Willie Manning awaits his execution. Can new evidence halt it?

STARKVILLE — The case against Willie Manning hangs on a restroom token. It is the link authorities made between a burglary and the killings of two Mississippi State University students, putting him on death row at age 26.

Two weeks before Christmas in 1992, deputies shone flashlights on a dark remote road until they saw something bright — a token between two puddles of blood. Court records show that within 24 hours, they concluded the brass token, about the size of a quarter, was stolen from a car outside a fraternity house where the couple was last seen. Authorities believed once they found their burglar, they had their killer.

A Mississippi Today investigation reveals how this rush to judgment caused them to fixate on known burglars, to reject witnesses who contradicted this theory and to fail to fully investigate the token’s age and circulation.

Four of the six Mississippians exonerated from death row came from the same judicial district where Manning was convicted. All were prosecuted by then-District Attorney Forrest Allgood, and all of them were Black.

As full-fledged service stations began to transition to self-serve pumps and convenience stores in the 1970s, restrooms moved from outdoors to indoors. Some operators used tokens or door codes to limit use of their bathrooms to customers.

During a 1994 capital murder trial, Allgood presented the restroom token — manufactured by Nik-O-Lok and found at the murder scene — as proof Manning carried out both the burglary and the students’ murders. “The burglar was in fact their executioner,” he told jurors.

Upon learning recently of the token’s use as evidence in Manning’s case, Rob Unterborn, who owns Indiana-based Standard Change-Makers and Nik-O-Lok, told Mississippi Today in a June interview, “If the authorities in Mississippi are using one of our tokens as some sort of proof to tie it back to someone, that would be a serious stretch.”

At trial, Thomas Webster, a vice president for the Nik-O-Lok division of Standard Change-Makers, testified that these tokens could be found at only two locations in Mississippi: a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Laurel and a Shell gas station in Grenada, a popular stop for those traveling on I-55 and for students making their way to Starkville.

But no one asked him about the national circulation of these tokens, distributed to gas stations, laundromats, bus stations and other businesses across the U.S.

In California alone, more than 4,000 locations used these tokens, Unterborn said. “If I had to estimate the number of tokens in circulation nationwide during that time period, I would estimate that number to be well over 100,000.”

In fall 1992, Mississippi State had 13,866 students enrolled at its Starkville campus, more than 800 of them from across the U.S.

Student John Wise testified that while his car was parked outside the Sigma Chi fraternity house the night of the killings, someone stole his leather jacket, CD player, huggie, $10 in change and a bathroom token from the Grenada station. According to then-Oktibbeha County Sheriff Dolph Bryan’s notes, Manning admitted to selling the CD player but denied killing anyone.

At Manning’s trial, Allgood asked Wise about the token, “Once it was missing from your car, when did you see it again and who had it at that point?”

“Sheriff Bryan,” he replied.

Unterborn said there’s no way to conclude a stolen token is the same one that’s been found any more than anyone can pick out a lost quarter from a pile of quarters.

“We literally stamp thousands of tokens at a time, and they are all identical to the untrained eye,” he said. “To have someone look at one of my tokens and positively identify it as ‘the one’ that was previously in their possession is quite ludicrous.”

‘Everyone was scared to death’

The killings of 22-year-old Pamela Tiffany Miller and 19-year-old Jon Stephen Steckler sent shivers through the campus of Mississippi State.

“Everyone was scared to death,” recalled Oktibbeha County Circuit Clerk Tony Rook, a Mississippi State student at the time.

In memory of the students, Mississippi State planted two willow oaks on the east side of the Drill Field. Miller’s tree is near Carpenter Hall while Steckler’s is near McCain Hall.

Miller was a junior. Her friends described her as a “real nice” and “real serious” student. At Madison-Ridgeland Academy, she worked for the newspaper and yearbook as well as serving as an officer for the drill team.

“My daughter was a beautiful, vivacious, clean-living, law-abiding citizen who was on the threshold of accomplishing one of her dreams — to become a nurse,” her father, A.C. Miller Jr., wrote in 1993 as part of his victim impact statement. 

Ann-Marie Templeton became emotional as she spoke of her sister, Tiffany, who was 13 years older. “She loved me,” she said. “I was her real live baby doll.”

Despite her youth, she said her sister let her hang out with the high school drill team on the sidelines of the football field.

As the holiday season neared in 1992, she said her sister planned to return home from Mississippi State in time to see her elementary school’s Christmas show but, at the last minute, had to work.

Tiffany never made it home.

When Templeton arrived with her mother at their house on Dec. 11, she saw two of her uncles and a preacher waiting for them, and soon her mother was screaming, she said. “Nobody would tell me what was going on.”

She sobbed. “It’s been a nightmare every day since.”

Steckler belonged to a prominent family in Natchez, where he attended the Catholic high school, played defensive end for the football team and made mission trips to Mexico. In his Cathedral High School yearbook, he placed this quote below his portrait: “Man lives by habits, indeed, but what he lives for is thrills and excitement.”

Steckler’s sister, Suzanne, recalled him as “a really great guy. He’d give somebody the shirt off his back, that sort of thing, to help a friend.”

Jeff Allen, who lived next door to Steckler at the Sigma Chi frat house, called his fraternity brother “fantastic, 10 out of 10 as a human being.” Although Steckler had many friends, he was “extremely kind and humble,” said Allen, now an attorney in Clarksdale.

He knew Steckler’s sister, Jennifer, as well. “I am a better person for knowing both of them,” he said.

Expert: Evidence suggests the killer knew his victims

After examining evidence in the students’ slayings at the request of Mississippi Today, former FBI profiler Kathleen Canning-Mello said she believes the killer knew the victims.

She said abductions by strangers are rare. According to the FBI National Crime Information Center data, less than 0.1% (247) of 498,038 missing persons or abductions reported in 2025 came at the hands of strangers.

In other words, a person is far more likely to die from a fall off a ladder than to be abducted by a stranger.

The sheriff testified at trial that he had no evidence to indicate Manning knew either victim.

Canning-Mello, who worked for the FBI for 31 years and spent a decade in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, said the evidence reflects overkill on both victims. “Overkill,” she explained, “is defined as the infliction of injuries beyond what is necessary to kill the victim.”

For instance, the killer shot Miller in the upper lip and the head, and then drove Miller’s car over Steckler after shooting him, she said. “The infliction of excessive injuries in this case indicates the offender was enraged at the time of the killings.”

Anger connected to such impulsive attacks often involves emotionally charged relationships, said Canning-Mello, who co-hosts the podcast, “Real Crime Profile.”

The killer dragged Miller’s body to the side of the road and stripped her down to her bra and panties. The pathologist found no evidence of sexual assault.

At trial, there was speculation the would-be rapist was interrupted, but Canning-Mello wonders if the killer staged this to throw off authorities. She said she wonders the same thing about the items stolen from the victims — their watches and rings.

Authorities concluded that the killer dropped Miller’s ring on the way to her trailer. Canning-Mello wonders if the killer simply got rid of it.

She theorized that the killer had a “hairtrigger temper,” a history of assaults, and a possible drug or alcohol problem. “In cases of explosive violence,” she said, “there is typically a stressor of some kind that precedes it.”

Authorities also believed the murderer knew the victims, according to their initial notes on the investigation. They wrote down two theories: One of Miller’s ex-boyfriends killed the couple out of jealousy, or they interrupted an auto burglary and were killed. “The victims knew the subject,” officers wrote.

Canning-Mello said authorities typically investigate those close to the victims of violence “to obtain alibis and discount the involvement of close relationships before widening the investigation.”

In this case, authorities quickly abandoned that belief to look “for someone who burglarizes cars at Mississippi State University,” the sheriff testified.

Despite evidence that suggested the killings were personal, the only names the sheriff put down as suspects for these murders were 13 known burglars. All of them were Black.

Two double murders stunned this town

Five weeks after the students’ murders, another double homicide horrified this town of then-18,000 people. This time, an elderly woman and her daughter were slashed with a knife and beaten to death with a laundry iron.

Time passed with no arrests, and murmurs turned to rumors. Was a serial killer loose in Starkville?

In response to public concerns, authorities let it be known they had two suspects — both known burglars — in custody for the students’ murders. University officials praised this “progress,” but authorities soon dismissed these suspects.

As March came to a close, Sheriff Bryan turned to the public for clues. CrimeStoppers aired a reenactment of the students’ murders, and billboards offered a $25,000 reward.

