Higgs was sentenced to death for his role in a triple murder. A key witness later said the government’s case was “bullshit.”
ON THE NIGHT Lisa Montgomery was executed by the Trump administration, Alexa Cave Wingate arrived at the Springhill Suites in Terre Haute, Indiana, at 9 p.m. The hotel sits at the intersection of U.S. Highway 41 and Interstate 70. The interstate leads all the way to Baltimore, where Wingate’s brother, Dustin Higgs, had been sentenced to die more than 20 years earlier.
Some 3 miles in the opposite direction, in a brick building on the banks of the Wabash River, is the federal death chamber. Montgomery, the only woman under a federal death sentence, was being held in a small room adjacent to it. The execution chamber was constructed just after the passage of the 1994 crime bill, but the surrounding penitentiary predates even the interstate. When the prison first opened more than 75 years ago, the meeting of Highway 41 and Old State Road 40 made Terre Haute the “Crossroads of America” — a convenient location to bring people in federal custody from all over the country.
Higgs arrived on federal death row in January 2001, just five months before the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. After the Trump administration restarted executions last summer following a 17-year pause, Higgs saw 10 of his neighbors taken to their deaths. On November 20, the day after his friend Orlando Hall died by lethal injection, Higgs got an execution date himself. On Friday, after the scheduled execution of Corey Johnson on January 14, Higgs is set to be the last person to die in Trump’s killing spree. Wingate plans to be a witness.
“Dustin is actually technically my first cousin,” Wingate explained when we first spoke in December. But they grew up largely in the same household in Poughkeepsie, New York, and refer to each other as brother and sister. “When Dustin first came home from the hospital, I was there,” Wingate said.
After giving birth to her own daughter in 1990, Wingate enlisted in the Army, the best of a limited set of options. “I had to find a way to take care of her, to get a skill, and my family didn’t have money for me to go to college.” Following a year stationed in South Korea, she moved to Washington, D.C. — and Higgs followed. By then, Wingate was raising two kids while going to night school at the University of the District of Columbia. “He helped me so much,” Wingate recalled.
For a time, their plans for the future were intertwined. Higgs wanted to open a barbershop and Wingate wanted to be a funeral director. “I said, ‘OK, well, you can come and we can start this family business. You can fix the hair. I’ll do the makeup and I’ll do the embalming and all that,’” Wingate said. “That was our original goal.” But eventually Higgs started to pull away from her.
Wingate had moved back to New York when she got a phone call in 1996 saying that Higgs had been arrested for dealing drugs. “I was like, ‘How did you keep that from me?’ He said because he knew I wouldn’t approve, so he never brought it around me at all.” But a worse nightmare unfolded in 1998, when Higgs was charged as a suspect in a horrific triple murder. The victims, Mishann Chinn, 23, Tanji Jackson, 21, and Tamika Black, 19, had been found fatally shot around 4 a.m. on January 27, 1996, on a road that cut through the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, a federal tract of land in Prince George’s County, between D.C. and Baltimore. All three worked in local schools and did not fit investigators’ profile of women whose lives might “invite violence,” according to a true crime podcast that recently explored the case.
Investigators found a day planner in Jackson’s purse that contained Higgs’s address and license plate number. After Higgs initially denied any involvement to police, a pair of his associates, Victor Gloria and Willis Haynes, were arrested together on federal drug charges, prompting what an investigator would later describe as an “incredible confession” from Gloria. Agreeing to be a witness for the government in exchange for a lesser sentence, Gloria testified that the three men had been hanging out with Chinn, Jackson, and Black in Higgs’s apartment when Jackson rejected Higgs. The two argued and she took down his information. Higgs became angry, telling Gloria and Haynes that Jackson “knew some people” who could hurt him. After offering the women a ride back toward D.C., according to Gloria, Higgs instead drove the group in his van to the federal reserve, where he gave Haynes a handgun and said, “Make sure they’re all dead.”
Wingate was skeptical from the start. She had never known Higgs to be violent toward women. When Higgs called her after the charges were filed, “I remember him saying, ‘You know I didn’t.’ And I said, ‘You don’t even have to finish that sentence. I know you didn’t.’”
And there were reasons to doubt Gloria’s credibility. In his earliest statements to police, he said that he’d been passed out in the backseat of Higgs’s van and woke up to gunshots. But later, he said he saw 23-year-old Higgs give 18-year-old Haynes the gun and threaten him if he did not shoot the women. At Haynes’s trial in August 2000, which ended in a life sentence, the government argued that he had not been intimidated by Higgs into shooting the women. Shortly afterward, at Higgs’s trial, the same prosecutors cast Higgs as the dominant player who had coerced Haynes into doing his bidding. On October 11, 2000, jurors convicted Higgs.
Later that month, Wingate drove down to Baltimore with the aunt who had raised them both as kids. “His lawyers asked us to testify at his sentencing hearing, to make them know what we know about Dustin, that he’s not this monster that the prosecution said he is,” she recalled. There was plenty to say. Higgs’s mother had died of cancer when he was a child, and the whole family saw how, in the absence of his father, he strived to take care of her in her final days. But Wingate felt unprepared. It was the first time she had seen Higgs in person in four years. “I’m trying to answer the questions that they’re asking me,” she said, but “I’m just crying.”
Federal prosecutors urged jurors to sentence Higgs to death. “The hard truth is, ladies and gentlemen, it would be a better world in the future without Dustin Higgs,” one told the jury.
Source: theintercept.com, Liliana Segura, January 14, 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde