DAY TWO

A death case derailed

Gang leader Ahmond Dunnigan directed two of the most horrendous murders imaginable, yet managed to avoid the death penalty — twice.

By HEATHER VOGELL and BILL RANKIN

Marsinah Johnson set a goal for September 1993 in her day planner, tracing it in bubbly letters: Celebrate my birthday well.

She never had the chance. Johnson's turbulent life would end on a forlorn stretch of Atlanta railroad tracks four months before she could turn 14.

She died at the command of Ahmond Dunnigan, a baby-faced gang leader who presided over the gruesome torture-murders of Johnson and another teenage girl that year.

Dunnigan called his gang "Doom."

The crimes made a homicide detective cry on the witness stand. They qualified for Georgia's death penalty nine ways.

But a cascade of setbacks in Dunnigan's prosecution helped him escape execution not once, but twice.

If the death penalty was meant for the worst of the worst killers, how did it fail to snare Dunnigan?

The odds were in his favor: Even when confronted with some of Georgia's most notorious killings, DeKalb and Fulton prosecutors were among the least likely to secure a death sentence, a Journal-Constitution investigation found.

DeKalb sent no killer to death row from 1995 through 2004, and Fulton sent just two. The counties were home to a quarter of all death-eligible crimes in the state over the decade.

(ENLARGE)

Ahmond Dunnigan

Ben Gray/AJC (ENLARGE)

A court document from a box of evidence from the murder case of Ahmond Dunnigan, who avoided the death penalty for leading the torture-murders of two girls.

Stunning crimes

When Johnson didn't come home on the bus one spring afternoon, her mother feared she'd run away again. She had.

Johnson was big for her age and hung around older kids. She wanted desperately to fit in. She went by "Hellraiser," joined a gang and got arrested for breaking into cars and houses.

The night of May 7, Johnson was visiting an apartment near the Decatur square when Dunnigan and his friends arrived.

He was there to punish Johnson. He believed, prosecutors later said, that she'd either tried to leave the gang or turned other members in to police.

Dunnigan and others beat her until she bled and burned her thighs with a red-hot knife and coat hanger.

At one point, he said he'd let her live if she gave him her soul. She agreed. He told her to blow into a peanut-butter jar and replaced the cap. "Now I own you and your soul," he said.

They blindfolded her and drove her to train tracks, forcing her to perform oral sex on the way. She begged to go home to her mother.

Dunnigan handed a gun to fellow gang member Samuel Parham. After Parham shot her, co-defendants said, Dunnigan asked whether she was dead. The two returned to the tracks. Another shot rang out.

A train hit her body, dragging it 300 feet.

Three months later, a suspect led police to a kudzu patch in south Fulton County and the body of another young girl who had done the gang wrong.

Nikki Waller, 15, was a friend of Johnson's and a runaway, too. She had been accused of taking a gang member's clothes.

At least nine people tortured Waller over three days. She was beaten and forced to perform oral sex. Dunnigan made her drink a mixture of salt and bleach, shocked her with a car battery, choked her with an electric cord until it broke, set her on fire and stabbed her.

She begged them to kill her and, in a final act, they drowned her in a cooler filled with water. Dunnigan held her head, four co-defendants said later.

"You're dead," he declared. "Tell God that Doom sent you."

Thirteen participants told police that Dunnigan, a stocky security guard, was their leader. Only he was implicated in both deaths.

That summer, Dunnigan was also arrested for raping a woman in a vacant apartment. He said it was his "hurricane season," when he did whatever he pleased to people. He said he knew a thousand ways to torture someone without killing them.

1 | 2       Next page >>