On April 16, 1993, a firefighter flushing hydrants discovered Wise’s stolen huggie. Despite the fact Manning lived 5 miles away and other suspects lived closer, the sheriff testified that the discovery made Manning a key suspect.

Nicknamed “Fly,” Manning made the perfect burglary suspect. Abandoned by his mother at age 2, he was raised by an intellectually challenged grandmother who often couldn’t afford food, according to court records. At times, they had no bathroom, no running water and no heat beyond firewood.

Manning swiped his first bicycle at 10, and a year later, a juvenile judge sent him to Columbia Training School for “joyriding,” according to court records. He repeated eighth and ninth grades before dropping out of school. Within a year of moving back in with his now-deceased, alcohol-battling mother, he began drinking, and by 21, he was downing eight cans of beer several times a week and smoking marijuana daily.

Many arrests and some prison time followed, mostly for burglary, auto burglary and auto theft. Court records show he had never been convicted of a violent felony.

Manning lived at Brookville Garden Apartments as a child, and those who knew him there recalled him as well-mannered and peaceful. “ He always was respectful to his elders,” said Lily Duck, who has lived in the complex since Manning was small.

Landon Clayborn grew up with Manning and his brothers and said he knows nothing about him being violent. “He was a thief, but he wasn’t a murderer,” Clayborn said. “I ain’t never known him to jump on nobody.”

Law enforcement officers heard the same thing when they interviewed those who knew Manning. According to investigative notes, one person told officers: “Would not believe he would murder. Would be shocked.”

Rook, who began serving as a deputy in 1993, said he and other officers believed Manning resorted to violence because another felony would send him to prison for a maximum sentence.

The sheriff believed the burglar forced the couple into Miller’s two-seat Toyota MR2, drove them to the remote area and killed them.

He theorized the burglar pulled a weapon. “That little car, you would just about have to hold a gun on somebody to get three people in it anyway. It’s very, very small,” he testified at the 1994 trial. “When three people are in it, it’s completely crammed full.”

The sheriff speculated that Miller sat on the gunman’s lap and Steckler drove the MR2. To get the trio in the car, he testified, “one even has to ride halfway sitting in the lap of a passenger and halfway sitting on the console.”

Miller’s MR2 now belongs to retired Chief Deputy George Carrithers, who bought the car and took it home two years after Manning’s conviction.

In August, Mississippi Today attempted to put three people in the two-seater sportscar at the same time. Getting all three inside proved difficult.

Canning-Mello said if a burglar was a complete stranger to the couple, he would more likely run away. “It’s a lot of work and high risk to abduct two people,” she said, “especially using a two-seater vehicle.”

Despite the parking lot’s close proximity to the frat house, no one inside reported hearing any noises, voices or gunfire during this purported abduction.

In contrast, three people at the University Hills Mobile Home Park where Miller lived reported hearing loud voices, screams and possible gunfire that night outside her trailer.

Nothing in law enforcement’s investigative notes reflects that authorities pursued this, nor is there evidence of following up on tips from Miller’s friends and fellow employees that she had been frightened by two men stalking her. One entry said that two men — who sexually harassed her and yelled obscenities at her  — lived a few trailers down from Miller.

Elizabeth Hill, who was lab partners with Miller in microbiology, told Mississippi Today in July that Miller told her about two men following her all the way home, hurling crude comments at her and harassing her.

She said she told Miller that acting scared would make her a target. “Get somebody to walk with you,” she said she told her.

What makes the authorities’ apparent lack of followup on these leads so surprising is they believed her killer returned to her trailer that night.

Murder returns the car he used to kill

At 2:15 the morning of Dec. 11, a motorist found the students’ bodies on a gravel road near a rural intersection, a five-minute drive from Miller’s trailer.

Hours later, deputies found Miller’s blood-covered car double-parked at the Old Mayhew Road Apartments, less than 300 yards from her trailer. In the investigative notes, authorities wrote, “Why was car returned to Mayhew Road?”

Deputies walked toward her trailer and found her missing ring and a set of boot prints the sheriff believed belonged to the killer.

The presence of her car so close to her trailer presented a challenge to authorities’ belief that Manning was the killer. How could he, a stranger, have known where she lived?

At the 1994 trial, Sheriff Bryan tried to explain away this problem. He testified that the gunman must have driven the “back way,” passing Miller’s trailer park. When that happened, the sheriff said, the couple must have exclaimed, “Let us out. Take the car. Do anything you want to, just let us out.”

