Dennis Wayne Eaton
American convicted mass murderer (1957–1998)
Dennis Wayne Eaton (June 7, 1957 – June 18, 1998) was an American convicted mass murderer convicted of killing a police officer and three other people in Virginia in 1989. On February 20, 1989, motivated by intentions of jealousy and robbery, Eaton conducted a series of shootings that led to the four murders. Firstly, Eaton gunned down his roommate Walter Custer Jr. before he killed his next-door neighbour Ripley Marston via shooting. After murdering both Custer and Marston, Eaton fled south together with his girlfriend in Marston's car, and during the journey, Eaton also killed state trooper Jerry Hines, before he subsequently crashed his car into a telephone pole while avoiding a subsequent police chase through Salem. As the police cornered the couple, Eaton fatally shot his girlfriend Judy Ann McDonald and attempted to turn the gun on himself, but he survived his headshot wound with medical treatment and was thus charged with the four murders.
Eaton was put on trial for all the four murders, which took place across two different counties (Shenandoah County and Rockbridge County). Eaton was sentenced to triple life terms without parole for the murders of Marston, McDonald and Custer in separate trials held between September and October 1989. For the fourth crime of murdering Hines, however, Eaton was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death on January 9, 1990. Ten years after the killings, Eaton was put to death by lethal injection on June 18, 1998, after losing his appeals against the death sentence.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dennis Wayne Eaton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.