In the spring of 1986, a wave of violence shattered the city of Lexington, Kentucky, forever marking April 23rd as a day of tragedy. Among the lives abruptly and brutally cut short was that of Trudy Harrell, a 59-year-old woman who found herself an unsuspecting victim in a senseless rampage. Her death was not an isolated incident but part of a horrific sequence of events that claimed four other lives and left the community in a state of shock and disbelief.
The day had begun with a
desperate search for money to fuel a drug and alcohol binge by two acquaintances, LaFonda Fay Foster and Tina Marie Powell. Their path of destruction started when they arrived at the home of Carlos and Virginia Kearns. What began as a request for money to cash a check quickly devolved into a night of unimaginable horror. Harrell, along with the Kearnses, Roger Keene, and Theodore Sweet, all known to their eventual assailants, became unwilling participants in a deadly outing. The group set out together in the Kearns' car, a decision that would prove fatal for most of them.
As the evening wore on, the true and violent intentions of Foster and Powell were unleashed. Trudy Harrell was the first to be found, her body discovered in the parking lot of the Berke Plaza Shopping Center around 9 p.m. She had been subjected to extreme violence, having been shot in the back of the head, stabbed multiple times, and then run over with a vehicle. The brutality did not end with her. Later that night, the body of Virginia Kearns was found in an alley, bearing the marks of a similarly vicious attack. The three men, Carlos Kearns, Roger Keene, and Theodore Sweet, were discovered in a field off Mount Tabor Road. They too had been shot, stabbed, and run over, their bodies left near the Kearns' car which had been set ablaze.
The reign of terror orchestrated by Foster and Powell came to a swift end. Their erratic behavior at a local hospital, where they were seeking a taxi, drew the attention of a nurse who noticed bloodstains on their clothing. A police captain who happened to be at the hospital arrested the two women for public intoxication. This arrest would soon unravel the full extent of their deadly spree, as authorities discovered the firearm used in the killings and connected them to the five murders. In February of 1987, after a four-week trial that detailed the gruesome nature of their crimes, both LaFonda Fay Foster and Tina Marie Powell were convicted on five counts of intentional murder, bringing a close to a dark chapter in Lexington's history.