The sheriff suggested the gunman returned Miller’s car to the Old Mayhew Road Apartments after the murders and tried to burglarize her trailer. He gave no proof to support this, nor did he explain how the gunman supposedly knew where Miller lived among the nearly 200 trailers in the park.

Witnesses: Screams and gunfire at Miller’s trailer

At Manning’s 1994 trial, Sigma Chi member Taylor Flowers testified that Steckler “was getting some clothes” and heading with Miller to her trailer when the couple left the frat house at 12:50 a.m.

Tina Cockrell, who was earning her engineering degree from Mississippi State, lived catty-corner from Miller’s trailer. During interviews with Mississippi Today in June and July, Cockrell said on the night of the killings, she was watching a TV show after midnight when she heard noises outside.

She turned down the television and opened her back door. “I could hear what I thought was a heated argument from the direction of Miss Miller’s trailer,” Cockrell said. “A young man was screaming. He was livid.”

She recalled him saying “something to the effect of ‘I can’t believe you did this to me. Why did you do this to me?’”

A few minutes later, she said she heard what sounded like two gunshots. Then she heard a car driving away. She started to go outside, she said, but the sounds scared her.

Nathaniel Morris, who lived two trailers down from Miller, told Mississippi Today in interviews in June and July that he heard loud voices outside her trailer. He said he heard what sounded like a man yelling, “That ain’t right. You know this mother f—ing sh– ain’t right.”

He said he also heard what sounded like gunshots.

Hours after the killings, Miller’s next-door neighbor, John Williams, told the Starkville Daily News that he had been awakened that night by noises. He said he heard a car idling outside his trailer and several people talking. The noises sounded “spooky,” he said, and he heard what sounded like two firecrackers.

Experts say gunfire can be mistaken for firecrackers. Cockrell said she knew the difference because her father was in law enforcement.

None of these three witnesses were called to testify at trial by either the prosecution or the defense.

Earlier this month, Bryan told Mississippi Today he knew nothing about these statements and that he would remember if such statements had been made. Williams’ words appeared in the Starkville Daily News the day after the killings.

Authorities found clues suggesting the killer walked from where the MR2 was parked at the Old Mayhew Road Apartments toward the trailer park. Deputies found boot prints and Miller’s ring on the path there. “The only reason to park the car and go back is to go back to the trailer,” the sheriff told jurors.

He noted that Manning’s home, more than 10 miles away, was in the opposite direction. When deputies later entered Manning’s home, they found nothing matching the boot prints. His ex-girlfriend said he never wore boots, only sneakers.

Canning-Mello said there are two plausible reasons why the killer would park Miller’s car near her trailer. One would be to “walk to a residence nearby,” she said.

Two men who lived near Miller had stalked her and sexually harassed her, according to investigative notes. A week before her killing, Miller talked about a man following her home until Steckler intervened, according to the FBI’s January 1993 interview with her roommate.

The second plausible reason would be for the killer “to return to retrieve his own vehicle,” Canning-Mello said.

Two students testified they left the Old Mayhew Road Apartments at 2:30 a.m. — just 15 minutes after a motorist discovered the slain couple on Pat Station Road. After the students turned right on Old Mayhew Road, a brown car with tinted windows blew past them at more than 55 mph in the 25 mph zone. They quoted themselves as saying whoever was inside the car must be running from trouble.

The killer’s decision to return Miller’s car signals that this was a highly emotional crime conducted by a criminally unsophisticated offender, Canning-Mello said.

Hours later, deputies searched through the MR2, where they found another ring that belonged to Miller, audio cassettes and a dried rose. What they didn’t find were the clothes Steckler was carrying to Miller’s trailer.

Cockrell shared what she heard with her father, Jessie Oden, a deputy with the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Department, and she spoke to the FBI a month later, records show.

Before her father died, she said the subject of the students’ murders arose. She said he told her he believed Manning wasn’t guilty of the crime.

Prosecutors use token to convict Manning of murder

The token found at the murder scene became the linchpin of the prosecution against Manning.

In his closing statement, the district attorney pointed at the babyfaced Manning. “He’s dressed nice, and he just doesn’t look like a blood-thirsty monster. The real monsters never do.”

The jury convicted Manning of the murders and sentenced him to death.

