintances of the Kearns household arrived at the door: 22-year-old LaFonda Fay Foster and 27-year-old Tina Hickey Powell. Both women had long histories of petty crime and substance abuse, and that night they had been drinking heavily and using cocaine. Seeking more money for drugs, they turned to the Kearnses, with whom they were friendly enough that their arrival did not raise alarms. At some point, Carlos agreed to write a check for them, which needed to be cashed. Everyone—Carlos, Virginia, Harrell, Keene, and Sweet—ended up piling into the Kearns’ car, with Foster at the wheel, ostensibly for a quick errand that slowly curdled into something darker.
What unfolded over the next several hours was a roaming, chaotic series of assaults across Lexington. The first sign that something was terribly wrong came around 9 p.m., when police were called to the parking lot of the Berke Plaza shopping center. There, they found the body of Trudy Harrell. She had been stabbed repeatedly and run over by a car with such force that her chest was crushed, suggesting she had been attacked at close range and then deliberately driven over. Investigators quickly grasped the brutality of the scene but had no clear narrative yet, only the knowledge that someone had used a vehicle and a knife with chilling intent.
Roughly two hours later, at about 11:15 p.m., a second body was discovered, this time in an alley behind warehouses in another part of southeast Lexington. It was Virginia Kearns. She had been stabbed and shot in the back of the head and, like Harrell, had tire marks across her body, indicating she too had been run over. The spread of the crime scenes—the shopping center parking lot and now an alley far away—told detectives they were dealing with a moving, purposeful spree rather than an isolated act of violence. The absence of the family car and of Carlos and the other men deepened the sense that this was not yet over.
During the late-night and early-morning hours, officers and emergency crews were dispatched yet again, this time to a field off Mount Tabor Road. There they came upon a burned-out car, later identified as belonging to the Kearns family. In and around the vehicle lay the remaining three male victims: Carlos Kearns himself, neighbor Jimmy Keene, and Keene’s friend Theodore Sweet. All bore signs of having been shot and stabbed, their throats cut, and their bodies run over with the same car that now smoldered nearby. One body—Keene’s—was reported to have been pinned beneath the burned vehicle, underscoring the calculated cruelty of the killers.
Carlos was initially found alive in the car and pulled from the wreckage long enough to be transported to Humana Hospital-Lexington. News accounts noted that he was discovered in his wife’s burning car and succumbed in the early hours of April 24, with one report specifying that he died shortly after 2 a.m. The injuries he carried—from stabbing, shooting, crushing, and fire—made his survival impossible despite medical care. Within hours of the first body being found, Lexington authorities were faced with five dead across three locations, a pattern quickly recognized as the worst single night of violence in the city’s modern history.
Ironically, the path to the killers began in the same hospital where Carlos died. Sometime after he was brought in, Foster and Powell arrived at Humana Hospital drunk, bloodstained, and looking for a taxi. Their appearance drew the attention of a nurse, who noticed both their intoxicated state and the blood on their clothing. A Lexington police captain, John Potts, happened to be at the hospital. When the women became belligerent, he placed them under arrest—not for murder, but initially for public intoxication, as the full extent of the night’s events was still being pieced together outside. Their casual arrival at the hospital where one of their victims was fighting for his life would later be cited as emblematic of the reckless arrogance of the spree.
As investigators processed the crime scenes and the burned car, they recovered a handgun and other physical evidence that began tying the two women to the killings. Once the gun was linked to the violence, Foster and Powell were formally charged with the murder of Carlos Kearns. They were brought before Judge Lewis Paisley on April 25, where they entered not-guilty pleas while being held in the Fayette County Detention Center. As evidence mounted, prosecutors gradually added counts until both women faced charges in all five deaths, the case built around ballistics, the condition of the crime scenes, and witness accounts of their movements that night.
The case went to trial in Lexington in February and March of 1987 before Judge James Keller. Prosecutors portrayed the spree as a drug-fueled rampage that escalated from a quest for money into a series of deliberate executions. Testimony at trial brought out the close relationship between Foster and Powell and described how the pair had been drinking and high on cocaine before setting out for the Kearns home. One UPI report noted that Foster had boasted about killing five people and compared herself to infamous cult leader Charles Manson, an admission that underscored the prosecution’s argument that the murders were not panicked accidents but acts committed with pride and a desire for notoriety. The jury was instructed that they could either convict or acquit on the murder charges; a lesser option such as manslaughter was not placed before them.
On March 28, 1987, after hearing the evidence, the jury returned guilty verdicts against both Foster and Powell on all five counts of murder, including the killing of Carlos Kearns. At the subsequent sentencing phase, prosecutors sought the death penalty for both women, pointing to the multiple victims, the cruelty of the methods, and the roaming nature of the spree. Ultimately, the jury recommended that Foster receive a death sentence and that Powell be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 25 years. Foster was sent to death row, while Powell entered the state prison system to serve her life term.
In the years that followed, Foster pursued multiple appeals. One focused on the difficulties of maintaining contact with her lawyers after she was transferred out of state under an interstate corrections agreement. Another challenged the handling of her original sentencing. These efforts culminated in a new sentencing hearing in December 1991, at which her death sentence was set aside and replaced with a term of 99 years, 99 months, and 99 days—effectively life without any realistic prospect of release. Powell, meanwhile, remained incarcerated on her life sentence and was denied parole when she first became eligible, with officials citing the severity of the crimes. Both women continue to serve their time in Kentucky prisons, the only suspects ever charged in the case and the only ones authorities have held responsible for the death of Carlos Kearns and the four others killed that night.