But authorities weren’t done. They also blamed him for the unsolved murders of the elderly woman and her daughter, maintaining that Manning had moved from the ranks of burglar to serial killer.

At that 1996 trial, Kevin Lucious testified he saw Manning enter the women’s home.

What jurors didn’t know was Lucious, now serving three life sentences without parole involving a gang murder in Missouri, feared he would be charged with these killings and has since recanted. The truth was he wasn’t living in the apartment where he supposedly spotted Manning — a detail authorities kept hidden from the defense. 

In 2015, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a new trial in that crime, and authorities exonerated Manning of those capital murder charges.

But justices have not ordered a new trial in the students’ murders, where at least three people have recanted statements they made implicating Manning. Two who testified against him had their criminal charges dropped or reduced and received most of the $25,000 reward.

Key prosecution witness believes Manning is innocent

Paula Hathorn, Manning’s ex-girlfriend and one of those whose words helped put him on death row, spoke to Mississippi Today in July and August interviews. She said she believes he didn’t kill anyone.

She met Manning in 1991 when both of them were being held in the Oktibbeha County jail, her for bad checks and him for burglary. They each spent time behind bars. After they were released, they dated, and she lived with him and his family.

The two of them slept on the top of the bunk bed while his brothers slept below, she said. She recalled how, even before the murders took place, a deputy would park outside Manning’s house, watching him.

Manning sometimes “borrowed” a car to make an out-of-town trip and after he returned, he parked the car at the Kroger grocery store, she said. “He had sticky fingers.”

After Manning was jailed, the sheriff asked her to share what she knew. She had plenty of reasons to cooperate. She faced up to 10 years in prison for dozens of bad check charges she had racked up.

“They had me under pressure,” she said. “I was seeking my freedom, too.”

The sheriff recorded more than a dozen calls she had with Manning. When she asked if he killed the students, he replied, “You know I didn’t do that.”

The sheriff later wrote, “Of course he answered NO! Manning is a known burglar, auto burglar and auto thief.”

Hathorn said authorities kept pushing her to get Manning to confess, even wearing a wire when she visited him in jail. But no confession came.

In exchange for her help, she said in a 2023 sworn statement to Manning’s lawyers, the sheriff repeatedly took her to savor Church’s fried chicken and to pay for her furniture and other bills — allegations he vehemently denied.

Before Hathorn took the witness stand, she said the sheriff coached her on her testimony, telling her how to handle tough questions. The sheriff acknowledged helping her get ready to testify but denied coaching her.

At trial, prosecutors told jurors the killings took place because the couple interrupted a burglary, but she said the sheriff told her the murders were part of a drug deal gone bad – which Bryan also denied.

She felt like authorities twisted what she told them to make Manning look guilty, she said. “I never ever said he did that.”

In the end, she said she felt the sheriff used her like a tool.

Authorities never recovered the murder weapon so prosecutors decided to call Hathorn, who testified that Manning fired bullets into a tree in his mother’s yard. Those bullets, former FBI examiner John Lewoczko testified, matched the ones that killed the couple “to the exclusion of every other firearm in the world.” (The FBI later called this conclusion junk science.)

Authorities never recovered Steckler’s watch and class ring. Prosecutors attempted to prove Manning had them, but witnesses’ descriptions differed in colors.

Hathorn recalled the sheriff showing her pictures of Steckler’s watch and class ring. Manning did have a watch and class ring that were similar, she said, but they weren’t the same.

After Manning’s conviction, Hathorn received $17,500 in reward money, and she spent no additional time behind bars, according to court records. That money, she said, went to pay her bad checks.

When she goes shopping, people sometimes stare at her, believing she sent Manning to prison when that isn’t true, she said.

Last year, Hathorn received a visit from a state investigator, she said. “He just told me to stop talking to people. He don’t want people to know the truth.”

Retired sheriff: Believed Manning had killed the students

Thirty-four years after the students’ killings, retired Sheriff Bryan has never forgotten the murder scene. “That was a bloody mess,” he said. “Blood was everywhere.”

There was so much, he said in interviews in July and August, that a truck had to bring in a load of sand to soak it all up.

“ When you’re looking at those corpses, you know that that’s somebody’s baby,” he said. “It never leaves you.”

With murders like these, he said, “You gotta find out who did it, and you gotta punish him.”

From childhood up, Bryan worked at his father’s Gulf service station, where he met deputies who worked for the sheriff’s office. 

He wound up getting a job there and found his home in law enforcement. “ Some people love to play golf,” Bryan said. “I love to work.”

He wore a cowboy hat and liked to think of himself as one of the Western stars he adored, standing up against the bad guys like Gary Cooper in “High Noon.”

Bryan first saw Manning at age 6 after the child threw a brick through the window of a Honda dealership in hopes of stealing a motorcycle. “He couldn’t push it off the stand,” Bryan said. “That’s my first memory of Fly.”

Manning continued to be arrested for burglary after burglary, and the animosity between him and the sheriff grew. Asked why, Bryan replied, “‘Cause I put him in jail so many times.”

When he heard what had happened just before Christmas on Pat Station Road, he rushed out in the dark to the remote road where the students’ bodies lay.

After the students’ murders, Bryan said there was some discussion they were killed by someone they knew, but he confessed Manning became his main suspect the day of the crime. “If anything happened that was atrocious,” he said, “Fly was the first suspect.”

Asked what made him believe Manning did this, Bryan said, “He was the only one that’s so damn sorry that he would do something like this.” If there was someone worse than Manning, he said, “I hadn’t met him yet.”

He began talking to inmates inside the jail. “ You don’t get to be a detective ‘cause you’re smart,” he said. “You get to be a detective because you make things happen.”

When two men from the community became initial suspects, Earl Jordan, already in jail for looting, told the sheriff he believed he had seen one of them with Miller. After Manning was jailed, too, Jordan told the sheriff that Manning had confessed to the murders.

At trial, Jordan testified that Manning said he and Jessie Lawrence forced the couple into the MR2 and drove to a remote area where Manning said he shot them to death.

The biggest problem with Jordan’s testimony? Lawrence was in jail in Alabama at the time the murders took place.

Jordan has since admitted he lied. “I was in jail and could have been charged as a habitual offender,” he said in a 2023 sworn statement to Manning’s lawyers. “I changed some words to the way the sheriff said he thought it happened. The sheriff was satisfied. I was not charged as a habitual offender, and I also received some reward money.”

Four different Mississippians, including Hathorn, said in sworn statements to the defense that the sheriff promised to help them with their criminal cases if they would implicate Manning. 

Bryan denied these allegations. “ Nobody could ever say I offered them anything,” he said. “ I never gave anybody anything.”

He initially called Hathorn a “known liar” and said he didn’t trust her until authorities began to confirm things she told them. 

Later, he referred to her as a “friend” who spent so much time at the sheriff’s office that people thought she worked there. She even answered the phone in the jail, he said. “She was really a lot of help.”

The animosity between the sheriff and Manning continued past his convictions. In 2011, when the death row inmate returned to the courthouse for a hearing, Manning was “cutting up with some deputies and making a lot of ruckus. I went, ‘Man, come on, come here,’” Bryan said. “He ran up to me and hit me, and I started shoving him back in the room …  When I got him up against the wall, I hit him in the face.”

Asked what he would say to Manning if he saw him now, Bryan said, “I’d say, ‘Hey, Fly, how you doing? Man, you’ve been in Parchman a long time. They should’ve killed you a long time ago.’”

So what if Manning said he didn’t kill the students?

Bryan paused. “Then I’d have to answer to the Lord for that.”

Execution awaits Manning

On May 7, 2013, Bryan headed to Parchman prison to witness the execution he had been waiting two decades for — Willie Manning. He said he felt he owed it to the students’ families.

Manning should have been killed “the day they brought the verdict back out,” Bryan said. “He’s been stealing air and water from the state of Mississippi for a long time, and he needs to go away.”

While driving to death row, Bryan got word that the Mississippi Supreme Court had halted the lethal injection in an 8-1 vote.

Days earlier, the state had received letters from Justice Department officials. They repudiated the testimony of an expert who claimed the bullets Manning allegedly fired into a tree came from the same gun that killed the students. Such a claim, the FBI wrote, went beyond the bounds of science.

Justices permitted more testing. No DNA matched Manning. Neither did any fingerprints found in Miller’s MR2.

In September 2024, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld Manning’s death sentence in a 5-4 decision, clearing the way for his execution.

His lawyers asked for a rehearing. Two months later, Mississippi Today wrote about how the case against Manning had fallen apart.

Justices usually rule on such rehearings within 60 days, according to court observers. So far, it’s taken more than 700 days.

Allgood, who prosecuted the case, declined to comment on the latest development, but he told Mississippi Today in a 2024 interview that Manning deserves to be executed.

As for the higher number of exonerations in his district, he said in the same interview that he never tried anyone he thought might be innocent, and he gave his prosecutors the freedom to dismiss any case where “they entertained a thought of innocence.”

Just because a case is reversed doesn’t mean it equates to exoneration, he said. “They are usually the result of some legal technicality.”

In the end, “Only God knows if a man is innocent,” Allgood said. “That’s why we have no verdict of ‘Innocent’ in our law — just ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not Guilty,’ or, in Scotland, ‘Not Proven.’”

Attorney General Lynn Fitch has repeatedly called on justices to carry out the death penalty on Manning. “What he is doing is a blatant attempt to delay his lawful execution,” she wrote in a 2023 brief. “This Court should set an execution date.”

Manning bears scars

Manning has spent more than 11,000 days in a single prison cell on death row.

“This is one of the worst things that any person could ever go through in their life,” he wrote in 2010. “I would have never thought that I could last 16 years in a small cell and still (somehow) be able to hold on to a small bit of my sanity.”

He told one visitor, “I go years without thinking about the door, and then when I remember it’s there, it crushes me all over again.”

He bears scars. Scars on his face from when he ran into a barbed wire fence as a child. Scars on his chest from when a fellow prisoner threw chemicals on him.

Some scars aren’t visible. In 2025, he lost his closest friend on death row, Richard Gerald Jordan, a white Army veteran who did three tours as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam before returning home a damaged man.

For years, the two men played Scrabble between the prison bars. When Manning’s date with death neared in 2013, Jordan prayed over him. The state halted Manning’s execution.

Last year, it was Jordan’s turn to face fatal punishment. Four days after summer began, Parchman officials strapped him down and injected him with multiple drugs, including one that stopped his heart. Manning wept.

There was no funeral service.

These days, Manning spends most of his time inside his 8-by-12-foot cell, sometimes writing poetry:

The innocent is being caught up …

People falling through the cracks …

Witnesses are being bought up …

Law enforcements pulling ‘jacks’ …

Because I came up in the ghetto …

Everyone I saw was black …

All my peers were in their 20’s …

And they’re the ones who had my back …

Most have known me all my life …

Know that I’ll never take another …

So you can save that ‘Killer’ sh– …

’cause they’re not buying that, my brother

New evidence suggests a second token

The token that helped put Manning on death row could now help spare his life.

An investigation by Mississippi Today has uncovered new evidence that suggests the token was not the same token stolen from Wise’s car.

The token deputies found at the murder scene looks almost new in a photograph taken immediately after it was found. The sheriff called it “bright” and “shiny.”

But when Wise took the witness stand, he described his token as “dirty.”

The reason he gave? The token had been sitting in his car with his change for more than a year.

Unterborn, whose company makes these tokens, told Mississippi Today, “Our tokens are clad in brass, which tarnishes very quickly when exposed to the ambient air.”

A company vice president testified about this at the 1994 trial. When the tokens arrive from the mint, “they’re bright, shiny, brand-new brass,” he said. “As soon as they are handled for a relatively short period of time, they tarnish.”

Unterborn said touching the token transfers skin oils, which accelerate the tarnishing.

He shared a brand-new token. No tarnishing can be seen.

He shared a nearly month-old token. Some tarnishing can be seen.

Then he shared a token that had been sitting on his desk for almost a year. Heavy tarnishing is evident.

Such tarnishing, Unterborn said, speeds up even more “when mixed with other coins due to the conductivity of the different metals from quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies.”

Shown a photo of the murder scene token, he said there is no way it could be a year old. “It would have been extremely new, likely less than a month old.”

Mississippi Today’s revelation about the token found at the murder scene means “the last remaining vestige of the government’s already-weak case has now crumbled,” said Krissy Nobile, director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel.

Instead of seeking to solve these horrific murders, law enforcement tried to force the evidence “to match some preconceived notion about what happened,” she said. “The government got it wrong from the start. This is why executions are not the place to act first and ask questions later.”

Claudia Amendoeira is at Mississippi Today on a fellowship from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. This story was published with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.